Gay by the Bay

Published by Chronicle Books
Edited by Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk

Robert Mapplethorpe first visited San Francisco in 1968 “to find out if I’m gay once and for all.” The trip represented a turning point; he returned to New York and immediately became involved with a young man. Mapplethorpe’s 1978 photograph of S/M call boy “Elliott” was his first magazine cover and his only assignment for San Francisco-based Drummer, edited by Jack Fritscher, who later chronicled Mapplethorpe’s life in Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera. Mapplethorpe’s debut San Francisco exhibition in February 1979 at the Simon Lowinsky Gallery included flower studies, portraits, and a few relatively innocuous sex pictures. The next month Censored, featuring more explicit work that Mapplethorpe claimed was rejected for the previous show, opened at 80 Langton Street. A series of scatalogical images shot in a Sausalito boathouse were among those specifically targeted for censure during the 1989-1990 controversy over Mapplethorpe’s NEA-funded retrospective.

Research comment: Authors Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk and Chronicle Books commit two errors: 1) claiming Mapplethorpe’s NEA-censored images in 1989-1990 were scatalogical photos: none of the photos on trial in Cincinnati was scatalogical; 2) reprinting Jack Fritscher’s design of Robert Mapplethorpe’s first magazine cover, Drummer  No. 024 1978, without crediting Drummer, Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera or “Jack Fritscher” in their index.