New Mapplethorpe doc examines love life
Gay culture in New York during the 1970s and ’80s is not easy to summarize these many decades later, but “Black White + Gray: A Portrait of Sam Wagstaff and Robert Mapplethorpe,” an interesting new documentary focusing on the infamous photographer, does a good job of trying.
There was so much of it, for one thing, from lower East side party kids to the (Fire) Island-hopping jet setters, the beautiful people and the Larry Kramers that sourly trashed the beautiful people . . . and, of course, eventually there was AIDS.But New York is, most of all, the ultimate hi-low mix-master city, where just the right wildly diverse group of people can converge at just the right wildly chaotic time, and the results can outdo your most fevered fantasies of glamorous living.
James Crump’s documentary tries mightily to convey some of that glamour in the retelling of the star-crossed love story between photographer Mapplethorpe and his devoted benefactor, the moneyed collector Wagstaff.
Neither of these two men were the least bit shy or evasive about their passion for one another and for all things sensual. It just wasn’t in their DNA to colorize it. Rather, for them, sensuality at its peak walked a fine line between the reassuring aesthetics of beauty with a capital B and the dark lonely depths to which all fetishists can — often happily — sink.
That made them perfect for New York and it makes them an incredibly compelling story to later generations of gay men who must wonder what they are missing — now that gay life has lost so much of its dark mystery and eroticism.
And who better to help tell the story than people like Patti Smith, who was Mapplethorpe’s roommate and muse. It wasn’t just a gay thing, she reminds us. But without us it couldn’t have happened at all. And much of what we now consider hip and cool — not to mention possible — in living an urban gay life was first tested and refined by people like Mapplethorpe and Wagstaff, who in the face of everything, never lost their sense of looking for beauty and pleasure an all things.
Source: gay.com