The conjuring of truth that transcends specifics is, of course, one of the factors that defines art. If the truth being revealed is basically biographic, the task is great: the artist needs to make metaphor out of personal detail, to allow generalizations to emerge from particulars. The more idiosyncratic the specifics, the harder this is.
David Wojnarowicz lived a bizarrely harsh life--most of it mean beyond easy comparison--and events of his past were both his motivation to create and his subject. He described what he lived and dreamed, recounting events of his external and internal life. He especially addressed sex and sexuality, finding “…it necessary to define (his) sexuality in images, in photographs and drawings and movies in order to not disappear.” What he described was uncommon experience but what he illuminated was shared. Somehow, his story fit my relatively benign circumstances, roughly, like waves take a body. More than anyone else, for me David excavated the sadness and difficulty involved in being gay in America, and the pain of living with AIDS. He did this for himself—it saved him from being destroyed by bad news—but he did it for me, too, and he knew that I knew.
We met through others we both cared about, but our relationship was between us and it was unexamined, not discussed, and based on a recognition that we immediately had: we understood and needed one another. To him, I think I represented an art world insider whom he could trust, at least as much as he could trust anyone. And I was trustworthy, because I respected him and loved him even before I knew him, pulled irresistibly toward him because of his art. It stunned and fascinated me from the early 1980s--altered posters, street stencils, and harsh stories of life on the street, a life I did not know but which left me feeling intensely. He was still “emerging” when we finally met, meaning that he was being watched by those who were powerfully connected, those who opened the doors to new artists, and gave them recognition. I think he was afraid of their increasing interest in him and the attention to his work by people he did not know, and he needed me, or someone like me, to help him sort out who was who and what meant what. I, on the other hand, needed his acceptance of sex to address my internal phobias (I was way out publicly but still full of conflict internally) and his rage to help delineate my mostly-unvoiced horror at what was happening to so many men I loved. He needed my insights into the art world. I needed his into life as a sexual being in a hostile environment.
David’s art pulsates with his anger at America and its intolerant and unempathetic social culture, one that only pretends to celebrate difference, to care about the young or care for the ill and the weak. This anger propelled his creativity, but his creative output seemed to free him from it. The David I knew was gentle, quiet, reserved, kind, open. He drove his stories forward with rage, but then, out of nowhere, rounded corners, leaving bitterness and arriving at soulful, mournful songs. Ones that I sing to myself in dark moments, and am grateful.
David described his American nightmare using both words and images, sparing nothing and no one, trying to reach “...the necessary things in my history that would ease up the pressure on my mind.” He limned his childhood abuse, his life on the streets and on the road. He also mined his dreams and fantasies for the meanings that underlie experience. He told of how being in nature--he so totally urban--fed him. Here’s a mini autobiography, cutting to his teen years on the street:
I had been drugged, tossed out a second story window, strangled, smacked in the head with a slab of marble, and almost stabbed four times, punched in the face at least seventeen times, beat about my body too many times to recount, almost completely suffocated, and woken up once tied to a hotel bed with my head over the side all the blood rushed down into it making it feel like it was going to explode, all this before I turned fifteen. I chalked it up to adventure or the risks of being a kid prostitute in new york city.
This litany of abuses is prelude to the first time he got fucked which was by rape. He was hitchhiking back from one of his periodic escapes to nature. He had taken a bus out of the city and found a pond in New Jersey where he had floated, still wearing his street-filthy clothes and shoes,
“...pushing my face under water looking for signs of life. It was rapidly turning to dusk and I was wet and feeling cold. The town was too small to offer much evening traffic so it was hard to get a ride. I didn’t really know where I was. I was gray inside my head and wishing that killing myself was an effortless act.”
He caught a ride from a man who said he worked in a bank and who detoured onto a deserted road. There he threw David into the back of his truck, pummeled him, and forced himself inside this rangy fifteen year old. Even years later, when he saw the man again in a movie theater, the memory smelled like gasoline, “lingered like the stink after a bad fire.”
