David became the third artist targeted in the culture war, just as he was entering his last months of relative vitality. His letter to the dean at Illinois State indicates that he anticipated more trouble, and more would come. What mattered to him in the meantime was getting certain messages out.
He and composer-musician Ben Neill had about a week of rehearsal at the Kitchen before ITSOFOMO (In the Shadow of Forward Motion) opened there on December 7, 1989, roughly a year after they’d begun their discussions at Disco Donut.
David had come up with an overarching theme for the show: the formation and collapse of the “one-tribe nation.” This was one of his tropes and had to do with homogeneity and conformity. As he put it in Close to the Knives, “To speak of ourselves—while living in a country that considers us or our thoughts taboo—is to shake the boundaries of the illusion of the ONE TRIBE NATION. To keep silent is to deny the fact that there are millions of separate tribes in this illusion called AMERICA. To keep silent … is to lose our identities.” What he wanted to do in performance would be the equivalent of breaking a collage apart, moving the elements around, and commenting on them. He planned on a recurring motif of life and death images. To that end, he created a big papier-mâché egg and six to eight sperm, all of these covered with maps. The performance began with him cranking a big gear that pulled the sperm toward the egg. Periodically during the piece, he cranked it closer. Near the end he included a filmed sequence of a snake killing and ingesting a mouse.
“We came up with this formal conceit of the gesture of acceleration on all these different levels,” said Neill, who used that conceit as a structural element in his music and in pacing the visual material David brought into the piece: images on four video monitors at the front of the stage and slides on a screen at the back. Most of the visuals had been pulled from photo pieces like The Weight of the Earth, films like A Fire in My Belly, and paintings like Fear of Evolution. David wanted movement in the piece, slithering, hopping animal movements that he knew he couldn’t do. So Neill brought in a choreographer he knew, and her small dance company. About halfway through the piece, David made himself a wolf mask from that day’s New York Times, along with a newsprint tutu he tucked into his belt, and did a little dance. He moved a strobe over a prone dancer’s body, and confronted a “politician” standing on a ladder. But mostly he read some of his texts. ITSOFOMO ended with the music and movement and imagery building to a frenzy while he shouted out the words from Untitled (Hujar Dead): “… and I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg …”
Neill played live computer electronics and his mutantrumpet (three bells, seven valves, a trombone slide, and interactive computer electronics). He’d gone to record a hollering contest in his native North Carolina, “these tribal yodeling hillbillies,” and sampled that throughout. He had a percussionist, Don Yallech, on vibraphone and timpani, the latter triggering other electronic sounds. “For its time, it was technologically advanced,” Neill said.
They were able to tour the piece over the next couple of years, taking it to San Francisco, Seattle, and Minneapolis. When Tongues of Flame came to Exit Art in New York, they performed there too. But they never used the dancers again. Neill said David wasn’t happy with how that had worked. “I think it made the piece get a little out of control,” Neill observed. “Neither one of us had experience working with that kind of performing force. We never used any of the theatrical elements again, and it became more like a rock band—a trio onstage with the videos. David did more freestyling in terms of improvising the texts, and he took on way more of a central role.”
At the Kitchen, they had the standard four nights to perform. On the last day, December 10, David spent the morning at ACT UP’s big “Stop the Church” demonstration in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Bill Gerstel, the musician who’d replaced David in 3 Teens Kill 4, happened to be one of thousands of demonstrators on Fifth Avenue. He remembered a tall skinny man in a ski mask wiggling his way to the front and throwing himself at a police barricade to knock it over. The crowd then surged past the barrier and the masked man ran around the corner. Gerstel decided to follow him to see who he was. He found David, mask off, sitting on the ground against a building, out of breath. With a performance to do that night, he couldn’t risk arrest.
In the ITSOFOMO program, David inserted a page devoted to facts and statistics about AIDS, especially the role played by the Catholic Church in choking off the flow of safe-sex information. In David’s opinion, the facts were enraging, and they would be to anyone. He hated it when people attributed his anger to what he called “my diagnosis.”
David worked on one writing project that he never finished but that may have helped him to deal with the rage he felt about the right-wingers piling on to attack him. They were far from done with him, but given the cast of characters he used in the project, called “The Private Lives of Saints,” he would have written it at about this point in his troubles. “Private Lives” was intemperate, to say the least. Part of it was a film script in which the president, Jesse Helms, Cardinal O’Connor, and others of their political persuasion engaged in orgies, murder, drug taking, and general depravity—the Cinema of Transgression meets Capitol Hill.
But that was play. He had serious messages to get out. So he agreed to appear on a local public affairs show, The Eleventh Hour—on the condition that no one see his face. He wore his Reagan mask throughout the interview, taped at Artists Space, and hit listeners with lots of statistics, later edited to a few voice-over sentences.
