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Mourning and Memoir Writing — what is tribute and what is betrayal?
Samuel Jones Wagstaff was the product of old Yankee money and private schools. He was the famed collector who catapulted photography to an art form. Chisel-featured handsome, he wore his patrician refinement over ratty jeans and socks with holes. An elegantly cheap bastard, he spent fortunes on art but was an annoying bummer of cigarettes — although generous with weed and coke. Publicly, Sam Wagstaff was the man who made Robert Mapplethorpe’s career — and made him his lover. I was a gay woman, a second-generation Italian escapee from Detroit and barely middle-class. I shouldn’t have fit into Sam’s world. But we were obstinately and ruinously close for fifteen years until AIDS murdered him in 1987.
Sam and I fell into an easy friendship. We spent afternoons in his penthouse over Washington Square Park passing joints that wafted ashes over his collection of rare photographs: Cameron, Steiglitz, de Meyer. . . We were playmates who took seaplanes to Fire Island, rotated tattered Agatha Christie paperbacks between us on gentle summer nights, and we shared secrets of old hurts and unforgotten rejections. In the city, we swapped drugs and drug dealers, art talk, and hit the downtown scene. At openings, we’d slip into stairwells to gossip and snort coke. I was the audience for his spittle-flying wrath at whatever offended his privileged white-man cemented judgements. He showed me parts of him he never revealed to the art world or museum boards — and sometimes not even to his precious Robert. Why me? Maybe because unlike Robert, I didn’t want anything from him. That’s a lie. I wanted everything that was Sam, and he gave it. But for all these years since, I’ve been trying to cope with what he demanded from me, and what I was able to give.
I’ve always kept Sam’s many secrets. He bound me to silence, but so did I. I’m an excessive Leo, loyal, and he knew it. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, tell anyone he was sick while I watched AIDS desecrate his beauty. I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t even talk. I avoided friends. I stayed isolated at ACT UP meetings, unable to explain why I was there. Worse, there was that promise I made to him. The day Sam died, I had to destroy stacks of his original Mapplethorpe photographs. Images of Sam. Beautifully lit dramas. Private acts. There was leather and bondage, a…
