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BRIAN RIDLEY AND LYLE HEETER by Robert Mapplethorpe
Mainstream American culture had little room for ho-
mosexuality in 1979, when Robert Mapplethorpe photo-
graphed Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter in their full sado-
masochistic regalia. At work, gay employees were largely
closeted. In many states, expressing their love could be
criminal. Mapplethorpe spent 10 years during this era
documenting the underground gay S&M scene—a world
even more deeply shielded from public view. His intimate,
highly stylized portraits threw it into open relief, perhaps
none more so than Brian Ridley and Lyle Heeter. Both men are
clad in leather, with the submissive one bound by chains
and the dominant partner holding his reins in one hand and
a riding crop in the other. Yet the men are posed in an oth-
erwise unremarkable living room, a juxtaposition that adds
a layer of normality to a relationship far outside the bounds
of what most Americans then considered acceptable. The
picture and the series it was part of blew open the doors for
a range of photographers and artists to frankly examine gay
life and sexuality.
Nearly a decade later, Mapplethorpe’s work continued
to provoke. An exhibit featuring his pictures of gay S&M
scenes led to a Cincinnati art museum and its director’s get-
ting charged with obscenity. (Mapplethorpe died of AIDS
in 1989, one year before the trial began.) The museum and
its director were eventually acquitted, bolstering Map-
plethorpe’s legacy as a bold pioneer whose work deserved
public display.
