It was November 30, 2010 —the eve of World AIDS Day. Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough ordered the National Portrait Gallery to remove David Wojnarowicz’s film A Fire in My Belly from a landmark exhibition about gay identity in art, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” The eleven-second sequence deemed offensive showed ants crawling over a crucifix.
According to Bill Donohue, president of the far-right Catholic League, this was “hate speech,” and he urged Congress to cut the museum’s funding. The top two House Republicans, Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor, chimed in immediately, calling for “Hide/Seek” to be closed. The museum would face “tough scrutiny” now, Boehner promised, while Cantor called A Fire in My Belly, which had been on view since October 30, “an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season.”
Once again, David Wojnarowicz (pronounced Voyna-ROW-vich) was a targeted artist. Late in 1989, his catalog essay for another landmark show—this one about AIDS—became the catalyst for a row between the National Endowment for the Arts and a major nonprofit institution, Artists Space. That was just the opening salvo in David’s battle with the right-wing culture warriors. By autumn 1990, however, increasingly weak and sick with AIDS, he prepared work for what would be his last show and told a friend in a letter that he was done butting heads with the bigots, adding “I’m tired of being perceived as a radical when I know I ain’t particularly radical.”
Even when he aggravated the powerful, David never saw his work as provocation. He saw it as a way to speak his truth, a way to challenge or at least to illuminate what many accept as given. That’s what the ants actually represented to him—humanity rushing along heedless of what lies under its tiny feet, indifferent to the structures that surround it. When he went to Teotihuacán late in 1986, knowing that he would find nests of fire ants among the Aztec ruins, he brought other props with him besides a crucifix (to represent spirituality). He also filmed and photographed ants crawling over watchfaces (time), coins (money), a toy soldier (control), and other charged symbols. This ant action accounts for very little screen time.
Untitled from the Ant Series (Spirituality), 1988. Gelatin-silver print, 29½ × 39 inches. (Courtesy of the Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York)
More than eighteen years after his death, David’s blunt, disquieting imagery had apparently lost none of its power. But his intentions were completely misinterpreted. His detractors called it blasphemous and sacrilegious; his defenders said it was all about AIDS. But it was neither. He disparaged the policies of the Catholic Church on other occasions (while lamenting the death of American spirituality, the title of one of his paintings). And he had plenty to say about AIDS. But not in this film.
In a 1988 letter to Barry Blinderman, who curated David’s retrospective “Tongues of Flame” he explained what A Fire in My Belly meant to him: “The film deals with ancient myth and its modern counterpart. It explores structures of power and control—using at times the fire ants north of Mexico City as a metaphor for social structure.”
As David saw it, people were brutalized into fitting those structures. That was a core issue for him. So, while not specifically about AIDS, A Fire in My Belly is certainly a piece about suffering.
Both his art and his politics were rooted in life experience, beginning with his almost Dickensian childhood. David was an abused kid, a teen runaway, and a former Times Square hustler who used art to re-create himself. This was someone who never went to art school, who barely finished high school, who never owned a suit, a couch, or (until the last two years of his life) a credit card, but who came to believe in the truth of his own experience and desire.
David was a major figure in what is now a lost world, in part because he happened to come along when New York City was as raw as he was. Manhattan still had uncolonized space: from the rotting piers along the Hudson River where gay men went for sex to cheap empty storefronts in the drug-infested East Village. There, in what David called “the picturesque ruins,” so much seemed possible and permissible. Then, in the late seventies and early eighties, the art world went through one of its seismic shifts—goodbye minimalism, hello expressionism—and fissures opened up that allowed a few outsiders in. By 1983, the art world was agog over what was happening in the above-mentioned funky storefronts: East Village art. The whole neighborhood seemed to be experimenting, expressing, and neo-expressing. When I wrote about the scene, because I too was part of what we used to term “downtown,” I categorized it as schizo-culture, built from the alternating currents of postmodern theory and nightclub energy. My favorite quote came from Edit deAk, art critic and denizen of the nightclub generation: “We are prospectors of slum vintage. Who renamed the city after our own names.… We have taken your garbage all our lives and are selling it back at an inconceivable mark-up.”
None of us would have thought so at the time, but those were innocent days—before gentrification flattened our options, and AIDS changed the world for the worse, and congressional leaders started weighing in on artists who filmed ants. We had no way to know how much was ending.