Asked to explain the mask (in a section that did not air), David said he thought it would be ironic for viewers to get their facts from the president, who had not said the word “AIDS” through six and a half years of an epidemic that killed twenty-one thousand Americans, and who’d thus inspired the phrase “Silence = Death.”v Also, David was now even more fearful about being queer-bashed. After Patrick Buchanan’s New York Post column calling the show “decadent,” with special opprobrium for David, and Ray Kerrison’s Post column comparing David to Louis Farrakhan, Artists Space received a bomb threat and had to evacuate the gallery.
David had clearly prepared a set of talking points for this taping—the virus did not have a sexual orientation, the virus was running rampant in minority communities, the cardinal preferred coffins to condoms, and so on. He spoke for at least half an hour, but wearing the Reagan mask, hidden except for his buck teeth and the gap between them, he looked a bit goofy. In the end, The Eleventh Hour gave him three and half minutes.
For most of that time he faced Untitled (Hujar Dead) on the Artists Space wall and read the text about the blood-filled egg, without the mask, while the camera focused on his back and on the clenching, unclenching fists at his sides.
Early in 1990, he traveled to Philadelphia to lecture at the University of the Arts as a “visiting photographer,” and there in the audience sat Dean Savard, covered with Kaposi sarcoma lesions.
They probably hadn’t seen each other since Savard left Civilian Warfare. He was living in Philly, driving a cab. When Savard later passed through New York on his way to see his parents in Connecticut, he and David got together for dinner.
David felt nauseated for the first part of this meal. “I do have tremendous emotional reactions to the physical problems people have with this disease,” he told me. “It’s more a psychological thing because of my own fears about what I face.”
Savard told David that when his parents came to take him to rehab all those years ago, he’d offered to gas up the car and then he just kept driving west while they stood waiting in front of the gallery. He’d gone all the way to Hawaii and spent a year there. Now he had so much KS that he could be a firehouse dog, he said. One of his legs was especially bad, and might have to be amputated. He’d gone to his local swimming pool with a friend, and as he dove in, a woman there with her kids started screaming at them, “Outta the pool!” Then he saw all these other parents yanking their kids out while his friend rolled on the ground laughing, saying, “Gotta bring you more often,” because she’d never seen so few people in the water. Savard was off dope, but just in case things got really bad, he had a “secret stash … guaranteed to kill me nicely.”
David typed this up and labeled it “Dean’s monologue.” There’s no telling how much of it is true.
“Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” closed on January 6, 1990. David’s retrospective, “Tongues of Flame, would open at Illinois State University on January 23. With this suddenly controversial artist headed to Normal, the Village Voice planned a cover story and assigned a couple of features. I was to write about David’s life while art critic Elizabeth Hess went to Illinois to write about the show. I did my three interviews with him early in January 1990.
We sat at what had once been Hujar’s blue kitchen table—though little blue was visible under the stacks of paper, books, plastic toys, and general clutter. Off mic, he told me he’d gone back into therapy. And he was a little apprehensive about this journey to the heartland. As I turned on the tape recorder, he hid the phone under some clothing and blankets on the bed so the ringing would be less audible. It rang constantly. The answering machine clicked. The crickets chirped.
David flew to Normal a few days before the show opened. He’d followed up his letter to the dean of the College of Fine Arts with a phone call to curator Barry Blinderman. David thought Blinderman also deserved to know that a certain essay now in the “Tongues of Flame” catalog had become radioactive.
Blinderman responded, “No problem.” The administration of Illinois State University would stand behind him. He told a reporter, “I’m simply carrying out the grant we received to the letter. We’re an educational institution. It’s not our job to squelch controversy.”
The grant application Blinderman submitted late in 1988 stated: “David Wojnarowicz’s impassioned, intensely colored images cry out against oppressive socio-political contingents, and address societal and sexual taboos.… Wojnarowicz’s presence at our museum will provide our audience with an experience that may challenge or disturb them. We feel that one of our responsibilities is to reinforce the appreciation of art that transcends decorative function.” He included slides of David’s work and a copy of “Living Close to the Knives,” the essay about Hujar’s death. Blinderman figured the project budget at $57,200 and applied to the Endowment’s museum program for $23,300.
The NEA’s peer panel approved a grant of $15,000 in February ’89, a couple of months before Reverend Donald Wildmon orchestrated the letter campaign against Piss Christ. This panel, which also approved the grant for “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing,” would have consisted of art world professionals from all parts of the country—curators, academics, and critics, for example—people familiar with the work of the artists and the reputations of the institutions applying. The panel would have convened in Washington, D.C., for several days to make choices based on artistic merit. Set up as a Great Society program in 1965, the NEA was designed to disseminate money for the arts across America. For example, its funding allowed dance companies to tour and world-class nonprofit theaters to thrive far from Broadway. It helped to support orchestras and museums and poetry festivals in communities that didn’t have the economic base to fund them. And it allowed a small museum at a Midwestern university to give a New York–based artist a retrospective.
