Reclaiming The Gaze: Black artists on identity, freedom, and agency

Returning to New York City from speaking on a panel in Washington, D.C. at the National Endowment for the Arts in the mid-1980s, multi-hyphenate icon Bill T. Jones was traveling with his then late partner Arnie Zane, and a friend, Bill Katz. They found themselves on the same flight as Robert Mapplethorpe, enfant terrible of the ‘70s and ‘80s photographic scene in New York.  “Arnie says to me, ‘I’ll be in [Mapplethorpe’s] car’ because Arnie was very ambitious, and knowing Mapplethorpe was an important art photographer, he wanted him to do my portraits,” recalled Jones by phone recently while on a national tour of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in North Carolina. “In the same way he wanted Chuck Close to do my portrait, or when Keith Haring asked to paint my body. All those artists were identity influencers. And I had every right to do whatever I wanted to do. I’d done major campaigns with Herb Ritts, too, and for me [working with those artists and] Mapplethorpe was about personal freedom. A Black male body who may or may not be gay, choosing to present themselves naked, what about it? Because the culture is so racist, and the gaze is so tainted with racism, you are automatically making yourself ‘Exhibit A’ in a continuing story of exploitation. To that I say, ‘don’t I have the right to be outrageous? Don’t I have the right to be free?’”  

Forty years ago, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe published “Black Book,” 96 images of Black male bodies (including Bill T. Jones) depicted as whole figures, flaccid penises, bare posteriors, and about 40 images that are neither full body nor genitalia — including portraits, backs, feet, heads etc.

Long before Mapplethorpe’s silver gelatin prints became a cultural flashpoint, Black photographers, archivists, and artists had already been doing the slow, necessary work of showing us to ourselves — in tenderness, in complexity, in the full spectrum of gendered and sexual possibility.

Today, in a climate where the so‑called “crisis of men and boys” is narrated almost exclusively through a straight, white, cisgender lens, the work of Black and queer photographers, artists and thinkers feels even more urgent. Their photographs, films, and installations refuse the narrow scripts handed to Black and Brown men and boys about manhood and gender expression, broadly. Through their work, one can understand that identity — racial, sexual, and gender — is ever evolving, shaped by desire and freedom, as well as agency over visibility and representation.

Black photographers and community archivists have captured the intimacies of Black queer life and Black male relationships — platonic or otherwise — since the late 19th century. Maurice Berger’s essay “Pictures of Men, Friends or Lovers” articulates what these images have always been sharing: Black queer relationships existed in plain sight, even when the world refused to acknowledge them. These photographs were not made for galleries or collectors, but rather the survival of an embattled historical memory — for Black and gay Americans to say, We were here. We loved. We desired.

When Mapplethorpe first exhibited “Black Males” in 1980, at Galerie Jurka in Amsterdam, with an accompanying catalog, some critics praised the work as a celebration of Black beauty while others saw it as a continuation of racial objectification. Many Black viewers felt admiration tangled with unease. 

“In 1981, Mapplethorpe had a solo exhibition, “Black Males,” at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York, NY,” explained Paul Martineau, curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. “He also released ‘Z,’ a portfolio of limited-edition photographs of Black men. Both were successful, so a book on the subject was the next logical step in Mapplethorpe’s search for artistic acclaim. He realized that there was a dearth of books that celebrated the Black male form and decided to fill that gap. 

“Mapplethorpe was aware of the photographs of Black male models by F. Holland Day, Horst P. Horst, and George Platt Lynes,” continued Martineau. “He also admired the photographs that the New Orleans-based artist, George Dureau, was creating with Black men in his community.” 

In 1984, the Getty Museum purchased the collection of photographs assembled by Mapplethorpe’s artistic mentor, curator Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. The Research Institute later secured Wagstaff’s papers and Mapplethorpe’s photography dealer Harry Lunn’s papers. 

“Mapplethorpe’s sexual relationships with Black men such as Philip Prioleau, Milton Moore, and Jack Walls, played a key role,” observed Martineau. “He made hundreds of photographs of each of them …. [referring] to the color of Black skin as ‘bronze’ and was particularly interested in the texture and tonal range of Black skin as translated by high contrast black-and-white films.”