David has been called everything from “the last outsider” to “the last romantic.” The era I’ve covered in this book surely was the end of something. The East Villagers were the last subterraneans who actually had a terrain, because during the 1980s the whole concept of marginality changed. Once the demimonde had served as a community of like minds for people alienated from middle-class values (artistic, sexual, political). Then, in the eighties, it became the “hot bottom” of the torrid art market, a place for collectors to seek out the Next Big Thing. The discovery, exploitation, and demise of New York’s last bohemia coincided with—among other things—the new visibility of queer culture, due in part to the advancing horror of AIDS. In brief, the media spotlight suddenly illuminated what had once been the cultural margin, exposing artists (especially gay artists) to an audience guaranteed to find them intolerable.
About a year before his death from AIDS, David was one of the writers included in High Risk: An Anthology of Forbidden Writings. While topics like homosexuality, drug addiction, and sadomasochism no longer seem so forbidden, the fact remains that David was part of a community of people who felt compelled to be themselves even if that meant risking everything. Many of them died. Some of those names appear on the dedication page in this book—not all of them AIDS deaths but all of them among the novas who lit that era and disappeared from our firmament.
In his painting, writing, film, photography, sculpture, and performance, David was committed to facing uncomfortable truths. Even as a kid of six or seven, he told me, he was the one who ran down the block one day, giddy with what he’d just learned. “We all die! One day we’re all going to be dead!” As he told his little friends, they burst into tears, parents rushed out of their houses, and David was seen as a very sick little kid for exposing the Real Deal. Recalling that memory, David smiled: “That’s a metaphor for the rest of my life.”
But David was also an elusive character—a truth teller who kept secrets, a loner who loved to collaborate, an artist who craved recognition but did not want to be seen.
I met him in 1982 and interviewed him in 1990 for a Village Voice cover story. At the time, David was still working on the book he would eventually call Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. He told me that he was going to let the publisher classify it as nonfiction, even though he thought of it as “a fusion of fiction and nonfiction.” He had decided to let everything in his emotional history become part of his palette, whether or not he remembered it accurately.
I knew David best during the last eight months of his life. We also had some mutual friends, and a couple of them warned me that if I chose to write about David, I would have to deal with what they called “the mythology.” Not that anyone knew of any specific myth. Or lie. But those stories! In 1989, when David prepared a Biographical Dateline for the catalog accompanying “Tongues of Flame,” one of the first readers remarked (though not to David), “It’s like effing Candide!” The Dateline ends in 1982, as David began his art career. Certainly, some of the facts he laid out on his early life are skewed or exaggerated or just wrong. His account emphasizes the hardships and omits a lot. But the Dateline does not vary from the accounts of his life he’d been giving since he first became a public figure.
So his childhood wasn’t as bad as he said? I think it was worse. For one thing, the real David was never as hard-bitten as the persona toughing it out through those stories. Nor did he include much of what his siblings and half-siblings endured, which really provides context.
I don’t think David understood the pathos in his own story. He emphasized the hardship he went through, and the hardship was there. But the central struggle in his life was about how much of himself to reveal. Who was safe? What could he tell? He felt he was an alien, that something at his core was suspect and would make people hate him. This feeling persisted until the last few years of his life.
David once told me that he used to long for acceptance from other people. Then he began to value the way he didn’t fit in. He realized that his uneasiness with the world was where his work came from.
David learned to be daring when he lived on the street, when he came out as a gay man and refused to hide it, and then when he met his great mentor, Peter Hujar—part of an older generation of high-riskers and, for David, a guiding light. Hujar could not tell David how to have a career, since he was no good at that, but he could show him how to be an artist. David did not know much art history but realized he didn’t need that in order to develop an iconography. In a yellow steno pad found among his papers, he wrote, “I had always believed that the content of paintings were always some denial of history—images preserved by and for a particular class of people. So it was in them that I reached for images of chaos—images that weren’t used in paintings—maybe obscure books detailing the human efforts of power structures—also in growing up in a world without role models where all institutions relegated homosexual matters to snide johns or things to be exterminated.… I had always believed that change came down to personal action—not just language but the idea of self truth. / Peter’s search for self-truth / All this in my work.”