Robert Mapplethorpe was a wonderful and extremely intelligent man–the kind Arnold Schwarzenegger would appreciate.I was Robert Mapplethorpe’s bi-coastal lover in the 1970s and asked Robert specifically in 1977 about his opinion of Arnold’s heterosexuality which is noted in the hard-cover memoir of our life in sex and art, “Mapplethorpe: Assault with a Deadly Camera.”

Mapplethorpe shot millions of frames and released only some of them to print. In my own experience with him, I helped set up for him more than one shoot in which the model (one a bodybuilding celebrity) was shot clothed and then nude with the proviso that the nude photos were private. The celebrity’s motive was to be photographed, completely undraped, by the master-artist Mapplethorpe whose genius has been unfairly tarnished by fundamentalists who hate art to begin with. In the revolutionary 1960s and the Titanic 1970s, the custom in physique photography was dual: the American style was in posing trunks; the European style was frontal nudity. The Austrian Arnold, freshly arrived from Europe, posed for Robert Mapplethorpe in 1976 at the height of sexual liberation. Arnold was already a celebrity and a millionaire who could custom-order whatever he wanted; so why would Arnold, the European, have not wanted private nude photographs of the sculpture of his body?
Photography is a bodybuilder’s only stop-gap against time and gravity’s revenge. Mapplethorpe was famous for “the Perfect Moment” of his photographs. Do the math.

Also note that as famous, and infamous, as some of Robert’s photographs are, what of his work has been shown to the public is only a fraction of his total work, most of which will not be seen for years. Any nude of Schwarzenegger by Mapplethorpe would be not pornography, but fully defensible art–and probably quite glorious.