Page 333 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

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Jack Fritscher Chapter 13 315

at least, so it seemed to me as I reviewed the internal evidence of
her attitude and voice in her “straight” biography of the gay artist.
Seventeen years later, critic Christopher Bram in Eminent Outlaws
thoroughly documented the “gay panic” typical of the mid-century
New York literary establishment who trashed gay artists such as
Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, and Christopher
Isherwood. Critic Richard Labonte wrote at his site, Books to Watch
Out For (btwof.com), “Of the two biographies of Mapplethorpe,
Fritscher’s was the first and is still the best.”
After Mapplethorpe died, March 9, 1989, I championed him in
Drummer where Paul Taylor, an understanding New York Times art
critic, noticed my “Pentimento for Mapplethorpe,” Drummer 133
(September 1989). Taylor wrote the following letter dated October
11, 1989:

Dear Mr. Fritscher, I am a former friend of Robert
Mapplethorpe and an art critic (New York Times and various
magazines), and I was pleased and interested to read your
article about Robert in Drummer. In fact, I have brought it to
the attention of Patricia Morrisroe, a journalist for New York
magazine (with no special credentials regarding art) who is
writing a biography of our friend for Random House publish-
ers. I hope she will be in touch with you if she hasn’t already.
---Yours sincerely, Paul Taylor.

A week before I received Taylor’s letter, Patricia Morrisroe,
straight and Catholic, contacted me for an interview for her book
funded by Random House. With both of us recording, I talked to
her on the telephone for nearly five hours. Days later, on October
10, 1989, she wrote me a thank-you note from her Riverside Drive
address in Manhattan. Quoted briefly from her copyrighted letter,
she was very sweet: “Dear Jack. Thanks so much...even though I’ve
interviewed over 120 people at this point, I haven’t spoken to any-
one who is as articulate on the subject of Mapplethorpe as you are.
Your piece [in Drummer] was really well-written.” Noting she was
having a “hard time” building a timeline for Robert because he kept
no notes, she inquired about his letters to me, saying she would
appreciate my help, and she signed off: “Thanks for the help you’ve
already given me. Best, Patricia Morrisroe.”

FOUR POINTS: DRUMMER AND MAPPLETHORPE

1. My “Pentimento: Mapplethorpe” article was the apogee of
Drummer magazine assaying a political cause celebre.

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