Mapplethorpe by Patrical Morrisroe is a fascinating read. I thought I would post some sections of the book.
1988 Interview with Mapplethorpe
"I had many affairs during this period, but I was never into quickie sex. I've only slept with maybe a thousand men"
Page 191-192
Mapplethorpe had never been interested in merely documenting the S&M subculture, but in bringing his own aesthetic to bear on scenes that many people would normally find sordid or repugnant. A perfect example is Jim and Tom, Sausalito, one of the seven photographs at the heart of the 1990 Mapplethorpe censorship trial in Cincinnati, it shows one man urinating into the mouth of another and was taken during a 1977 trip to San Francisco. Mapplethorpe placed his two figures in an abandoned Marine bunker, where the light from a nearby window floods the dingy space with religious glow. Instead of an angel appearing in the cell, however, there are only Tom and leather-hooded Jim transforming urine into something like wine. "Can't you see the beauty in it?" Robert had pleaded to his neighbors in Floral Park after showing them his Cubist madonnas. Years later, he was still preoccupied with the same question, and in a 1988 interview with Janet Kardon he described another disconcerting image, of a man inserting a finger in his penis, as a "perfect picture. because the hand gestures are beautiful. I know most people couldn't see the hand gestures, but compositionally I think it works. I think the hand gesture is beautiful. What it happens to be doing, it happens to be doing but that's an aside."
