Artist Jack Walls Survived His Boyfriend, Robert Mapplethorpe—and All the Haters, Too
Here's my (sometimes touchy!) talk with the man who says people thought he'd die, too, of heroin or AIDS. They were wrong.
It may be September, Caftan readers, but let’s just carry on as though it’s still summer—because it is, right? Summer doesn’t officially end until September 23, and what’s more, with climate change, it often feels like summer until Halloween, doesn’t it? One of my best recent memories is swimming in the ocean off NYC’s Ft. Tilden Beach (part of the Rockaways) on a gorgeous day in mid-October. I hope to do that again this year!
A big THANKS to those of you who’ve bought a copy of my new novel Speech Team, which you can buy on Bookshop (which I love because it supports indie bookstores), Amazon or at your local bookstore.
It’s about four queer or weirdo/misfit friends who were all on Speech Team together in high school (as was I!) in the 1980s and slowly, awkwardly reunite 25 years later to track down the teacher/speech coach who messed with their heads when they were under his mentorship.
For those of who haven’t bought it, can I basically beg you to buy a copy? The publisher, Viking, gave me a big second chance with this novel—which, being a queer(ish) novel in a reading market dominated by straight women, has an uphill climb—and I need to sell at least 10,000 copies for them to give me another chance. And I’m only about 25% of the way there so far. So I’d really appreciate the support.
And if by chance you have read and liked it, will you be so kind as to post about it on your social media (if you do that sort of thing) and rate it on Goodreads? Both those things help a lot.
Thank you! Now, as for this month’s Caftan interview—I love it! It’s with artist Jack Walls, 66, who realized his own stated goal when he became the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s boyfriend for most of the 1980s, until Mapplethorpe’s death from AIDS in 1989. Since then, Jack has made his own art career—in his native Chicago, then in NY’s Hudson Valley, then (since 2019) back to Chicago. He’s very open about his time with Mapplethorpe, as his Instagram makes clear, and you can see him in the 2016 HBO documentary about Mapplethorpe, Look at the Pictures…
…and read about him in Patricia Morrisroe’s 1995 biography of Mapplethorpe, which I had no idea that Walls hates (as you’ll see), even though Morrisroe describes him as being smart and funny, with “a streetwise hipness that had been honed to perfection through his years with a Chicago street gang.”
One reason I wanted to interview Walls was that, although Mapplethorpe’s famous images of Black men, and his real-life relationships with them, project and suggest that they were silent, passive objects to him, Walls is anything but silent or passive. He has a lot to say about that time and place, as well as what came before and after, and (as you’ll see), I was often rattled as he seemed easy to anger or offend, to the point where I wondered what question wouldn’t rile him up. But I think we got to a better place by the end of the interview, by which point I realized that what I took to be anger was perhaps just Walls’ forceful way of talking, which you can get a taste of here (starting at 4:25)…
So here is my interview with Walls, who gave me two hours of time, which I am so grateful for. I hope you enjoy it. In a few days, I’m doing the October interview, with an entertainment figure you almost certainly have heard of. I’m excited! I’m surprised he said yes, frankly! (Update: We did the interview yesterday and it’s a good one!)
But until then…here’s Jack!
Tim: Jack, thank you so much for talking today. So you moved back to your native Chicago a few years ago, yes?
Jack: I came back in 2019. I'd outgrown my space in Hudson, New York, and realized I hadn't been back to Chicago for about 25 years, so I came back in March of that year and was offered a show here in May, so I stuck around for that. But then I started running into people I hadn't seen for years and was having fun, so I decided to stay for the holidays with my mom, who has a big four-bedroom house on the South Side with nobody in it. Then my gallery in Hudson said they were going to give me a show in March of 2020—well, of course we all know what happened. The whole world shut down. And I've been living at my mom's ever since.
Tim: What's the biggest difference between Chicago and New York?
Jack: I first went to New York in 1974 when I was 17.
I'd always had this obsession with it. I'd been aware of Andy Warhol since I was about ten or even. New York was everything for me—better than Hollywood. I was a big reader. My seventh grade teacher gave me Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown [set in Harlem], then somewhere along the line I also read Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin and Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr.—all before I was 15.
So a bunch of us were going to drive to New York to go to a rally in Madison Square Garden where Cesar Chavez and Angela Davis were going to speak. I grew up in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, so I had a bunch of Mexican friends who were politically minded. I was going to NYC for that, but to see the city. So that's how I got there the first time, and then every year in my teens I would find my way back. Then when I was 20, I joined the Navy.
The year 1977 was big for me because I had a friend from Long Island, nicknamed Peaches, a femme queen. So I spent the summer of 1977 in Cherry Grove on Fire Island. That's the same summer I met [the late, great house music DJ] Frankie Knuckles—Peaches was friends with him.
I remember thinking that Fire Island must be somebody's idea of heaven if heaven were gay. My head was swimming. This was pre-AIDS so everyone was fucking like rabbits.
Tim: Was Cherry Grove more racially diverse than the Pines?
Jack: No. Peaches and I were two of the few Black guys.
Tim: What was that like?
Jack: I don't know. That's the thing about gay life. I know racism is racism, right? I know there's racism in the gay community. So I took everything with a grain of salt. At that point, I was also interested in being some type of writer or actor. And I was aware of the challenges before me, not only as a Black gay man but just as a Black man in America.
Tim: Did you ever have some sort incident on Fire Island?
Jack: It wasn't an incident. It was the way it was—period. I was aware of derogatory terms like "dinge queens." White dudes who were into Black dudes were called that. "Oh, he's into dinge."
Tim: Would you say something when you heard that?
Jack: You accepted it. And then some of these white queens, especially from the South, they would use the N-word because they were used to it. But I wasn't going around kicking people's asses. You just took note and kept it moving. They wouldn't say the word to you—but in a way where they thought that they were so hip that they could use it. Like, "I have all these Black friends, so I can say N."
Tim: Well, in fact, to jump right into that. In her 1995 biography of Mapplethorpe, Patricia Morrisroe goes into great detail about how much he used the N word, both with white friends and with Black men during sex, and about how he would go to Black gay bars like Keller's looking for a certain type of—in his words—"primitive" Black man. Didn't all that turn you off?
Jack: That's the take-away you got from that book. Because that book frankly is a piece of shit.
Tim: Why?
Jack: Because it is. I'm gonna leave it at that. And she can't write. What has she done since then? [Tim: She's published two memoirs and a novel.] She's a hack. When I met her, I detected right away that she was going to write a hit job [on Mapplethorpe]. She was digging for dirt and wanted to make it mean and nasty, which is what she did.