Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe’s line lands like a champagne burp in a drawing room: breezy, amused, and quietly incendiary. “Toast of London” isn’t just bragging; it’s a social diagnosis. He’s clocking how fast prestige can travel when you become useful to the right people - not because you’ve been domesticated, but because you’ve become the fashionable kind of dangerous.

The kicker is his offhand description of “really decadent families” where “the married men were gay and no one thought anything about it.” The wording does two things at once. It punctures the myth of a repressed, uniformly straight establishment, and it exposes the hypocrisy that polices sexuality by class and discretion. In these circles, queerness isn’t liberated; it’s managed. It’s tolerated as long as it remains elegant, coded, and contained within the apparatus of marriage, money, and inherited power. “No one thought anything about it” reads less like enlightenment than like an entitlement: when you’re insulated by privilege, transgression becomes décor.

Context matters. Mapplethorpe was an American outsider rising into late-70s/80s European high society, a moment when art-world glamour, aristocratic decline, and sexual subcultures overlapped. His photography would later trigger culture-war outrage in the U.S.; here, he’s describing the upstream version of that drama, where taboo becomes currency before it becomes scandal.

Intent-wise, he’s not moralizing. He’s taking notes: the elite can absorb almost anything - even homosexuality in “married men” - as long as it flatters their self-image and doesn’t threaten the structure beneath the silk.