Like most of his narratives, David’s description of this abuse was rendered with the fractured brilliance of strobe light. Splintered among the flashes of brutishness were recollections of another sort. He remembers that the man, mounting from the rear, pulled his head back and kissed his eyes. And while he raped, he also mumbled, “Oh, what a gift you are giving me...” David pieced these details into the tumble of his account, complicating the picture of this man and this act. The man is not redeemed but neither is he left utterly devoid of consciousness, of humanity.
The intensity of the man’s sexual desire, and the end to which it drove him, are inexcusable, but lust is ordinarily imbalanced--and this David acknowledged. He often described the way it feels to be caught up in longing, feelings powerful and irrational, “...a humming gathering from my stomach and rising up past my ears.” He went on “...I feel the fist of tensions rising through my solar plexus beneath my t-shirt and the sensation grows upward, spreading like some strange fever in my chest, catching only at the throat where small pockets of sound are contained.” No matter his early history, he believed in sex as an act of communication. He saw it as essential and good, even as desire pushes reason and safety aside.
Halfway through my meal the door swung open and this deaf mute walks in and leans against the counter a couple of seats from me. He uttered a series of squeaks and grunts and flashed me a smile. Something clicked in my head, I mean, he was intense and oddly sexy with a muscular body covered in scrapes and a few bruises. He looked like he just walked out of some waterfront in an old queer french novel. He managed to order a burger to go and as the counterman went in the back to place the order he leaned over the counter and lifted the plastic lid of the danish case and slipped one inside his filthy shirt. He winked at me as he speared a second danish and dropped it down his neckline, then he walked over and extended his hand and I shook it. Something was clicking somewhere. When I shook his hand he made a odd little gesture with his middle finger against my palm and winked again. There was an air of desperation and possible violence around him like a rank perfume. And that was what suddenly became sexy to me. I tried to understand this sensation, why the remote edge of violence attracts me to a guy.
David dissected the attraction, finding a useful metaphor: that the life of a gay man is, essentially, that of an outlaw. Since social mores disapprove of, and in some states criminalize, sexual acts of intimacy and love, and since more casual or public encounters are commonly policed, we are inherently lawless whenever we express our sexuality. He suggested that the queer is a short step from the one who has given up caring about society’s rules. David, at least, saw common ground between his sexual nature and one who stepped further out of line, even whose behavior was unpredictable and possibly violent. He let this guy follow him into the subway, and to a deserted spot where they began an encounter that was a mess of conflicting impulses. Wanting sex, but not wanting his pocket picked, David eventually kneed the guy in the chest, and barely managed to outrun him onto a departing train. “He never got in and I turned and slumped into a seat and realized the car was filled with sleeping winos. Christmas eve and I’m on a train full of drunks heading toward another future.” It is not a pretty picture, but it still implies hope, “another future”.
Reading the likes of this was incredibly revealing for me. I judged my own desire harshly. I did not easily forgive myself for getting into situations that went in directions I did not want. And David made me see the foolishness in this. What indeed is wrong with desire, with sexual desire, with desire for being with men, with desire for the wrong men? How had I become convinced that desire was bad, therefore I was bad? Or a less easily answered question, why did this feeling stick so long with me, given that it seldom stopped me, was only effective at producing guilt?
In another story from his teenage days as a Times Square hustler, he tells of a man who
...would have me put on these pure rubber sneakers and the sergeant’s outfit and then a rubber trenchcoat and then he’d grease up his dick and he would start fucking another rubber sneaker while on his belly and I’d have to shove my sneaker’s sole against his face and tell him to lick the dirt off the bottom of it and all the while cursing at him telling him how stupid he was...
