Robert Sherman was at a members-only S&M club in Manhattan's Meatpacking district in the late 1970s when he was approached by a group of five men who asked if they could take his picture. The photographer was flanked by two men on either side, each dressed in head-to-toe leather. Sherman was new to the city and had never heard the name Robert Mapplethorpe. He politely refused.
"I didn't want to end up in a swing and handcuffs," he states in his nasal drawl, now so popular at the weekly fetes he hosts Thursdays at Bar Marmont in Hollywood. Some time later, Sherman told the story to a friend, who told him, "If you've still got that number you better call him up, or you'll regret it." So began a working relationship which would launch one man into artistic eminence and make the other an icon.
The work that would eventually receive its own two-page spread in
Vanity Fair is the 1984
black-and-white photograph,
Ken Moody and Robert Sherman, which was taken about five years into the Roberts' relationship. Moody gleams from the back of the frame, the periphery of his body melting into darkness; Sherman glows orb-like in the foreground, Adam's apple bulging, their cheekbones forming a delicate parallel. Millennials may know Mapplethorpe’s work might best through the KT Tunstall song “Suddenly I See,” written in response to the striking portrait of Patti Smith on the cover of her album,
Horses. Mapplethorpe rose to prominence as an artist and provocateur in the 1970s with intensely personal studies that pioneered modern homoerotic imagery. His are the contemporary answers to ancient Greek Sculpture. It wasn't until months after the photo shoot, at an opening at the prestigious Robert Miller Gallery in New York that Sherman became aware that his life was about to change as a result of Mapplethorpe's photographs.
Sherman has been a model,
actor, dancer, make-up artist, drag performer,
maitre d', and muse. But before his career took off he was a loser, a freak, and an aberration. Sherman lost all of the hair on his head and body when he developed alopecia as a six-year-old growing up in Key West in the 1960's. "Children are horrible to each other" he recalls without emotion.
When his family moved to Connecticut in the 70's he eagerly joined in the drug culture that made being different cool. Sherman's entire body was a personification of the rejection of the norm. "Nobody made fun of me or anything because I was 'freaky man'. It was a badge of honor."
The man that would make his image famous, Mapplethorpe, grew up in suburban Floral Park, Queens.
He once said, "I come from suburban America. It was a very safe environment and it was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave."
Like Mapplethorpe, Robert Sherman left the safe environment of his acid-fueled teen years in Connecticut and moved to New York City. "I didn't stick out at all. For the first time I was completely at ease and really at home."
