Looks, Love, and Ambiguity: Queerness In Patti Smith’s “Just Kids”

Confession: I only became interested in Patti Smith because I thought she was a lesbian. While I was standing in a gallery exhibition on the history of punk music, a photo caught my eye. The cover art for Horses (1975) is nothing if not captivating. Smith makes direct eye contact with the camera, displaying a confident yet slightly dreamy expression in a white button-up and a black jacket tossed casually over one shoulder. The picture has a sapphic magnetism that led me quickly to the artist’s music library. And – wouldn’t you know it? – her most popular song is about having sex with a woman. Once I learned she was lifelong best friends with my favorite photographer, Robbert Mapplethorpe, I couldn’t help but follow my mother’s advice and read her biography Just Kids (2010). You can only imagine my dismay when, hours into the audiobook, my mother broke the news to me that Patti Smith is, in fact, heterosexual. “Gloria” (1975) may well be about sex with women, but Patti Smith was only covering an old favorite not pronouncing her sapphism.

The thing is, even after I received this news I didn’t feel quite convinced. Sure, part of this was just denial. What do you mean she’s straight? – she’s so cool! Beyond this, though, was something else. Despite centering a heterosexual cisgender woman’s relationship with a man, the life story outlined in Just Kids is anything but heteronormative. Smith’s presentation is androgynous, her art breaks gender expectations, and the connections she forms disrupt cultural expectations. Patti Smith may not be queer in the LGBTQIA+ sense, but her life certainly has queered norms around gender and relationships.

The most obvious queerness in Smith is what I noticed first: her appearance. Smith’s public presentation has never clung to gender expectations, leading many to make the same erroneous assumption I did. Sexual energy pervades many photographs of the artist, despite their general absence of feminine erotic signifiers. In fact, even in the buff she manages to convey an energy that’s more ambiguous or even masculine than the alternatives. Although she never seems to call herself androgynous, the label follows her around nonetheless as outsiders struggle to reconcile her gender-queering presentation with her heterosexuality. This has been true throughout her career. 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. Interestingly, this also occasionally went the other way. In the same chapter, she meets a male friend through him mistaking her for an attractive young man and buying her some food. Smith’s presentation is not, for her, a signifier of queer sexuality. At the same time, this almost makes the queerness of her look more potent. 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. This is not only evidenced through her relationships exclusively with men, but also through her art which deals in lust directed towards men. 

Beyond simply her appearance, Smith’s identification and operation within the landscape of gender is complex and fluid. According to the first chapter of her memoir, she felt deeply betrayed as a child when her mother told her she would become a young lady. She was disturbed and disgusted by the concept of growing into a female body and learning to perform “female tasks.” “It all seemed against my nature” she writes, “it revolted me.” She preferred to imagine herself as one of Peter Pan's lost boys or a traveling soldier surrounded by her men. Even as she aged into womanhood, she continued to be more inspired by people like Frank Sinatra, and especially Bob Dylan, than she was by other women. Almost every influence she mentions in Just Kids is male, including her favorite poet Arthur Rimbaud who, incidentally, had at least one love affair with another man in his lifetime. In fact, her art in itself broke through expectations of womanhood. Fronting a rock band was not unheard of for women during the early seventies, but it was certainly unexpected.

In the chapter “Separate Ways Together,” Smith describes how difficult it was for her to find band members because of her gender since male musicians were put off by the idea of performing behind a woman. The masculinity of Rock and Roll complicated her place within it. Smith frequently covered and reworked rock songs which were almost always by men. By choosing not to switch genders, Smith queered the music by her very presence. Although songs like Gloria are not examples of Smith declaring lesbianism (as many assumed), their very performance by a woman changes their meaning and forces audience engagement with queerness. This goes beyond cover songs, as well, with a male perspective being explicitly in many of Smith’s original works. 

Finally, Just Kids sheds light on the ways Smith’s emotional connections with others challenge heteronormative assumptions. Most notably, one of, if not the most, important relationships Smith has ever had was with a gay man: controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. Although their initial coupledom ended relatively early, Smith and Mapplethorpe were a near inseparable pair within Mapplethorpe’s tragically short life. They lived together for years in New York City, had deeply intertwined careers, and acted as inspirations for each other’s art. Although the sexual nature of their relationship eventually ended, their connection never ceased to be nebulous and outside the boundaries of the normative culture’s assumptions. They loved each other deeply, smoked and took LSD together, and were always interwoven even in their romantic relationships with others. Rather than being explicitly romantic or platonic, their bond evolved through many phases without losing its intimacy. Sometimes they were an officially monogamous partnership, sometimes Mapplethorpe was a pen pal sending Smith stories about his new homosexual adventures, and sometimes Smith was the breadwinner for them both even as they explored other relationships. The pair eventually permanently ceased to cohabitate and both found long-term domestic partners in others, yet even then they were closer than any typical model of mixed-gender friends. Mapplethorpe, near the end of his life, even offered to house Smith and help her raise her children if she were to ever lose her husband. Arguably, even a romantic bond between a gay man and a straight woman queer expectations. Beyond this, though, Smith’s relationship with Mapplethorpe subverts heteronormativity with its flexible, fluid, and forgiving nature. 

Patti Smith is not the lesbian icon I initially understood her to be, yet her life, persona, and art still queered expectations. The world can always do with more LGBTQIA+ artists and public figures, yet Smith’s presence fills a different need. Rather than providing us with a lesbian perspective, Smith displays the nuance of human existence. Even “queer” versus “not queer” is an imposed dichotomy. In truth, all of us uniquely operate within the complex and ever-changing landscapes of gender and sexuality. Women like Smith exemplify that living life truly and fully does not rely on finding fitting labels and operating under their parameters; presentation, identity, and forms of connection exist outside the stereotypical patterns we imagine make up our social world. 

Written by Aiden/Estelle Garrett.