American artist and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was BOTD in 1946. Born in New York City to a working-class family, he studied art at the Pratt Institute, dropping out to pursue a career as an artist. After experimenting with collage and filmmaking, he focused on photography, collaborating with his then-girlfriend, the writer and singer Patti Smith. He received significant praise for a striking black-and-white portrait of Smith, dressed in a man’s suit and shirt, which became the cover image for her 1975 hit album Horses. Openly bisexual, he simultaneously pursued a relationship with David Croland, with Smith’s knowledge and consent. In 1972, he met arts patron Sam Wagstaff, who became his life partner and manager, buying him a loft apartment in Chelsea which became his home and studio. By the mid-1970s, he was recognised as a major American photographer, drawing praise for his carefully composed and elegantly-lit portraits of Smith, Wagstaff, his lovers Marcus Leatherdale and Peter Berlin and celebrity friends including Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Philip Glass, Deborah Harry and Isabella Rossellini. Emboldened by his experiences in New York’s gay and BSDM sub-culture, his work became more sexually explicit, chronicling a series of nudes of Black men, masked leathermen, bondage scenes, sexual play with dildos, fisting and genital torture and an infamous 1977 self-portrait with a bullwhip inserted in his anus. His impeccable technique and unflinching portrayal of queer sexuality made his work both irresistible and disturbing, drawing comparisons with fellow queer renegade Caravaggio and provoking debates about the boundaries between art and pornography. By the 1980s, he was a superstar of the art world, his work fetching record prices at auctions while being condemned by moral conservatives. Later in life, he produced a series of portraits of the female bodybuilder Lisa Lyon and an eroticised series of floral still lifes. Diagnosed with HIV in the mid-1980s, he chronicled his physical degeneration in a harrowing series of self-portraits, including a 1988 photograph holding a skull’s head walking stick. He died in 1989 of an AIDS-related illness, aged 42. A planned 1990 retrospective exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work in Washington, D.C., partially funded by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, was cancelled following criticisms over government subsidies of “obscene” art. The resulting controversy prompted the US Congress to enact restrictions on future NEA grants featuring sexually explicit subject matter. Later that year, the director of the Contemporary Arts Centre in Cincinnati, Ohio was charged with obscenity after exhibiting photographs from the cancelled Washington show, though was later acquitted. Mapplethorpe’s work continues to provoke controversy and debate, though is now recognised as an important chronicle of late-20th century gay and BDSM culture. Smith’s 2010 memoir Just Kids provided a stunning portrait of her relationship with Mapplethorpe, though was puzzlingly silent over his later identification as a gay man. He was portrayed by Matt Smith in the 2018 biopic Mapplethorpe.