Is patti smith gay

The picture has a sapphic magnetism that led me quickly to the artist’s music library. Patti tapes photos of her artistic heroes to the wall, a placement which encourages her to emulate these creators and continue what Smith sees as a shared artistic mission. Rather than being explicitly romantic or platonic, their bond evolved through many phases without losing its intimacy.

“Gloria” (1975) may well be about sex with women, but Patti Smith was only covering an old favoritenot pronouncing her sapphism. The family itself becomes what we implicitly know, as well as what surrounds us, a dwelling place.”[14] Under this paradigm, queer bodies become disoriented within the home because their existence contradicts the implicit knowledge that the home imposes. 

Although the home is problematic within literature and scholarship, many are “not ready to toss the idea of home out.”[15] This group of scholars concedes that the home can be a space of oppression and exclusivity, but they also note and praise its potential for instability.  As Christopher Reed argues, although the home may be “the main arena for the enforcement of conventional divisions of masculinity and femininity (along with their complement, heterosexuality)...the modern home has also been a staging ground for rebellion against these norms.”[16] Kristin Jacobson uses the term “neodomestic” to describe an outgrowth of literature in the neoliberal era that points out the contradictions and exclusions of the “single-family, privately owned” home.[17] Jacobson's book shows that the home is far from dead in 20th century feminist writing; it is just challenged and transformed.

Her 2008 memoir, Just Kids, makes it apparent that even after their romantic relationship ended, Smith still loved Mapplethorpe deeply. It tells them, This is your place within the world. ‘I had this fantasy that he would fall in love with me and we would get married…’

But more than any other contemporary influence, it becomes apparent that no one was a deeper influence and closer collaborator than Robert Mapplethorpe.

In fact, even in the buff she manages to convey an energy that’s more ambiguous or even masculine than the alternatives. Despite Robert’s queerness and insistence that they should have relationships with other people, Smith is bothered by it, hoping to preserve the unit of Patti-and-Robert. It is unclear what boundaries, if any, there are in the home (which comprises the entire second floor of their building).

Smith’s presentation is androgynous, her art breaks gender expectations, and the connections she forms disrupt cultural expectations. Smith portrays him as both “priest and magician” as he becomes increasingly interested in working with religious imagery.[24] Robert even dresses the part; when Patti comes home one day, she finds him in “a Jesuit robe he had found at a thrift store.”[25] It is clear that this is not out of a genuine religious impulse, but for aesthetic purposes.

Smith has long-held a unique, androgynous sense of fashion. Sure, part of this was just denial. As such, each generation has always clashed with and slightly rebelled against the one before it. She was disturbed and disgusted by the concept of growing into a female body and learning to perform “female tasks.” “It all seemed against my nature” she writes, “it revolted me.” She preferred to imagine herself as one of Peter Pan's lost boys or a traveling soldier surrounded by her men.

Almost every influence she mentions in Just Kids is male, including her favorite poet Arthur Rimbaud who, incidentally, had at least one love affair with another man in his lifetime. As with many of Smith’s covers, the lyrics have been slightly rewritten and feature Smith’s poetry as a supplement to the original lyrics.

She refuses to subscribe to a model of the home that relegates women to doing invisible, meaningless background tasks in lieu of pursuing their ambitions. Smith makes direct eye contact with the camera, displaying a confident yet slightly dreamy expression in a white button-up and a black jacket tossed casually over one shoulder.

(The ever sexually-ambiguous Morrissey, who considers Smith to be a major influence on his work and wrote of hearing Horses for the first time as a major life experience in Autobiography, issued a cover of ‘Redondo Beach’ a few years ago.)

Starting with a calm piano riff, ‘Free Money’ builds into a crazy rock and roll free-for-all that explores the American obsession with money.

One cannot deny the delight in Smith’s narration as she describes the “monastic mess” she creates of her workspace.[31] In her narrative, Smith seems to recognize that there is, as Iris Marion Young claims, “world-making meaning in domestic work.”[32] In homemaking, Patti and Robert do not merely maintain space—they build it in a way that is highly personal and reflective of their own artistic identities.