“Tongues of Flame” would test a familiar right-wing assertion. Jesse Helms and his cronies liked to characterize what they contemptuously called “the arty crowd” as either purveyors of perversion or some jewel-encrusted elite, a symbiotic gang of highbrows and lowlifes. According to Helms and crew, this crowd’s pornographic, sacrilegious art experiences were resentfully funded by the tax dollars of “average Americans,” some of whom might reside in a town called Normal.
On the night of January 23, 1990, more than seven hundred people crammed into the gallery at Illinois State to hear David speak. “It just broke any record that we’ve ever had, including student annuals,” Blinderman said. “It was beyond what fire laws would allow.”
Elizabeth Hess described David’s talk this way in her piece for the Voice:
In a brilliant litany of questions, answers, statistics, and anecdotes, Wojnarowicz makes connections between his own life story, the defense budget, homelessness, AIDS, sex education, gay and lesbian teenage suicide, abortion, and the real killer—silence. Students sitting next to me are nudging each other with wide eyes. They can’t believe their ears. “If I tell you I’m a homosexual and a queer does it make you nervous? Does it prevent you from hearing anything else I say?” screams Wojnarowicz into the mike.
He had surrounded himself with four video monitors playing the footage from ITSOFOMO. He ended by reading the text from Untitled (Hujar Dead). Afterward he spent nearly two hours shaking hands, signing posters, and accepting gifts before finally going out for dinner with Tom Rauffenbart and Anita Vitale, who’d come from New York for the opening.
The next morning, he returned to the gallery with Blinderman and Hess, stopping at a McDonald’s drive-through for his usual two Egg Mc-Muffins. Hess reported that David gave his order to the disemebodied voice on one side of the building, then drove to the other side to pick up his food. When that window opened and the bag emerged, a voice over the speaker said, “Thank you, thank you. What a great performance!”
He wasn’t yet able to take that in. Someone sent a box of flowers to the gallery that day, addressed to David, but after he picked it up, he put it right back down. It was too heavy for flowers! Blinderman took the box out into the hallway and opened it to find, not a bomb, but flowers with a waterpack. Soon enough, David was able to drop his anxiety about what was going to happen to him in the heartland. “A great performance” turned out to be the consensus.
“Tongues of Flame” broke attendance records at University Galleries and got good reviews in the local press. The catalog sold out. David decided to stay an extra week, because the “average American” was so supportive—sending him letters, approaching him in restaurants to thank him. “It was my moment as a rock star,” he told me later. He also said he thought people were hungry for information, and if someone stood in front of them and told them directly, “This is my experience,” the average American would listen. The Associated Press ran a story on the show headlined “ ‘Degenerate’ Art Exhibit Creates No Complaints.”
“He endeared himself to the community,” Blinderman said. “He made such an impact. After you hear a voice like that, it changes you.” Bloomington-Normal’s first ACT UP chapter formed while David was there, and held its first meeting at the gallery, surrounded by his work.
Blinderman recalled him being friendly, meeting with anyone who wanted to meet with him. “People just went crazy over him,” said Blinder-man. “So charismatic, sensitive, humble, and vulnerable. So open. And he enjoyed the attention because it was sincere.”
David had arrived in Normal with a shopping bag full of sheet music, fake dollars, and supermarket posters to use in the lithographs he would create at Normal Editions Workshop, the University’s print atelier. He’d been planning another version of “The Four Elements.” On this visit, he began work on Earth and Wind (a brain emerges from a globe on a background of sheet music; a songbird and tornadoes on a background of dollars), but then turned to a more urgent piece. This new lithograph had the New York Post’s “Offensive Art Exhibit” editorial on one half, dollars on the other. He drew a voodoo doll on litho stone to be printed over the editorial, skeletons and a globe to be printed over the dollars, and a circle filled with blood cells uniting the two halves.
After its run in Normal, “Tongues of Flame” was scheduled to travel to the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Exit Art in New York, and Temple Gallery at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. Blinderman was able to send the NEA a rapturous final report:
Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the Wojnarowicz exhibition was watching the profound effect that the artist’s work and the attendant controversy had on our audience. Community members who had never stepped into the gallery before flocked in to see the work in person, after having read and heard so much about it. We received support and praise from town officials and university upper administrators, including the mayor of Normal and the President of Illinois State University.… The public’s enthusiastic acceptance of a so-called “difficult” show gave us great hope that the terms “average American taxpayer” and “playing in Peoria” could at last be redefined. In addition, hundreds of students of all disciplines at I.S.U. wrote papers on the social, moral and legal aspects of the exhibition. Some law students even did dissertations on the topic. As was the hope of our Dean of the College of Fine Arts, Tongues of Flame proved to be a unique educational experience for our immediate audience and people all over the country.
Meanwhile, back in Washington, John Frohnmayer had decided to tell people what he might have said during the Artists Space meltdown: “Tongues of Flame” had been funded before he got there, and he did not have to comment on it. Frohnmayer was only off the hook until the self-appointed watchdogs found their next “degenerate” artist. And David wasn’t off the hook at all.
