Is patti smith gay

The placement of rooms enforces the separate-spheres ideology, while the arrangement of objects within the home places pressure on those who do not conform to stay in line. The family table is a particularly strong example. Not only does she break heteronormative expectations through her appearance, she stomps on the pieces by demonstrating how even the association between masculinity and attraction to women is a normative assumption rather than a core truth.

In Just Kids, the artist reminisces occasionally about moments of femininity, yet those are always framed as outliers, a fact that her peers quickly noticed.

In the chapter “Chelsea Hotel,” she mentions that, despite the fact she was never particularly interested in women sexually or romantically, many people mistook her for a “latent homosexual” because of her presentation.

Robert’s takes place during an acid trip he embarks on to create drawings. Smith has long-held a unique, androgynous sense of fashion. Patti often models her behavior and actions after these men, in hopes of living a romanticized artistic life. Rather than abandon domesticity altogether, recent writing surrounding the home tends to focus on its potential for instability, and the positive outcomes that come from it.

It follows the style and beat from the growing American interest in the reggae scene. As Catherine Wiley and Fiona R. Barnes argue, the home, at least as represented in the rhetoric of family values, “is not a space that encourages women to be creative beyond, or in, the domestic sphere.”[5]

This essay, however, is not concerned with a narrative of the home as an obstacle to female artists.

Mark Wigley argues that, during the consolidation of architecture as a discipline, “the task of architectural theory becomes that of controlling ornament, restricting its mobility, domesticating it by defining its ‘proper place.’”[33] This means that women become confined not only to the domestic sphere, but to its innermost private spaces, because they are viewed as accessories more so than subjective persons.

More and more writers seem to advocate for revision of the home, rather than abandonment. 

Artist as Mother and Father–Challenging Separate Spheres

Smith uses art to challenge the idea of separate spheres; to the musician and poet, the individual artist must embody both masculine and feminine roles—an idea that transfers onto homemaking. Smith imagines the process of making art as parallel to birth, placing the artist as creator in a maternal role.

These gatherings, however, are fundamentally “directive,” instructing their inhabitants into the “right” way of interacting with each other.[36] Ahmed argues that tables tend to present the “same form of sociality”—the heterosexual couple and the family.[37] Even the photographs and artifacts placed around the table (family photos, wedding gifts etc.) have a way of keeping the members of the table “in line.” The touting of a lineage—i.e.

Not only does “the home” detract from the ideal of the artist as a detached genius, but, particularly for women, it also inhibits personal and meaningful work, making it not merely a roadblock, but an oppositional force to art. They found solace in each other's company, becoming romantically involved while sharing a small apartment and pursuing their individual artistic dreams.

Thus, in encouraging artistic collaboration, the Chelsea Hotel pushes its inhabitants to form communal networks that differ from the private relationships that sustain the traditional home. Sexual energy pervades many photographs of the artist, despite their general absence of feminine erotic signifiers. It amazes me that after all this time Smith has never really found a mainstream audience, just as she has never really found a major audience in the LGBT+ community.

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. While the feminine creator artist allows the art to come into being, the masculine provides the aesthetic guidelines for such art to flourish. Smith’s vocals scream across the decades to touch the soul of our disaffected youth.

It feels like Patti Smith has found her greatest influences in queer men.

Her recently re-released prose-poem, The Coral Sea, is a tribute to Mapplethorpe in his final days – a fantasia about one last voyage. Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar (London & New York: Routledge, 2005), 34.

[9] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (London, England: Vintage Classics, 2015).

[10] Iris Marion Young, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme,” in On Female Body Experience: Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 138.

[11] Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W.

W. Norton and Co., 1963), 293.

[12] Mark Wigley, “Untitled: The Housing of Gender,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. With the non-male thrust aside, writing again becomes associated with maleness, and the cycle repeats:

So, for instance, if the action of writing is associated with the masculine body, then it is this body that tends to inhabit the space for writing.

Her 2008 memoir, Just Kids, makes it apparent that even after their romantic relationship ended, Smith still loved Mapplethorpe deeply.