The Shadow the G&LR Refuses to See

By Rob Redding

Editor & Publisher

NEW YORK, Feb. 22, 2026, 6 p.m. — I read Matthew Bamberg’s “When BDSM Went Mainstream,” published in the Gay & Lesbian Review in its January-February 2026 edition, and felt the familiar weight of a silence I have known all my life. It is the silence that settles in rooms where whiteness believes itself to be neutral. It is the silence that follows praise that has been stripped of truth. It is the silence that pretends not to know what it knows.

I earned my MFA at Pratt. Mapplethorpe studied there too. Neither of us came out at Pratt. I was already out before I arrived and he came out after he left. But we both learned to see in those same studios. We both learned how power moves through an art school. How it hides behind technique. How it disguises itself as objectivity. How it speaks through what is left unsaid. And when I read this article, I recognized that silence again.

The piece praises Mapplethorpe’s discipline. It praises his innovation. It praises the way he brought S and M photography into the mainstream. But it refuses to speak of the cost. It refuses to speak of the Black men whose bodies he used to build his legend. It refuses to speak of the way he turned those bodies into symbols and surfaces. It refuses to speak of the way he made Blackness into something to be stared at, not understood.

I saw this dynamic long before I ever read a word about Mapplethorpe. I saw it at Pratt. I saw it in the way certain professors spoke of Black artists as if we were footnotes to a story that had already been written. I saw it in the way white students could play with Black forms and Black pain as if they were raw material. I saw it in the way white gay men could speak of Black male bodies with a fascination that was never innocent. Mapplethorpe did not invent that world. He simply revealed it.

The magazine calls his work joyful. It calls it trust. It calls it a kind of innocence. But innocence is a story the powerful tell themselves. Trust is a word that bends under the weight of history. Joy is not the same thing as freedom. And when Mapplethorpe photographed Black men, he did not give them freedom. He gave them exposure without identity. He gave them beauty without agency. He gave them presence without power.

Some of those men were paid. That is true. Payment acknowledges labor, but it also reveals the imbalance. The white artist built a global career. The Black models were often unnamed, uncredited, and unremembered. Only now, decades later, are institutions trying to identify them. Trying to return to them the dignity that anonymity stole. Trying to give them the agency that the art world denied. The article does not mention this. It does not mention the long history of white gay fascination with the Black male body. It does not mention the way that fascination has shaped desire, shaped violence, shaped the very architecture of white gay imagination.

I write about this in my own work. I write about the way Black men have been turned into fantasies that do not belong to us. I write about how nationalism grows out of reclaiming the body that history has tried to take from us, as I discuss in my bestselling book The Professor: Witnessing White Power. It strips away power. It strips away story. It strips away the right to be more than a big black surface.

And there is another irony. My own art, Constructive Expressionism, uses deep black as a primary color. Black as structure. Black as force. Black as the ground from which meaning rises. In my work, blackness is not a void. It is a presence. It is a world. In Mapplethorpe’s work, blackness becomes an abyss. Something to be consumed. Something to be stared into. Something that does not speak back.

The magazine repeats this. It praises the white artist. It praises the white patrons. It praises the white institutions. It leaves the Black subjects in the dark. It reenacts the very dynamic it should be interrogating. It calls this neutrality. It is not neutrality. It is participation.

Mapplethorpe was a talented man. A disciplined man. A man who understood light and shadow better than most. But talent does not absolve power. Discipline does not erase history. And beauty does not excuse the way a body is taken.

If we are going to speak of Mapplethorpe, then we must speak of all of him. The brilliance and the blindness. The innovation and the extraction. The art and the cost. Anything less is not criticism. It is worship. And worship is the oldest silence of all.

Rob Redding is the author of No. 1 best selling book Black Power in the Age of Artificial Supremacy Featuring Redding-Shim Kwet Yung . He is the bestselling author of 18 books. He is the host of Redding News Review Unrestricted and creator of ReddingNewsReview.com. He is also an emerging visual artist who lives and teaches at two colleges in New York City.