Patrick McDonnell was an Illinois State graduate student in the Art Department who worked at University Galleries and acted as preparator for David’s retrospective, unpacking the work and helping to hang and light it. He and David had met during David’s first visit to Normal, the previous October. Patrick knew nothing about David’s work, and they didn’t speak until David started laughing at a piece Patrick had made from an empty Etch A Sketch; on it he’d spray-fixed a drawing of an armless man with a huge erection. Patrick had just come out. The piece was about his frustration over being gay and never acting on it. For the remaining days of that October visit, said Patrick, “if there was a moment that we had to share, we were having it.”
When David arrived before the opening in January, he said to Patrick, “Take me through the show and tell me what you like and what you don’t like.”
“I still didn’t know anything about his work. So I took him over to this one piece and said, ‘This looks unfinished.’ ” It was one of the driftwood totems.w “David said, ‘Really!’ And I said, ‘Yes. This piece looks like you just stopped.’ David went into the office and he grabbed some brushes and paint and brought them out to me, and he said, ‘Here. You finish it.’ “ Patrick declined.
One night David went to see Driving Miss Daisy with Patrick and his roommate, Anna Marie Watkins. When they got back to Barry Blinderman’s house, where David was staying, he said to them, “I don’t want to become friends with you guys, because I’m going to die. It’s not right to impose that on someone.”
Patrick told him he’d had friends who died and he’d almost died himself, and it didn’t matter. “I wanted to be near him and I told him so,” said Patrick. “I felt like I could relate to him on so many different levels.” For one thing, Patrick had spent time as a kid living on the streets of Houston—along with his mother and siblings. His father had abandoned the family. His mother was schizophrenic. They lived intermittently with Patrick’s grandmother, but she was incapacitated and poor. So the kids all cleaned houses and mowed lawns to get money for food, and when that didn’t bring enough, they’d borrow from the neighbors, who knew they weren’t going to get it back. Their grandmother would throw them all out when the mother became particularly difficult. Sometimes the mother would find a guy to move in with, and he’d provide for a while, then get tired of it, and they’d try going back to their grandmother. Patrick and his siblings also lived briefly with an uncle and did a couple of stints in foster care. He attended seventeen different schools, thinking everyone lived that way. Finally, at the age of seventeen, with two years of high school to go, Patrick moved in with his brother’s ex-girlfriend, who gave him the first stress-free environment of his life. Eventually, he was able to get a full scholarship to Texas A&M at Corpus Christi.
David was a revelation. Patrick had bought into all the stereotypes about gay men, and David didn’t fit any of them: “He was just himself, and that’s what I wanted to be.” Patrick was nine years younger than David. They spent a lot of time together just talking, going out for breakfast, driving around town. David would tell him, “You’re driving Miss Daisy.” This was the last major friendship David developed in his life. He treated Patrick as though he were a younger brother, encouraging and advising him. He tried to be the mentor Hujar had once been to him. “He wanted me to make a way for myself that I didn’t have as a child growing up,” Patrick said. When he told David, for example, that he wanted to drop out of graduate school, David urged him not to, saying, “You’ll regret that.” In the end, Patrick was glad he took that advice.
“He wanted me to explore my sexuality beyond what I had,” said Patrick. “I really wasn’t dating anybody, but there were some guys I wanted to date, and he would say, ‘Well, ask ’em, Patrick.’ “ He even suggested an icebreaker: “Tell them you know the famous artist from New York, and you can introduce them.”
Patrick told David about “the Square,” a gay cruising area that extended from the courthouse in Bloomington to an adult bookstore in Normal. He commented that the men who went there were desperate. David said, “You know, Patrick, you’re a prude. Those men are not desperate. They happen to know what they want, and they’re going to go get it. You tell me all the time what you want, and you’re not going to go get it, so fuck you.”
“So,” Patrick said, “I took that challenge.” He started cruising the Square with David. “We never picked anybody up. We would just look.” Sometimes they would drive around town and see an attractive guy and start howling or woofing.
David told Patrick stories about the days when he went to the piers for sex. When he wanted to find a run-down site like that in Bloomington or Normal so he could stage a photo, Patrick took him to an old warehouse in an abandoned railyard. There David photographed Patrick in a headdress made from maps, kind of a Krazy Kat with a long nose that said “culture.” He’d made masks like this for himself in years past. This time he added a clown collar fashioned from large fake dollars, painted Patrick’s arms blue with darker blue spots, and had him wear a polka dot shirt. “Pose like Coco Chanel,” David told him. He called the resulting Cibachrome print A Formal Portrait of Culture.
