Styled by Olivier Rizzo and photographed by Willy Vanderperre, the ad campaign features Mahershala Ali, Trevante Rhodes, Ashton Sanders, and Alex R. So much so that one cannot celebrate the new Calvin Klein underwear campaign featuring the actors from the film Moonlight without acknowledging that Mapplethorpe’s presence lurks just beneath the surface. Mapplethorpe casts a long shadow over discussions around race and desire, and around black men and sexuality.
This is also a debate we continue to have today. This was a debate that centered around race and power, art and representation - and it was a debate led by black queer men. Or those who were appalled by sexually provocative images and those who were not.
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This was not simply an argument between those who favored censorship and those who favored free expression. Even as his work was championed and defended by the white art world for its transgressive themes, there were others who took issue with his depictions of black men. These debates seemed to explode around the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and his images of black men in the 1980s, at the height of the cultural wars. However, what’s less discussed now is the sexual objectification of black men by white gay men. Black gay men know as well as anyone that the sexual liberation of white gay men has not made them more sensitive to racism. These discussions describe, often in detail, the various forms of emotional injury in the digital realm of dating and hookup apps that manifest a kind of modern-day Jim Crowism. In our current moment there has been considerable debate around what is frequently referred to as “sexual racism,” a term that reacts to the romantic and erotic rejection of men of color by white gay men.