Someone else might have left us with a sense of pity or revulsion for a man who picked up kids and made them partners to his weirdness. But David saw beyond the sex. He concluded this tawdry little tale by adding that the guy “says he loves the way my skeleton moves underneath my skin when I bend over to retrieve one of my socks.” The man becomes sympathetic not simply pathetic, weird but human. There is no sexual perversity. All sex is legitimate.
One way David conveyed this accepting stance was to remain a partner to the sex he described, even when it was taking bizarre turns. He could watch, but was never a bystander. His own sexual nature and his intense desire were givens and accepted, no matter how much religion and family had tried to teach him to think other. There was no guilt which meant also no innocence. And for him, sex happened all the time, all over the place. He described a tableau at a sex club:
...There is a clump of three guys entwined on the long ledge. One of them is lying down leaning on one elbow with his head cradled in another guy’s hand. The second guy is feeding the first guy his dick while a third guy is crouching down behind him pulling open the cheeks of his ass and licking his finger and poking at its bull’s-eye. ...One of the guys, the one who looks like he’s praying at an altar, turns and opens his mouth wide and gestures towards it. He nods at me but I turn away.”
He turned away because at that point he carried the virus, and it complicated participation. But he still relished what he saw. For him, sex was matter of fact, the same subject addressed by pornography. As he experienced it and as he described it, however, he added subtext. A leer from someone who was “praying at an altar”, his head “cradled”: this language transforms a sexual encounter from tired and tawdry to weirdly holy. David talked about sex with grit, no dressing up, no glossing over, and he seldom associated sex with romance. Still, he saw sex as having a kind of sanctity, and he certainly saw it as an aspect of love. In describing what is usually referred to as casual sex with a stranger in an abandoned building on a Hudson River pier, David wrote,
In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. I loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.
He continued to write this way despite AIDS. AIDS was a virtual gift to homophobes, and to those who disapproved of sex separated from procreation--the perfect opportunity to demonize the sexual urge and promiscuity. People brought up like me, and David, too, were vulnerable to this message. Already complex for most of us because of ingrained sexual phobia and internalized homophobia, AIDS did something horrible to our chances at intimacy, already challenged, as we gay men now faced the distinct possibility of killing each other as we made love. David knew that he’d contracted the virus through sex, and he watched with horror as AIDS killed way too many of his friends and as it exacted its toll on him. But his stream of sex stories and his images about gay sexual experience continued defiantly. He inferred that sex would redeem us because it brought us together; we should not abstain. I believe him to this day.
In 1989, David contributed an essay to the catalogue of an exhibition called Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, organized by his friend, the photographer Nan Goldin. The show was at ArtistSpace, a non profit gallery in Lower Manhattan. Funding for the show had come in part from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The NEA was already under scrutiny by the religious right and conservative members of Congress for its support of a fellowship to Andres Serrano, the maker of Piss Christ--in truth, a profoundly spiritual meditation on Jesus--and a show of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs that included several staged, highly aestheticized images of some gay sex practices. David’s essay was a brilliant polemic entitled “Postcards from America: X-rays from Hell,” and it hissed with anger.
It was vaguely diaristic, probing conversations and recalling events in order to describe what it is like to deal with illness, dying and death, although it was very much a tale of how AIDS was a very particular way to die.
The rest of my life is being unwound and seen through a frame of death. And my anger is more about this culture’s refusal to deal with mortality. My rage is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.
The essay included powerful condemnations of Roman Catholic efforts to keep safe sex a non topic, of the politicians who were swayed by them, and of the bureaucrats who did too little too late to help with treatments and education. He even vented on gay critics who wrote rebukes of others who continued to write of unfettered sexual experience:
...we have people from the thought police spilling out from the ranks with admonitions that we shouldn’t even think about anything other than monogamous or safer sex. I’m beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for radical gesture is the imagination. At least in my ungoverned imagination I can fuck somebody without a rubber, or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse [Senator] Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw congressman William Dannemeyer off the empire state building. These fantasies give me distance from my outrage for a few seconds. They give me momentary comfort. Sexuality defined in images gives me comfort in a hostile world.