One day Patrick and David went to a coffeehouse in Normal, and David began to talk about the problems he was having with the building conversion engulfing his loft. They’d opened a hole in his roof and water was leaking through it. “I said to him, ‘David, what is stability anyway?’ Because I was kind of reflecting on my horrific childhood, having everything constantly taken away from us. And this moment of the roof leaking at his house—it would pass. I was saying, ‘We all have to understand that life throws you curveballs.’ And he just came unglued in that restaurant. In front of everyone.”
David exploded into one of his purple-faced rages, yelling that he wasn’t talking about ‘stability,’ that Patrick wasn’t listening to him, that he had a fucking hole in his fucking ceiling. Everyone in the restaurant turned and looked. Patrick said, “OK. Calm down. Sorry I spoke.”
And David was able to recover. He told Patrick, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what comes over me. I do that all the time. I’ve been working on it with my therapist.”
Keith Haring died of AIDS on February 16, 1990, at the age of thirty-one.
California representative Dana Rohrabacher had developed a new strategy in his campaign to kill the National Endowment for the Arts.
Early in February he sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to every member of Congress, condemning the agency for funding Annie Sprinkle’s Post Porn Modernist, a performance in which the former porn star talked—graphically—about her experiences as a sex worker. Above Rohrabacher’s headline, “The National Endowment for the Arts Is at It Again!” he ran a quote from Sprinkle’s show: “Usually I get paid a lot of money for this but tonight it’s government funded.” That was a joke. Sprinkle had never applied for a grant, much less received one. But the show was a perfect vehicle for generating outrage among enemies of the agency.
On February 13, the American Family Association took out a full-page ad in the Washington Times headlined “Is This How You Want Your Tax Dollars Spent?” and using Sprinkle’s comment that her show was “government funded,” then listing about a dozen supposed NEA outrages, a list riddled with misrepresentations and errors. For example, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” was described as “an art exhibit in which angry homosexuals denounced Catholic clergyman John Cardinal O’Connor.” The NEA quickly released a fact sheet to correct all the mistakes. When the AFA bought its next full-page ad, in USA Today, it had to cite its sources, most of them right-wing publications not known for their fact-checking departments.
Susan Wyatt had an appointment with Congressman Rohrabacher on February 20. She was there to advocate for the arts. And he would ask, “What’s your religion?” But when she first got to his office, everyone was looking at Rohrabacher’s latest “Dear Colleague” letter.
“They were all so thrilled, and they showed it to me,” she said.
His new letter, again sent to every member of Congress, condemned the NEA for supporting David Wojnarowicz’s “Tongues of Flame,” described by Rohrabacher as “an orgy of degenerate depravity.” His missive carried an image of Jesus shooting up that had been clipped from the corner of Untitled (Genet), the collage David created in 1979 while he was still living in Vinegar Hill. That piece wasn’t even in the exhibition. As with One Day This Kid and photos from the Rimbaud in New York series, the image appeared only in the catalog. Rohrabacher asked his colleagues to consider whether their constituents would want their tax dollars subsidizing a show of such work. He wrote, “The art is sickeningly violent, sexually explicit, homoerotic, anti-religious and nihilistic.”
The conservative weekly Human Events ran a short piece on this “NEA-funded blasphemy” a few days after Rohrabacher circulated it. Human Events then used it in a subscription offer to members of the American Family Association. The image from Untitled (Genet) also became a featured outrage on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club.
Since David left for Berlin and then Paris on February 21, he knew nothing about this until he returned March 3 and spoke to Blinderman.
A young man had come to University Galleries after hearing about David’s work on The 700 Club. “I feel the show is bad,” he told Blinderman. “I want to take it down.”
Blinderman talked him out of it. “I ended up going into this big art historical argument.” He invoked, for example, Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, painted in the sixteenth century for a monastery where monks cared for people with skin diseases—so the suffering Christ in that painting shows symptoms of skin disease. “It’s because he’s the man of sorrows,” Blinderman argued. “He takes on the suffering of the world. So if Christ were to appear physically today, one of the sicknesses he would have to take on would be drug addiction.”
“Here I am—a secular Jew,” Blinderman said. “But as an art historian, I had to learn a lot about Christian art, and I love it.” He reminded the man that Jesus had said “you who are free of sin cast the first stone” and “turn the other cheek” and “judge not and be not judged.” He spoke of compassion and humility and sacrifice. The man looked baffled, but he left.
“Tongues of Flame” was on view in Normal until March 4. On March 5, 1990, President George H. W. Bush sent the image of Christ with hypodermic to John Frohnmayer with an “eyes only” note stapled to it. The president stated, “I know you are as offended as I am by the attached depiction of Jesus Christ. I think you have been doing a superb job, so I send along this note not in any critical vein whatsoever, but simply to inquire if there isn’t something we can do about excessive cases like this.”
Frohnmayer told the president, “Yes, I was offended by both the work and the man, since I had encountered him directly at Artists Space where he was very angry and abusive toward me personally. Our original legislation, however, warns the Endowment to avoid imposing … a single aesthetic standard or to direct artistic content.” Frohnmayer thought this a wise policy, and he would fight to defend it from Helms.
