“Screening” the Sexuality of Jean-Michel
Basquiat: The Artist in Two Films
Writing in 1994, bell hooks argued:
Conflicted in his own sexuality, Basquiat is nevertheless
represented in the Whitney Biennial Catalogue and elsewhere
as the stereotypical black stud randomly fucking white
women. No importance is attached by critics to the sexual
ambiguity that was so central to the Basquiat diva persona.
(35)
The avoidance of the “conflicted” and “ambiguous” aspects of the black artist’s
sexuality in favor of the portrayal of him as “the stereotypical black stud” is, as
hooks points out, not unique to Whitney Museum’s 1992 retrospective. In the
many films, books, essays, art catalogues, and retrospectives that have sought to
remember Jean-Michel Basquiat since his death in 1988 at age 27 from a heroin
overdose, there has been a general tendency to ignore or shy away from
discussions and depictions of the queer activities that constituted the artist’s
sexual existence and to focus, instead, only on his heterosexual practices. This
paper argues that Edo Bertoglio’s Downtown 81 and Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat
participate in this process in the way they “screen” the artist’s sexuality; in other
words, as both films display the artist’s heterosexuality, they conceal the more
controversial, queer activities that also comprised his sexual reality. As will be
demonstrated here, the screening of Basquiat’s sexuality is consistent with a
tradition of invisibility and silence surrounding the issue of black queerness,
especially when dealing with black figures of serious investment. As JeanMichel Basquiat was at the time of his death and remains today “the most
financially successful Black visual artist in history” (Tate 233), there is much at
stake in the way in which he is constructed and portrayed for widespread public
consumption. Thus, Downtown 81 and Basquiat frame Basquiat as
unquestionably straight, even though he participated in sexual activities that
would trouble his categorization as such.
While this paper maintains that Downtown 81 and Basquiat both
operate to screen Basquiat’s sexuality, they do so with such different intent and
styles that some brief clarification is needed. Basquiat, written and directed by
fellow artist and contemporary, Julian Schnabel, and released in 1996, eight
years after the artist’s death, is a feature-length film that stars actor Jeffrey
Wright as Basquiat. Although Schnabel’s film is a “blend of fact and fiction”
(Adams 2), it presents itself as a biographical portrayal of the artist in that it
proceeds chronologically tracing the artist’s life from childhood to death while
pointing to important events and people along the way, and as such “they [the
viewer] will treat it as a documentary” (hooks 5). Although Downtown 81,