ART
Tales From the Heart of Queer Art
Recalling a bond with Sam Wagstaff, Robert Mapplethorpe’s lover
BY PAUL SCHINDLER
For a decade and a half
beginning in the early
1970s, out lesbian Roberta
Degnore was an intimate
witness to one of the most
remarkable partnerships in queer
art history — between Robert Mapplethorpe,
who would go on to become
what former New York Times
picture editor Philip Gefter called
America’s “bad boy photographer,”
and Sam Wagstaff, a prominent
art curator and collector who was
Mapplethorpe’s lover as well as his
“mentor and career impresario,”
again in Gefter’s words.
At fi rst blush, Mapplethorpe and
Wagstaff may seem to have been an
odd couple. Mapplethorpe, then in
his 20s, grew up near the Queens/
Long Island line, had abandoned
his graphic design studies at Brooklyn’s
Pratt Institute, and was beginning
his photography career even
as he also designed jewelry. From
1967 until 1972, he lived with singer,
songwriter, and poet Patti Smith,
fi rst as her boyfriend and later as
her lifelong intimate buddy.
Wagstaff, 25 years his new lover’s
senior, was raised on Central
Park South and graduated from
Yale, was viewed as an elegant
eligible catch on the New York
debutante ball scene, and had held
prestigious curator positions at the
Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford
and the Detroit Institute of Arts.
But if Wagstaff was to the manor
born, at least as early as when he
was in his 40s by the 1960s, he
was “always in rebellion against
his conservative and upper class
background,” according to writer
Joan Juliet Buck, who narrated
James Crump’s 2007 documentary
about him. Throughout the 1970s
and ‘80s, Wagstaff became a major
collector of photography — helping
speed the art world’s full embrace
of it as a valid and valued artistic
endeavor — even as he and Mapplethorpe,
after meeting at a party
in 1972, pursued a romance that
over time evolved, as had Mapplethorpe’s
with Smith, into an enduring
intimate bond.
Roberta Degnore was captivated by Sam Wagstaff’s “voracious appetite” for learning and exploring,
but she could also tell him when he was full of shit.
Mapplethorpe would soon shoot
to the status of art world star, due
in large part to his audacious work
capturing the gay BDSM scene —
including his notorious self-portrait
with a whip handle coming out of his
ass — as well as for his male nudes,
some of which drew criticism for their
sexualized focus on Black bodies.
The couple were part of the BDSM
world themselves as well as the drug
adventurism then de rigueurin Manhattan’s
downtown art scene.
If Wagstaff’s relationship with
Mapplethorpe was surprising given
the older man’s background, so too
was his friendship with Roberta
Degnore, who grew up in “desperately
middle class” surroundings
near the Eight Mile Road divide
between Detroit and its suburbs to
the north. Like Mapplethorpe, Degnore
was decades younger than
Wagstaff, and she had earned her
bachelor’s degree as well as a master’s
in psychology from Wayne
State University before coming to
New York “to escape Detroit, to be
free.” Her mother’s unwelcoming
shock at learning about Degnore’s
sexuality played no small part in
her decision.
“We were obstinately and ruinously
close for 15 years until AIDS murdered
him in 1987,” Degnore wrote of
her relationship with Wagstaff in a
recent essay on Medium.com.
In recollections of their times together
she discussed with Gay City
DONNA ACETO
News, Degnore described a strikingly
handsome man who “was
like a character out of a movie, a
Rock Hudson type,” with whom she
shared “a voracious appetite” for
learning new things — as well as a
whole lot of weed, coke, and laughs.
Their bond was so tight, in fact,
that it was Degnore who was entrusted
with a sacred mission at the time
of Wagstaff’s death — the destruction
of a raft of photos of him taken
by Mapplethorpe, many of them intimate
and presumably explicit, that
the photographer himself agreed
should never see the light of day.
Degnore was in graduate school
at CUNY working on her psychology
Ph.D. when her artist girlfriend,
whose work Wagstaff had defended
while he was at the Detroit Institute
of Arts, took her to meet him.
“He was the great man,” Degnore
recalled. “She told me not to speak
to him.”
When they arrived at Wagstaff’s
apartment, Mapplethorpe was
there, wearing a bracelet decorated
with skull fi gures. Her girlfriend,
who was a metalist, quickly fell
into conversation with Mapplethorpe
about the bracelet’s making,
and Degnore and Wagstaff smoked
a joint and started gabbing. They
each immediately recognized a
kindred spirit.
In time, she would learn things
about Wagstaff that he wouldn’t
even share with Mapplethorpe.
“I think it’s because I wanted nothing
from him – not a show like my
girlfriend did, not exposure like Robert
did,” Degnore said of the strength
and endurance of their bond, even
while conceding, “I did use him much
later for my doctoral dissertation on
the psychology of public art.”
But Degnore has also written
that it’s “a lie” that she wanted
nothing from Wagstaff.
“I wanted everything that was
Sam, and he gave it,” she wrote,
elaborating to Gay City News that
his knowledge of art and his unquenchable
thirst for knowledge
and for exploring new things were
the draw.
Wagstaff would hire sea planes
so they could drop in at Fire Island,
shared confi dences with
Degnore, let her see that he was a
patrician with holes in his socks
who would baby-talk to his cat.
And she, in turn, could make him
laugh — something that didn’t
necessarily come naturally to a
man from what Getty Museum curator
Gordon Baldwin described as
a “starchy background.”
Degnore also witnessed his prejudices,
what Deborah Solomon,
in her New York Times review of
Gefter’s 2014 biography of Wagstaff,
termed his “unsavory habit
of making sexist, racist, and anti-
Semitic comments.”
“I was the audience for his spittle
fl ying wrath at whatever offended
his privileged white-man
cemented judgments,” Degnore
said, noting, “I could tell him he
was full of shit.”
If Degnore offers intimate insight
into a leading late 20th century art
collector, she also gained canny insights
into Mapplethorpe as well.
“I used to call him Mr. Bitchy,”
she recalled, mentioning several
incidents that showed the petty
jealousies of a famed artist.
Mapplethorpe and Wagstaff
both had birthdays on November
4. When Degnore was picking out
a birthday present for Wagstaff one
year, she came across a daguerreotype
she thought would make a nice
➤ DEGNORE, continued on p.23
MARCH 25 - APRIL 7 , 2 22 021 | GayCityNews.com
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