When Frohnmayer related the incident in his book, though, he admitted that he had not been offended by this work. He understood it. “In fact, an image of Christ with a needle in his arm, particularly when he is not holding the needle, is consistent with an interpretation of Christ taking on the sins of the world—hardly a blasphemous concept.”
That March, Jesse Helms directed the General Accounting Office to investigate a list he provided of the NEA’s “questionable activities,” among them “Tongues of Flame.”
While he was in Normal, or shortly after, David made notes in his journal for what he thought would be new photo pieces: “FLEURS DU MAL … Photo blow-ups of color flowers (Hawaii book, Louisiana book). Sew in images and information on homophobia, AIDS issues, sexual issues, invasions, distortions, health papers.” Ultimately these ideas developed into the flower paintings in his last show.
During the trip to Berlin, where he was in a group show, he stayed for three days with Andreas Sternweiler, co-founder of the world’s first (and only) gay museum. Sternweiler later sent him photos of the Nazis destroying the Institute of Sexual Science, an organization that had advocated for women’s liberation and gay rights. Nazis burned the institute’s books as part of a government censorship program, so David contemplated a piece linking this event with the Helms agenda.
In one of the airports where he waited on this trip, David wrote, “I won’t grow old and maybe I want to. Maybe nothing can save me. Maybe all my dreams as a kid and as a young guy have fallen down to their knees. Inside my head I wished for years that I could separate into ten different people to give each person I loved a part of myself forever and also have some left over to drift across landscapes and maybe even go into death or areas that were deadly and have enough of me to survive the death of one or two of me—this was what I thought appropriate for all my desires and I never figured out how to rearrange it all and now I’m in danger of losing the only one of me that is around. I’m in danger of losing my life and what gesture can convey or stop this possibility? What gesture of hands or mind can stop my death?”
Dean Savard died of AIDS on March 30, 1990, at the age of thirty-one.
David got a letter from Montana Hewson, the friend of Tommy Turner’s and Richard Kern’s who’d had a small role in You Killed Me First.
Montana wrote after the Artists Space imbroglio hit the papers in his home state of Texas, but he didn’t know David’s address. He sent the letter to Artists Space, and David finally got it either just before or just after he went to Normal. He decided then that, for the last chapter of his book, he’d do a profile of Montana, “a guy I psychically felt connected to because of the way he didn’t fit. I wanted to touch that thing that I knew he carried.”
He sent Montana his address and phone number and told him he’d like to come visit, to ride around some back roads with him and talk. Montana could call him collect. After David heard nothing back, he sent a postcard in March. Then at the beginning of April, he received a mysterious letter addressed to “David W—” with no return address. The full text read, “David W—In response to your card, I regret to tell you that Monte committed suicide about January 18, 1990. His dad.”
David thought about the last line of Montana’s letter: “No fair dying before I do.” It dawned on him that Montana had been dead by the time he wrote him back. He decided to do a chapter on him anyway, to write about self-destruction, about the circle of people around Montana he’d once been part of.
He hadn’t been in touch with his Cinema of Transgression friends, Turner and Kern, since Hujar got sick. As David put it, “Emotionally it was too ugly to be taking care of a guy who was battling to live and then hang out with people that were jamming shit in their arms or throwing themselves into the varied arms of death.” Kern had moved to San Francisco and cleaned up but had recently returned to the East Village. Turner would eventually get completely off drugs, but at this point he was on methadone. David set up interviews with each of them and with Sophie Breer, she of Waje’s Cockabunnies, since they had all known Montana better than he had.
He wanted to ask each of them: What attracted us to the dark things? Things most people recoil from? What was this death wish? What were the drugs about, really?
Montana had been this paradoxical character who, as David put it, “built an elaborate shrine over a mouse hole.” He would not kill a cockroach. Yet he claimed to have murdered a drug dealer who ripped him off. (This can in no way be substantiated.) He was creatively and disturbingly self-destructive. And he had stolen money from Tommy and Amy Turner to buy drugs. That was the transgression that haunted him till the end of his life. When Turner came to see David for his two interviews, he brought Montana’s letters—one after another begging forgiveness. Turner talked to Montana on the phone and forgave him, but it didn’t seem to assuage the guilt.
Montana had lived in such extreme circumstances—sleeping at least part of one winter in Central Park, for example. He’d also lived in a building on the Lower East Side where, thanks to a fire next door, he had no heat and no unbroken windows. So he put blankets over the windows and kept a toaster oven propped up on a bureau. Then there was the ten-by-ten foot room in the residential hotel, where he had a bed and a hot plate and saved all his garbage. Newspapers stacked up the wall. Rows of bottles filled with piss. Montana was hopelessly in love with the heterosexual Kern. So, before his first suicide attempt—shooting ten bags of heroin—he wrote Kern a letter to say, “You can have my synthesizer. I’ll leave the door unlocked. Take pictures of me dead.” His second attempt, much grislier, involved massive blood loss but a neighbor found him in time.
