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…
