Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Mapplethorpe

That line has the sting of a preemptive rebuttal: Mapplethorpe anticipating the neat moral arithmetic that says nightlife equals emptiness. The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost defensive, because the accusation it answers is so familiar. “Out at the bars all the time” reads like a charge sheet, the kind of detail people use to reduce a person to a vice. His counter is not “I wasn’t lonely,” but “I was looking for someone to love” - a rerouting of the same facts toward a different motive. The twist is that the bars, usually coded as distraction or decadence, become the search field.

Subtextually, Mapplethorpe is claiming romantic seriousness inside spaces that respectable culture wants to treat as unserious. For a gay artist moving through the late-70s and 80s downtown scene, “the bars” weren’t just recreation; they were infrastructure: community, anonymity, possibility, danger. The line refuses the idea that desire must be sanitized to count as love. He doesn’t romanticize the scene, either. The verb “looking” suggests yearning, repetition, maybe failure - the ache of trying again tomorrow night.

Context matters because Mapplethorpe’s work was constantly misread as pure provocation: leather, bodies, taboo, scandal. This sentence quietly argues that the same world that produced the explicit images also contained a basic human plotline - attachment, recognition, the hope of being chosen. It works because it punctures the audience’s smugness: you can’t dismiss him as hedonistic without also admitting how often people go “out” precisely because they want to be held.