David had always romanticized those he regarded as “thug saints.” But there was more to it here. David was impressed, perhaps overly so, with Montana’s writing and drawing. He saw him as an artist, as someone who rebelled against the structure of things. When David called a friend of Montana’s in Texas, Mary Hayslip, to get what information he could about the suicide and what led to it, he explained that writing about Montana would give him a chance to confront his own alienation. “I feel like I’ve gone through my whole life pretty uncomfortable with what it is to live in the world,” he told her, “so in this writing, I just want to talk about those mixed feelings of either being human or not being human.” David too had thought about suicide, but in Montana, his worst impulses were magnified to the nth degree. This was someone who rebelled so hard against the structure of things that he’d rebelled against being alive.
The letter from Montana’s father really shocked him. “I felt like my soul was slammed against a stone wall,” he wrote in his essay, the longest by far in Close to the Knives. “I started crying, something I haven’t done in months. There was something about the last half year, about all the deaths in the air. I’d been wondering if death has become so constant that I will never feel anything again. I fear losing the ability to feel the weight and depth of each life that folds up, sinks, and disappears from our sight. I thought of whether anyone will be able to feel anything about my death if it takes place. Is it all becoming the sensation one feels when they pass a dead bird in the street and all you can do is acknowledge it and move on.”
Robert Mapplethorpe’s beleaguered retrospective “The Perfect Moment” opened in Cincinnati on April 7. I was there to cover it and will never forget the moment when the police came bursting into the Contemporary Art Center, pushing away the artgoers and knocking down velvet ropes as if chasing some deadly criminal.
The police cleared the museum, which was on the second floor of a downtown mall and had been full to capacity. Between those thrown out and those who’d been waiting to enter, many hundreds of people soon stood on the mall’s ground floor. Museum director Dennis Barrie came out to address them, covering his face with his hands and telling them, “It’s a very dark day.”
The sheriff announced later at a press conference that the museum was now obligated to remove the offending pictures. The next morning, a Sunday, lawyers for the Contemporary Art Center went to a federal judge for a temporary restraining order. The judge ordered the police not to remove pictures, close the exhibit, or intimidate the people who wanted to see it.
Barrie and the museum had been charged with “pandering obscenity” and with “illegal use of a child in nudity-oriented material.” According to Miller v. California, a decision about obscenity should be based on “community standards.” At trial that fall, the prosecutor would suggest to the jury that maybe the record-breaking eighty-one thousand spectators had come from out of town.
But on April 7, the hundreds of people who stood outside the Contemporary Art Center began chanting to a surprised-looking police force: “We’re the community standard! We’re the community standard! We’re the community standard!”
Reverend Donald Wildmon, the Mississippi-based director of the American Family Association, had ordered himself a copy of the exhibition catalog for “Tongues of Flame.” Here was something he could use to further the Lord’s work of killing the National Endowment for the Arts. Though he reported later that the catalog made him kind of sick to his stomach, he persisted in ferreting out fourteen images—Christ shooting up plus thirteen pictures of alleged sexual activity. One of them was Rimbaud Masturbating, but all the others were fragments of much larger pieces. Six were negative insets from The Sex Series, one was a severely cropped still of the disco dancers from Fear of Disclosure, one was a purification ritual involving urine and a cow, and the rest were chopped from the complex and much larger paintings Water (from The Four Elements series) and Bad Moon Rising.
Wildmon pasted these bits onto two legal-size pages and added text with the headline “Your Tax Dollars Helped to Pay for These Works of Art.” The fact is that tax dollars paid for none of the work. David never in his life applied for an NEA grant. He earned a total of five hundred dollars from “Tongues of Flame”—his speaking fee. Even that didn’t necessarily come from the NEA, since its grant covered less than a third of the show’s cost.
On April 12, 1990, Wildmon mailed envelopes labeled “Caution—contains extremely offensive material” to every member of Congress with the two-page pamphlet of images and a long letter informing them that the enclosed information would soon be mailed to “3200 Christian leaders (heads of denominations, bishops, superintendents, etc.), 1000 Christian radio stations, 100 Christian television stations, and 178,000 pastors.” These “key leaders” would be asked to distribute the material further.
Wildmon suggested that the NEA had broken the law by funding “Tongues of Flame” in violation of the Helms amendment. He declared that the NEA acted as a government censor since only work chosen by elitist panels was funded, and he repeatedly quoted Frohnmayer out of context. But his main point was this: “The NEA has been isolated from mainstream American values for so long that it has become captive to a morally decadent minority which ridicules and mocks decent, moral taxpayers while demanding taxpayer subsidies. Congress must either clean the NEA up or abolish the agency altogether.”
