My boyfriend and I went to view a series of Robert Mapplethorpe test prints presented by the Kinsey Research Institute at the John Giorno Foundation on the hottest, most steamy day of the year so far, March 29, 2025. The heat was pulsing, charged in clouds which hung low over the city, insulating the sweat and spit inward. It was unseasonably warm and all of the city dwellers had their first opportunity to show skin and debut their fresh spring fashions. Everyone was out and about, finally unburdened from the throes of a long, cold winter.
Regrettably I had to spend the day taking the train to Times Square to recover my wallet which I had forgotten at Sardi’s in a drunken lapse of memory the night before. Thankfully it awaited me with the coat check girl (with the cash still inside). “It’s a black patent-leather Vivienne Westwood pocketbook… it has a rose gold AmEx and a driver’s license inside.. my name is Emilie Engel and I will be there at 4 to pick it up…” I ran inside Sardi’s, recovered it and tipped the coat check girl, and ran out of restaurant. Clip clop, my clogs clunked through the packed streets, and onto the train downtown to attend my appointment at the Bunker.
Suddenly a cold wind began to blow, and my head throbbed as the air pressure dropped lower and lower. The weather was changing — and fast, with an urgency only capable of Mother Nature in New York or London. The girls in their linen dresses clenched their teeth and grimaced with discomfort as an icy breeze blew up their skirts. I met my boyfriend at the Bunker just as the weather started to transform.
We reserved a five-minute appointment to start at 5:15, and when we arrived the girl working let us in and told us they were running extremely behind, but we should make ourselves comfortable and help ourselves to beer or sparkling water in the fridge. It was the final day to see the test prints before they were shipped back to Indiana.
There is a long rectangular table in the center of the room where a group of 20-somethings in bandanas, jean-shorts, and mullets sit. One positioned in the center of the table, in a seating arrangement not unlike The Last Supper, wears a white cotton glove and flips the photos with languor.
I take a sparkling water, he takes a Modelo, and we sit down in folding chairs in the kitchen opposite the curator of the Kinsey Research Institute. She is in a conversation with two 40-something women approximately her age about menstrual extraction. A renowned practicer of the procedure died in Southern California recently, leaving behind six children (and many aborted offspring).
I try my best not to eavesdrop too obviously when an older Japanese man approaches the curator and says, “Just so you know, your 4:45 is waiting in the Burroughs room.”
The curator diatribes into how easy it would be for someone (implying the Japanese man and his crew) to close the door of the Burroughs room and have sex in it. No one would ever know. However she would personally like to have sex in the Orgone box, because as a masochist the cold, hard surfaces and complete darkness appeal to her.
The attendees are getting anxious. We have been here for 40 minutes already, who knows how long the others have been waiting.
We stroll into the Burroughs room, where the Japanese man and co. are seated patiently. Burroughs had a shotgun mounted as a lamp and a copy of Stephen King’s It by his bedside. A woman seated next to the Japanese man is talking to him about Genesis Breyer P. Orridge and s/his attempt to be “completely androgynous.”
I leave the Burroughs room and go into the far corner by the Hindu shrine, pluck a pillow off of the shrine, sit on it, and practice some forward folds. My boyfriend goes to get more drinks from the fridge and the curator asks him if I am okay.
A group of recently-arriveds begin to crowd around the viewing table, trying to sneak a peek at the test prints, even though they have not yet spent the compulsory 1 1/2 hours in anticipation. The curator dispels them and informs them that they need to wait their turn.
The photos show of dominant/submissive couple named Dominic and Eliot. Mapplethorpe photographed the pair n 1979 in a sex dungeon (specific location unknown) and gifted them the test prints. As I mentioned, the prints were tests, they were not commercially distributed onr signed by Mapplethorpe. The prints stayed in Dominic and Eliot’s possession until Dominic died. Eliot held onto the prints and eventually met someone else. Eliot passed away eventually too, and the prints were inherited by the new boyfriend, who found it a tad awkward to own photos of his deceased lover and his former flame. Through the help of a broker at a sexual photography art fair, the new boyfriend sold the test prints to the curator of the Kinsey Research Institute.
There is one group in the queue ahead of us now. The curator has started combining the five minute appointments to make this go faster. The lot seated at the viewing table now is a combination of two parties of single women in their 40s, mostly lesbians. One half of the group is comprised of the menstrual extraction enthusiasts, and the second half consists of a group of women in sundresses who loudly insisted they have been waiting longer than my boyfriend and I when the curator asks us if we’d like to see the photos now. They aggressively stand and rush over to the viewing table, and the curator asks the group of eight 40-somethings who would like to wear the white glove and flip the photos. One of the sundressed women interjects she is a trained conservator so… naturally she is the obvious choice…
The Kinsey Research Institute is based in Bloomington, Indiana and housed within Indiana University campus. The Institute also receives partial funding from IU. In Indiana, it is illegal to show photos of a sexual nature in a gallery setting if there is a chance an underage person could walk in and see them. The Mapplethorpe photos are therefore forbidden to be shown at the institution which owns them, and for this reason the John Giorno Foundation in New York is hosting the viewing.
At long last, it is our turn. Our assemblage of a viewing party includes a tall, skinny couple in their 20s dressed in all black with two septum piercings. The guy has skater-energy about him, like he stumbled in here after visiting the Supreme store a few blocks up the Bowery. A pair of older, New York local women with nasal voices and frizzy hair streaked with gray join us, along with a corpulent Eastern European butch lesbian. My boyfriend volunteers to wear the white glove and flip the pages.
The photos show a man dangling upside down over a leather floor, chains strapped to his wrists and ankles and a chain squeezing his testicles which connects to a collar around his neck. He applies the chains, gets into position with acrobatic grace, and his partner stands hungrily beside him. The dangling man’s legs flex about his head, and his arms are stretched as if he’s nailed to an upside-down cross. This partner grabs his penis out of his loin-cloth jock-strap chain. The next photo displays the partner pissing and shitting in his mouth. The photos are gritty, dirty, painful, harsh, hard, there is an obvious brutality and lack of tenderness. The two local women are behaving prudishly and are shocked. The two ask clarifying questions like, “where does that chain go?” [his testicles] “what is that liquid?” [urine]. We flip through the twelve photos front-to-back, and then back-to-front.