I still remember reading the article that appeared in the New York Times in July 1981: “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” I also remember thinking, What kind of sick joke is this? “Gay” cancer?
I have no secrets. —Robert Mapplethorpe By the time Robert Mapplethorpe died in March 1989 at the age of forty-two, he’d prepared for the preservation of his work and legacy. He’d established his foundation. He’d selected a biographer. He’d made what he knew would be his last self-portrait, gripping a cane topped with a death’s head. The attacks on his work began that June. Representative Dick Armey (R-TX) sent a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts, signed by more than a hundred members of Congress, decrying NEA support for Mapplethorpe’s retrospective “The Perfect Moment,” then touring the country.
Isaac Julien, Still Life Studies Series, No. 1, 2008, color photograph in light box. IN THIS AMBITIOUS SURVEY, editors Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer tell a story of increasing visibility for every permutation of homosexuality in visual art, making a case for the importance of queer culture in art history. Queerness contains multitudes, of course, […]
Photographer Danny Lyon has spent much of his career documenting the overlooked and underreported, be it an outlaw motorcycle gang (The Bikeriders [1968]) or the nineteenth-century buildings demolished to make way for the World Trade Center (The Destruction of Lower Manhattan [2005]). In 1967, his quest to photograph society’s outsiders took him to the Texas Department of Corrections. There, Lyon knew he would find a subject most people had never seen. (It would be four more years before the tragic Attica uprising brought prison life into public consciousness.) In a facility nicknamed “the Walls,” he met career criminal James Ray