Throughout his youth, and again as a person with AIDS, all social welfare systems failed him miserably, including schools and the neighbors who took no notice of his father’s repeated and public beating of his children. Think of what he might have become. But, instead, he used art as his way out, even of bitterness. He channeled his anger into creativity, and it was preposterous to watch how this frightened our leaders in Washington, and even conservatives in the art world.
Given the hell-bent determination of the right to still voices such as his--triply troublesome because he was queer, angry, and aesthetically challenging--David’s hyperbole forced the NEA to threaten to rescind its grant for the show creating a major early skirmish in the culture wars, begun in earnest in the late 1980s. In response, the art and civil liberties worlds accused the NEA of attempting censorship. Summit meetings were called between free expression advocates and bewildered bureaucrats who were being lobbied in less public forums by those who wanted to obliterate the agency for a whole slew of reasons, using artistic effrontery as their ammunition. A compromise was eventually achieved: the NEA slapped the hands of ArtistSpace, but it was allowed to keep its grant for the show as long as no government money went to pay for the offending catalogue.
As the public controversy raged, there was another side to the story that seldom gets told. At a meeting of some art world activists addressing the situation, I watched a conversation between David and the director of ArtistSpace, a good person by all standard measures. I knew it was their first encounter since the fracas had begun many days before, and that David was dismayed not just by the NEA challenge but also by the way it was being handled. I could not hear them talk, but I could certainly see the tension, quiet as it was, and knew that it ended badly. David was already aware that, fighting the NEA as she was, and truly beleaguered by countless people applying different sorts of pressure, the director’s basic issue was a very practical one: keeping her grants coming.
There was of course a brave side to her stance, namely that she--and soon enough, scores of other managers of art presenting agencies--was defending ArtistSpace’s right to determine what it showed based on aesthetics, not politics. She and others fought for funding without strings attached. And this basically meant arguing for artists’ rights to free expression, a worthy cause. It is not unimportant here, however, that the legal experts carried the ball throughout the fight, not the arts community. The art world enjoined the lawyers in defending its right to free speech--but its contribution was usually to claim authority to establish what was and wasn’t art, virtually never to justify art’s sometimes contentious nature.
David knew that he was invisible in the fight. Like most other artists who experienced this discrimination, he was never asked to speak for himself. And no one with authority--i.e., credibility that extended beyond the confines of the contemporary art world--stepped forward to argue that, in its challenges, his was art of a most potent sort, voicing the sentiments of many, making pointed (but defensible) social criticisms, and extending aesthetic terrain. The art world has historically been ambivalent toward artists who make social issues a primary focus, and when such content is combined with cutting edge expression--familiar behavior since the Renaissance--even those “in the know” are often at a loss for words of explanation and apologia. But art world institutions--major museums and their curators as well as respected critics, for example--either kept their distance or, when forced to speak out, hid behind the privilege of expertise without taking on the admittedly difficult task of justification.
While David as the maker of troublesome work was vilified, misrepresented and misunderstood in the press and elsewhere, he as a person was all but eclipsed. He had created his work in the till-then protected arena of the art world. When the external world invaded, the paper-thin line of defenses around those who trekked furthest out became obvious. As one willing to baldly expose his heart and gut, he was de facto abandoned by all but friends. The invisibility of the queer in the larger society existed even here. It hurt him deeply to be betrayed by the world that had given him life.
