Defending his bi-coastal lover Robert Mapplethorpe, Jack Fritscher based this personal memoir of sex, art, race, politics, drugs, and friendship on his detailed 1970s journals, and on his interviews with a dozen of Mapplethorpe's intimate and famous friends. He has written a fast-paced impressionist book, suitable for our social-media times. His quick-messaging text can often be facetiously provocative because everyone seems to have fierce opinions about the controversial Mapplethorpe.

In 1977, the young Mapplethorpe, launching his career, flew to San Francisco seeking publication from Jack Fritscher, the influential editor in chief of the international Drummer magazine. Fritscher profiled Mapplethorpe and gave him his first magazine cover. They became instant bi-coastal lovers for three epic years during the first decade of gay liberation after Stonewall. Mapplethorpe, the photographer, told Fritscher, the writer, that he wanted to become "a story told in beds around the world." As an eyewitness of Mapplethorpe's life, character, and career, Fritscher began writing and publishing elements of what would become his insider's cinema verite memoir. He wrote his first impressions in 1978, eleven years before Robert died, seventeen years before biographer Patricia Morrisroe's straight-laced Mapplethorpe, and thirty-two years before Patti Smith's tender reminiscence, Just Kids.

As he lay dying in the late 1980s, Mapplethorpe kept next to his bed a copy of a story Fritscher wrote about him in 1979, telling visitors: "This story is about me." When Robert died on March 9, 1989, Fritscher wrote a feature obituary for Drummer magazine which caught the eye of a New York Times critic at the same moment Republican Senator Jesse Helms denounced Robert, dead only one hundred days, on the floor of the US Senate, starting the biggest art scandal of the 20th century. That media fight over art and pornography so demonized Mapplethorpe that Fritscher set out to defend his friend. With right-wing politics demolishing the sweet, witty, and caring person Mapplethorpe was, Fritscher reshaped his memoir from a 1970s love story with, according to The New Yorker, a bit of "polemic" against the wider issue of homophobia that prejudiced American critics, politicians, and religionists have long held against gay writers, artists, and photographers.

Within months of Robert's death, Fritscher added a chorus of Roshomon voices to his own by interviewing colleagues, models, and friends of Mapplethorpe. In early 1990, he recorded their true stories told honestly before myth, scandal, and agenda adulterated almost everyone's tales of Mapplethorpe. If this eulogy of a book has a central image, it is of a group of artists keening the death of a friend.

The lively voices trading Q&A with Fritscher include Mapplethorpe's secret mentor George Dureau; gallery owner Holly Solomon; British art critic Edward Lucie-Smith; 1930s pioneer photographer of African-American men, Miles Everett; photographer Joel-Peter Witkin; model Mark Walker; and artist Robert Opel who streaked the 1974 Academy Awards before founding Fey-Way Studio, the first gay gallery to exhibit Mapplethorpe.

Fritscher is a wonderful stylist as a pugnaciously "politically incorrect" storyteller, spinning the Catholic Mapplethorpe into the context of the wild pagan world that was gay liberation before the speeding first-class party people, cruising on in the "Titanic 1970s," crashed into the iceberg of AIDS. If you missed the 1970s party, or if you revel in nostalgia for it, curl up with this author of a good book.

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• Print Length: 306 Pages
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