Robert Mapplethorpe, Self-Portrait, N.Y.C. 
                                selenium toned gelatin silver print
                               19.5 x 19.5cm, 1978

Everything in the portrait casts a shadow, 
spell widening across canvas, everything
has its stunt double, its villain twin, two
worlds caught in pose and repose, everything—except the whip.

•

To speak, first you must take in a little of the world. Let a wisp fill your lungs. Call it bullwhip, this act, this displacement first in the chest, then in the vocal folds gripping, dragging it upwards into the soft palette, dampened, amplified. Some excess of sound is always swallowed back. The sound you hear is an echo from the well that stays buried.

•

Once, in church, as a teenager, I felt a man’s stare 
behind me, winged across weathered pews. We 
were singing hymns. When I turned, he was standing 
with his wife, a chorus of blond children, my age. 
His looking cried, landed on my shoulders. It felt 
like being ordained into the lowest of priesthoods: 
the men’s hands falling on my head as they closed 
rank, chanting. Me looking where their bellybuttons 
were secreted away, under robes, sleeping, locked-open 
cyclops, mysteries I wanted to feel the well of, 
to lick into. The bullwhip is a tongue lolling out 
of the mouth of the asshole. You can’t hear the chant 
on its lips. But you can feel the weight it lifts, trying 
to speak. I followed the tail of his heavy stare back. 
His eyes, dark with restraint. He mouthed 
an overenunciated, Hello. That was it. A silence 
I still hear. The gaze gripping us, two ends of a rope 
braided taut. I can’t say which of us let go first, 
if we ever really broke away.

•

The bullwhip that murdered your idea of god.

•

The man’s ribs are not corseted. There is no bullwhip. 
His knee is not cocked. Where you see leather chaps
are really a sheath of tan trousers, the legs 
of a seersucker suit. He’s sitting askew on a desk 
in the lecture hall. He’s chalk on slate. He has no face. 
No ass. A man is not a body. Your looking puts 
a body, a bullwhip there. Either that, or, at all times, 
there is a bullwhip lodged inside every man’s ass. 
One of these things is likely, the other true.

•

Looking is always conjunction: for 
the length of the gaze, you become 
the man, a bullwhip in his rectum, 
and the bullwhip becomes you, 
ready to sting, which is why you feel,
afterwards, nervous to punish 
everything wearing the name normal.

•

It’s as though though turned to look at but 
and but stood in for as so as turned though 
into a corset that laced yet into inasmuch 
while ampersanding and into art’s black-and-white 
escape hatch, meanwhile.

•

Meanwhile, the man hefts his leather-braided tail, 
offering it, commanding: discipline me. I will 
free you. I will hurt you into me.

•

A bullwhip isn’t even the strangest thing I’ve kept in my ass this week.

•

Though most art historians see Mapplethorpe’s self-portrait 
as a defiant reclamation—here is light for the demon, love for snarl 
and swish—I wonder instead where the tail goes, unfurling 
its danger out of the frame, flicking toward us, 
Eve’s umbilical cord re-attached finally 
to the lapsed world, where we are feeling now 
it lasso looping our waists, pulling us forward, 
the asshole welcoming us home. The garden’s 
impossible blossom opens. 

//

Author’s Commentary:

When I was young, my family hosted holidays at our house. Which meant a day of cooking and cleaning before the avalanche of relatives arrived, and that my younger brother and I would have to “straighten up” our rooms, removing all evidence of our queer existences.

Have you ever looked at your life and asked: which objects here could convict me?

Between Dustin and me, we’d have to hide:
—an 18×24 framed poster of half-naked Eric Nies, of MTV Real World fame, emerging from a beautiful blue-black ocean, his nipples little kisses of sun
—two feather boas, pink and black
—two sequin cowgirl hats, black and pink 
—rainbow-colored pride necklaces and rings, packed into a jewelry case
—a jewelry case
—copies of The Weekly News, which tried (but sometimes failed) to keep the words “gay” and “lesbian” off the front page of the newspaper which served our community
—the binder of bylaws Dustin kept as leader of the Broward Gay and Lesbian Youth Group

Walking into Dustin’s room to play video games with the cousins, I could see the whiter space on his wall where Eric had been, as if the portrait’s absence were blushing pallidly. The emptiness, I mean, stared back louder from the wall. 

In Robert Mapplethorpe’s “Self-Portrait, N.Y.C.” from 1978, queerness refuses to be emptied out, and indeed centers our human mechanism of absence and abjection: the excretory asshole, the means by which we empty ourselves of waste. Mapplethorpe inverts this function, feeding a bullwhip into himself. The anus isn’t the exact center of the piece, but if you were to draw a crosshairs, you’d draw a rough cross over the anus. Point taken (literally and metaphorically). 

I’m drawn to the vortex of possibilities in ekphrasis—the insertion of presences that otherwise remain at the edges, haunting, implying through their hovering their own centrality-via-negativa. 

This self-portrait appears in the infamous X Portfolio from 1978 which published 13 portraits, of which Self Portrait, N.Y.C. was last. The portfolio includes a portrait of two leathermen at home, decked out in full gear. One gets the sense of an inverse Americana here: ma and pa displaced by daddy and Daddier. The abjectified absence finally gets to speak. 

That’s what I love about ekphrasis—that it is always a queer act, getting the margins to usurp the middle, to give the echoes crowded up in the line breaks a chance to resonate more fully. 

My grandmother once found one of Dustin’s taken-down framed pictures, years later, among things we’d left behind in her storage unit. She mailed it to my brother, who wasn’t out to her yet. In the accompanying card, she wrote: “I thought you might be looking for this.” 

//

(Note: Mapplethorpe’s Self-Portrait, N.Y.C. is still in the public domain, which is why the image for this piece is a QR code that links to the photograph.)