More difficulty was to come, however: an exhibition of his work by the bravely supportive gallery at Illinois State University also received NEA funding. The show was accompanied by a well-illustrated catalogue which contained reproductions of large works, embedded in which were drawings based on pornography, some altered photographs that also originated as porn, and one print that showed Christ with a hypodermic in his arm--truly the man of sorrows, one of the downtrodden. The fundamentalist American Family Foundation unlawfully excerpted the images from their surroundings and mailed them to its constituency as a fund-raiser (purportedly one of its most successful) to support its efforts to bring down the NEA. David sued, both for copyright infringement and for malicious intention to defame his character. He won the case, at least from the standpoint of the illegal use and misrepresentation of his work. But the arguments that his career was damaged were apparently unconvincing. As his one expert witness, I have had a hard time forgiving myself for this. David was awarded a dollar in damages. The judge apparently believed that notoriety was an aid to any career. There was, however, no evidence that this was true then, and there is none now.
What the judge did not, perhaps could not, understand was the nature of creativity, what a delicate matter it really is. Nor the heavy toll it takes to go public as a queer. Nor what it is to live with life threatening illness, particularly one that comes with social stigma--the draining strain of it. Although not writing about the judge, David described an encounter with someone else who approached him as if “normal”: “too bad he can’t see the virus in me, maybe it would rearrange something in him. It certainly did in me.”
It appeared to be too much to hope that the religious right could act with any generosity toward any person of different views or behaviors, but I, optimistic to the point of naiveté, wanted to believe that the judge could hear what David was saying-- an argument for civil rights, not to mention common sense, and basic humanity. How could he miss the pathos in David’s description of living with AIDS? In this excerpt from the ArtistSpace essay, David recalled a conversation with a friend opening a window into how he dealt with the omnipresence of his own deterioration and with the dying and death of others:
My friend across the table says, “There are no more people in their thirties. We’re all dying out. One of my four best friends just went into the hospital yesterday and he under went a blood transfusion and is now suddenly blind in one eye. The doctors don’t know what it is...” My eyes are still scanning the table; I know a hug or a pat on the shoulder won’t answer the question mark in his voice. The AZT is kicking in with one of its little side effects: increased mental activity which in translation means I wake up these mornings with an intense claustrophobic feeling of fucking doom. It also means that one word too many can send me to the window kicking out panes of glass, or at least that’s my impulse (the fact that winter is coming holds me in check). My eyes scan the surfaces of walls and tables to provide balance to the weight of words...My eyes settle on a six-inch-tall rubber model of Frankenstein from the Universal Pictures Tour gift shop, TM 1931: his hands are enormous and my head fills up with replaceable body parts; with seeing the guy in the hospital; seeing myself and my friend across the table in line for replaceable body parts; my wandering eyes aren’t staving off the anxiety of his words; behind his words, so I say, “You know...he can still rally back...maybe...I mean people do come back from the edge of death...”
Why didn’t the judge get it? Why could he not see the effort required to make sense of a life so often under fire? David spoke out in order to understand himself but also to make others, including me, grasp what we witnessed and found so hard to process.
I am a bundle of contradictions that shift constantly. This is a comfort to me because to contradict myself dismantles the mental/physical chains of the verbal code. I abstract the disease I have in the same way you abstract death. Sometimes I don’t think about this disease for hours. This process lets me get work done, and work gives me life, or least makes sense of living for short periods of time. Because I abstract this disease, it periodically knocks me on my ass with its relentlessness.
Words can strip the power from a memory or an event. Words can cut the ropes of an experience. ...Describing the once indescribable can dismantle the power of taboo. To speak about the once unspeakable can make the INVISIBLE familiar if repeated often enough in clear and loud tones… IF PEOPLE DON’T SAY WHAT THEY BELIEVE, THOSE IDEAS AND FEELINGS GET LOST. IF THEY ARE LOST OFTEN ENOUGH, THOSE IDEAS AND FEELINGS NEVER RETURN. This was what my father hoped would happen with his actions toward any display of individuality. And this is the hope of certain government officials and religious leaders as well. When I make statements like this I do not make them lightly. I make them from a position of experience – of what it is like to be homosexual in this country.