Five years later, when “Black Book” was released, a broader conversation exploded. That same year, editor Joseph Beam published “In the Life,” the first major anthology of writing by Black gay men. The timing was uncanny against the backdrop of rising AIDS-related infections and a growing chorus of gay Black men’s voices arguing for visibility and support: on one hand, a celebrated white photographer had created a book of Black men, with every subject’s name (except for five because the subject did not want to be identified when his genitalia were shown) but absent biography; and on the other, a pioneering Black writer and advocate had produced a work giving voice to a diversity of men whose lives were often erased by both the Black and gay communities.  

The reception to “Black Book” was immediate. Edmund White, a white novelist who had written the catalogue text for Mapplethorpe’s earlier “Black Male” exhibition, praised it. Ntozake Shange, the playwright who’d famously created “for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf” wrote the book’s introduction, offering a more ambivalent framing both acknowledging the haunting beauty of Mapplethorpe’s images while naming power dynamics within the perspective.

Mapplethorpe’s images of nude Black men helped catalyze public discourse on representation, desire, and the Black male body, but it was the creative and artistic advocacy of individuals such as poet Essex Hemphill, filmmaker Marlon Riggs, as well artists including Isaac Julien, Lyle Ashton Harris and Glenn Ligon who drove the conversation in ways still resonant today. Their work responded to the cultural moment — the devastation within and beyond the LGBTQIA+ community, politicization of queer representation in art, and the celebration of queer sexuality — as well as reshaped it through a noir gaze. 

Hemphill’s voice was prescient, unmistakable and affirming. Following Joseph Beam’s tragic death in 1988, he oversaw the completion and publication of “Brother to Brother” in 1991, a follow-up to “In the Life.” Further, he responded directly to Mapplethorpe in the speech “Does Your Mama Know About Me?” at the first OutWrite Conference which took place at San Francisco’s Cathedral Hill Hotel on March 3-4, 1990. With a clear statement of unapologetic vulnerability, erotic honesty, and confrontation he asked, “Does your mama know about me? … Will she accuse me of stealing your love?” to the white gay men who sexually pursued Black men for the size of their sexual vitality and penis sizes without addressing the racial dynamics of their desire nor of society at large. While Essex Hemphill gave the era a new vocabulary and language, Marlon Riggs gave it moving images. His most noted works, including “Tongues Untied,” “Color Adjustment,” and “Black Is… Black Ain’t” challenged the typically distorted narratives of Black life in mainstream media of that time, refuting  the notion that Blackness and queerness were incompatible. In “Tongues Untied,” Riggs created a visual chorus of Black gay men testifying to their lived experiences at a time when both AIDS and virulent homophobia were stalking Black communities, insisting on joy, beauty, and the right to exist without shame.

When “Tongues Untied” aired on PBS, the backlash was immediate. Conservative politicians including then-senators Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato — some of the same voices attacking Robert Mapplethorpe — demanded that public funding for the arts be slashed. Marlon Riggs, like Mapplethorpe, became a symbol for the rising Evangelical, far-right.

In 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington canceled “The Perfect Moment,” Mapplethorpe’s retrospective in a heated political climate where a vocal cohort of national politicians accused the exhibition of being obscene. The National Endowment for the Arts, which had partially funded the exhibition, became the target of congressional hearings. Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Black male nudes were among those that were singled out, though rarely with explicit mention of race. Essentially, the Black male body became a signal of a broader (largely white, but not exclusively) moral panic of the 1990s  focused on  sexuality and purity, disease, and uncomfortably changing social norms.  

While Marlon Riggs used film to traverse the interior of Black queerness, artist Lyle Ashton Harris used photographic and archival tools focusing on his individual self and personal community. The seminal “Ektachrome Archive” compellingly documented gay nightlife, and everyday existence and grief in America and abroad in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a work of dynamism, embodying Black and gay life through a 360-degree point-of-view.  

British artist Isaac Julien’s 1989 film, “Looking for Langston,” gave a lush, dreamlike meditation on Black and queer life against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance, imagining poet and writer Langston Hughes’ gay self as an essential element of his literary oeuvre. The black‑and‑white cinematography of “Looking” mirrored Mapplethorpe’s aesthetic but Julien’s gaze is rooted in longing rather than possession. 

Through texts, language, and appropriation of images by Robert Mapplethorpe and others, Glenn Ligon’s “Notes on the Margin of the Black Book” (1991–93) didn’t attack Mapplethorpe directly but rather offered a contextualized dialogue with his images and the works of others on racialized gazes, identities, beauty and history. The result is an  essay which identifies the contradictions, and tensions embedded in “Black Book.” Ligon deftly invites viewers to wrestle with complexity and challenge their assumptions.  

