GLR January-February 2026

from nonexistent to torture. On the vanilla end is his photography of Peter Berlin, shot while Mapplethorpe was in San Francisco. If the S/M images were a reality show, Peter Berlin would be a cartoon. With his eternal Dutch boy good looks, Berlin wandered San Fran cisco’s streets for decades riffing on various bawdy identities, one day a French sailor, the next a farm boy in see-through over alls, the effect of which was always heightened by his ample package. Au thor and editor Jack Fritscher, writing in Skin: The Hardon Magazine in 1981, opined that Berlin wasn’t like other blond men in leather, who often suggested a kind of Aryan an drogyny. Any association of S/M with the self-appointed masters of the human race or with Nazism played no role in Mapplethorpe’s staging of S/M photographs. Illustrating the ideas and tools

visually support the acts they engage in. Map plethorpe introduces S/M not only artfully but also as an alert to the American public that this subculture is alive and real. For example, the chains, reminiscent of a man and a dog in how they are positioned, aren’t used just to take a walk but to engage in torture or a sim ulation thereof that emphasized æsthetic form, symmetry, and classical beauty. A source of metaphor in Map plethorpe’s work was the intersection of pain and religion. Recently discovered Mapplethorpe photos include Dominick and Elliot (1979), in which the fig ures practice bondage as Dominick hangs suspended upside down by his ankles while his arms are pulled forward by leather straps around his wrists. His

figure forms an inverted cross, his head touching the floor. A thick, heavy chain dangles from Dominick’s crotch down his

of S/M involved no pain, only the representation of transgres sive acts. In Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter (1979), the epony mous leather-clad figures employ S/M to define the roles that men (and women) play through their accessories. The parts of master and slave, together with all the gear they wear—chains, shackles, leather jackets, collars and caps, chaps and boots—

stomach and chest, leading to a leather collar around his neck. The dominant Elliot stands, reaching between Dominick’s thighs and exerting a tight grip on his testicles. The drama of the two men symbolizes St. Paul’s wish to be crucified in a way that does not represent Jesus’ death. Poet and playwright Paul Schmidt wrote in his introduction to Mapplethorpe’s “X Port folio”: “In a secular age, these images are all we have left. Here are the images of our modern martyrdom: our Scourgings, our Crownings with Thorns, our Crucifixions.” Yet there is joy in the image because Mapplethorpe saw S/M as an innocent ac tivity. “For me,” he said, “S/M means sex and magic, not sado masochism. It was all about trust.” By the 1980s, Mapplethorpe and Wagstaff had both con tracted HIV that developed into AIDS. The former shot images of the mysterious effects of the disease, including those strange purple lesions called Kaposi sarcoma. These photographs are rarely seen today (none of them can be found on the internet), but for me they were perhaps the most painful images in all of Mapplethorpe’s work. After witnessing these images in the 1980s, as well as a tsunami of black and blue balloons in a San Francisco Gay Pride parade, my heart flooded with emotion and worry, which would become a frequent occurrence as some of the best of the best people I had befriended quickly succumbed to the unyielding pain of various infections. Mapplethorpe, Smith, and Wagstaff helped open the closet doors for the LGBT community by transforming the face of 1970s art, starting a trend that changed attitudes toward S/M photography as an art form from marginal at best to being wor thy of display at the top art museums worldwide, evoking the joy and pain of American sexuality. Mapplethorpe mastered photographic techniques, employing a range of subjects and ob jects and capturing them with flawless precision through metic ulous staging, a process that required copious time and effort. He showed the photographers who followed him how to capture uniquely intense, monochrome illumination: silvery, archaic light that makes everything—a face, a flower, an ass—weighty and still, like classical sculpture.

TheG & LR

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