Why could the judge not understand that when the bigots attacked David’s art, they attacked him, severely affecting his ability to work? As I see it, the court decision was as debilitating to David as the virus, and it crippled his capacity to create. The judge’s decision in no way accommodated the fact that David’s time was running out. Thirteen months after the decision was handed down, David wrote to a friend: “I haven’t worked in almost a year.” Elsewhere he wrote,
I can’t form words these past few days, sometimes thinking I’ve been drained of emotional content from weeping or fear. I keep doing these impulsive things like trying to make a film that records the rituals in an attempt to give grief form.
Images and words that had sprung from his life, dreams, and fantasy and which were his weapons against society as well as his own physical deterioration began to fail him. “I am a prisoner of language that doesn’t have a letter or a sign or gesture that approximates what I’m sensing.” In New Mexico standing in a landscape from which he sought comfort, nature having given solace to him since his early childhood escapes from his father, he wrote “...I didn’t trust that fucking mountain’s serenity. I mean it was just bullshit. I couldn’t buy the con of nature’s beauty; all I could see was death.”
By the time he died, on an otherwise gentle July night in 1992, something in me was dead. As David so often lamented about most of us, I had inherited the American inability to deal with death and dying. I had found out, too late, how the denial of these things--the only inevitabilities--leaves us emotionally inept at dealing with them. When most of my waking time was spent dealing with bad news, I had no clue about how to act or react. I could talk, sort of--more like stuttering--but I could only approximate feeling. I ignored and glossed over. I overworked. I misdirected anger. I pretended. I joked. But I had no clue how to grieve the passing of days that lacked both joy and hope. David: “My life is no longer filled with poetry and dreams. I can’t even smell rust in the air.” I could not process the losing of so many--oh so many--people I thought I would grow old with. David articulated the words I could not find in myself to fathom and describe a very long nightmare. He wrote: “Sometimes it gets dark in here behind these eyes I feel like the physical equivalent of a scream.”
I had long lost any religious faith by the 1980s, yet I wanted the solace that it promised. My brushes with it at memorial services only seemed to make it worse: Though he too saw spirituality as a need and a possibility for all of us, David wrote of how religion fucked it up. Listen to this, written after asking a nun to leave the hospital room in which Peter Hujar--David’s best friend, mentor, and briefly his lover--had just died. The sister had been going on about how Peter had accepted the church, in her mind thus insuring his salvation. As he wrote about that moment later, David’s terse, quirky prose cut through the tired promises of Christianity.
He’s more there than these images of spirituality--I mean just the essence of death; the whole taboo structure in this culture the mystery of it the fears and joys of it the flight it contains this body of my friend on the bed this body of my brother my father my emotional link to the world this body I don’t know this pure and cutting air just all the thoughts and sensations this death this event produces in bystanders contains more spirituality than any words we can manufacture.
So I asked [the nun] to leave and after closing the door again I tried to say something to him staring into that enormous eye. If in death the body’s energy disperses and merges with everything around us, can it immediately know my thoughts? But I try and speak anyway and try and say something in case he’s afraid or confused by his own death and maybe needs some reassurance or tool to pick up, but nothing comes from my mouth. This is the most important event of my life and my mouth can’t form words and maybe I’m the one who needs words, maybe I’m the one who needs reassurance and all I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say “All I want is some sort of grace.” And then the water comes from my eyes.
With spirituality that existed without boundaries, he bore the virus’ ravages, coping for more than two years after writing this. He was not quite thirty-nine when he died. (“My eyes have always been advertisements for an early death.”) I live on, of course, like others, weighed down with loss, feeling abandoned and dried up. Trying to conjure hope. Facing unrelenting depression as I try to get on with work which doesn’t seem satisfying, certainly no reason in itself for living. Wondering if I should risk the making of new friends or searching for lovers in a reduced pool of people who might also get/be sick. Dealing with disclosures of status, and the possibility of rejection or repulsion on the grounds of it, of dicks that won’t get hard because of medicine or fear. I wonder how David would have written about this? What more would I have learned from him?