“These artists must be viewed within the broader cultural context rather than isolating them in a ‘ghetto’ of alternative art or through a black and white lens,” urged Lyle Ashton Harris on a video conversation from upstate New York. “Their legacies continue to influence contemporary artists despite the challenges they faced during the AIDS epidemic and within the Black community. Highly influential people like James Baldwin and Richard Wright as well as others have shown us how cultural representations of Black masculinity evolved over time.”  

Together, Riggs, Harris, Julien, and Ligon refused the binary of celebration or condemnation, arguing that neither Black nor queer masculinity is monolithic. They expanded the conversation Mapplethorpe had entered and moved it to being one driven by Blackness. 

In 1994 Thelma Golden, now director of the Studio Museum of Harlem, was a curator at the Whitney Museum who entered the fray regarding masculinity, manhood, and Blackness in mounting the exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” It ran from November 1994 to March 1995, gathering works including David Hammons, Jean‑Michel Basquiat, Lorna Simpson, Gary Simmons, Lyle Ashton Harris, Glenn Ligon, Isaac Julien, Barkley Hendricks, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others. 

The conversation went beyond Black queerness to interrogate what it means to be Black and male in the United States in the context of white supremacy and all the “-isms” intersecting American life. Visitors to the Whitney weren’t allowed to see Black men as distortions or simplicities but rather in their full humanity. “It was a kind of ‘boiling point,’” noted Lyle Ashton Harris of the show in the context of dialogues within and beyond the art world to larger society regarding Black masculinity, manhood and sexuality. 

Today, exhibitions like “Exposure: Black Queer Visual Constellations” at Brown University extend the legacy of Essex Hemphill, Marlon Riggs, Lyle Ashton Harris, Isaac Julien, and Glenn Ligon as well as their contemporaries. Recently closing on June 15, the show was co-curated by Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, the Malcolm S. Forbes Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown, with Lindiwe Makgalemele, Jordan Mulkey, J.M. Nimocks, and Gee Wesley. According to Weheliye, it was conceived due to the surprisingly few group shows in recent years specifically featuring Black queer artists with only three or four such exhibitions in the past five years. For many  of his students  Black Book was a significant reference point but it’s less central to the artistic conversations they’re having now, than in the 1990s.

“Initially, the scope of the exhibition was a little bit smaller,” he explained by phone from Providence, Rhode Island. “I think we started out with one particular artist but then started looking around at different exhibitions of contemporary Black queer art and there were actually not nearly as many as one would assume given the number of Black queer, Black gay and trans artists working particularly in the area of photography. It was important to showcase the diversity within contemporary Black queer art in terms of the work itself, but also geographically from the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and the African continent.”  

The show brought together artists exploring varied perspectives on the contemporary world including Clifford Prince King, Nadia Huggins, Ajamu X, and Texas Isaiah, among others. Collectively they are pushing the multiplicity of Black and queer lives and perspectives using history, community, and imagination.

Professor Weheliye also spoke to the global challenges facing Black queer artists, highlighting how U.S. fundamentalist Christian groups have influenced anti-LGBTQIA+  legislation in Africa, and the current White House administration has vigorously reduced support for artists across the board in its effort at cultural erasure of non-white and LGBTQIA+ visibility. 

“For Black queer, Black trans artists, their war is by default political because of their identities,” he argues, “even though their art is not always explicitly political, but it still carries the history. We still have ways to go and need continuous spaces, resources for artists to exhibit, opportunities to sell their work and residencies or fellowships.”

Lyle Ashton Harris is now working to develop an exhibition honoring Riggs and Essex Hemphill in collaboration with MASS MoCA, co-organized by Cantor Arts Center and MASS MoCA. It will open at the Cantor, then on to MASS MoCA, and subsequently show at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. He met Riggs as a graduate student and has been poring through more than 200 boxes of archival material. “The fire, the energy that [Marlon] and Essex used to propel themselves to produce their enduring work are legacies that have lasted beyond their lifetime,” Harris declared. “They are even more potent, more radical today.” Marlon Riggs died in 1994, and Hemphill followed him a year later, both AIDS-related. 

In his poem, “The Perfect Moment” Essex Hemphill spoke to the discourse around Robert Mapplethorpe’s images of Black men acknowledging the fears, desire, and danger for men who were Black and gay in his lifetime. One of the most haunting lines still resonates today in the midst of anti-trans efforts and the threats to marriage equality and visibility for all queer people: “I want to be seen in the fullness of my life.”

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