Frohnmayer wrote Wildmon a letter on April 20 that began, “Members of Congress have shared with me your letter dated April 12, 1990. I am sure you will want to contact each of them again and correct the many false impressions you left. I know your zeal for this subject is great, but I hope you also remember the Commandment against bearing false witness for which all of us who are Christians and Jews must some day answer.” And he added that images like this were not going to be funded on his watch.
David didn’t know about the mailing until Blinderman called on April 19 to describe what it looked like and read him the text. David was angry and upset. The next day, he got a call from the Washington Post and told the reporter he thought the people attacking him were “repressed five-year-olds.” The mailing did not represent his work. “They’re making pieces of their own,” he said.
When the Post reporter called Wildmon, the reverend admitted that the images were cropped, but he asked, “Does that make them less obscene?”
He never responded to Frohnmayer’s plea to correct “false impressions.” Instead, on May 1, Wildmon sent another letter to every member of Congress, which began, “The National Endowment for the Arts helped fund the child pornography contained in the enclosed sealed envelope.” There he placed copies of Mapplethorpe’s two pictures of children and copies of photos taken by Ricardo T. Barros of his nude wife and children. The latter had run in Nueva Luz, an NEA-funded photography magazine. Wildmon promised that this information would soon be mailed to his list of “key leaders” and they would be asked to disseminate it further.
On April 21, David left for a long-planned trip to Mérida in the Yucatán with Tom. There he found the material for the end of his book, his postscript to “The Suicide of a Guy Who Once Built an Elaborate Shrine over a Mouse Hole.”
Tom had seen a poster for a bullfight. David wasn’t sure he felt like going, then decided he would. His first impulse, he wrote in his journal, was to offer money to spare the animal, but he didn’t have that kind of money. His twenty-three-page “postscript” interspersed his account of this bullfight with various sharp memories: The violence he’d experienced at the hands of his father. Keith Davis on his deathbed getting a last-minute phone call from his estranged boyfriend. The earliest photo he had of his mother—the one she’d inscribed at the bottom with the word “Self.” The ritualized slaughter he and Tom witnessed in the bullring that day came to a terrible end as the bull, twisting and turning before the assaults of the banderillero, broke its own front left leg. “The matador shakes his head in sympathy and disgust,” he wrote. “He arches his feet and points his sword at the bull in an affected graceful, arched motion. He takes aim with his X-ray eyes on that invisible point between the rolling curves of the bull’s shoulders, the true point where the entrance of the steel blade will still the heart. Smell the flowers while you can.”
“The pain I feel is to see my own death in the bull’s death,” he wrote. He was also still thinking about Montana’s suicide and why it had hit him so hard—“despite my having successfully managed to freeze out the weight of various other deaths in the last five years,” as he put it. “I felt I stood the chance of going crazy and becoming a windmill of slaughter if I allowed myself the luxury of experiencing each of those deaths with the full weight accorded them. [Montana’s] manner of death opened a door to all that I’ve been speaking of.”
He noticed children in Mérida selling wild roses. His photographic piece Hell Is a Place on Earth would tell the rest of the story, how at dusk the children would sit in a local park eating the petals of the flowers they hadn’t managed to sell. That was the text incorporated into a close-up of a bumblebee.
He and Tom stopped at the Mayan ruins of Chichén Itzá, where David filmed a long column of leaf-cutter ants, each carrying a green slice of leaf back to the nest. They spent the night there and Tom went off to see the light show put on at the ruin, but David did not feel well and stayed behind at the hotel. “He knew something was wrong [physically],” said Tom. “All the little things that usually cheered him up weren’t working. David used to love to go shopping for little trinkets and things, but—he said he just didn’t care anymore. Nothing like that mattered. So he was really depressed. I think he was more afraid than he ever admitted.”
They went on to Playa del Carmen, where they were going to meet Anita Vitale. One night, David dreamt that he was back in Times Square. He wondered what his purpose was there. He couldn’t remember where he lived. In the dream, he found two baby birds in a cardboard box and tried to figure out how to take care of them. Where could he get an eyedropper? Then, walking west across Forty-second Street, he began to scream. “It is a sad great deep scream and it goes on forever. It lifts and swells up into the air and the sky, it barrels out into the west and my head is vibrating and the pressure of it makes me blind to everything but the blood running in rivers under my skin, and my fingers are tensed and delicate as a ten-year-old’s and all my life is within them and it is here in the midst of that scream in the midst of this sensation of life in an uninfected body in all this blurry swirl of dusky street light that I wake up.”
They brought piñatas to the airport to greet Anita, but all three of them hated Playa del Carmen. They drove off to the rough ruins at Cobá, surrounded at one point by thousands of small yellow butterflies. David insisted that Tom drive at a snail’s pace but casualties were inevitable, and he would groan each time one hit the windshield. They went to the beach at Xel-há and did some snorkeling. This had never made sense before, since David could barely see a thing without his glasses. But Tom had bought David a gift—goggles that had his prescription. At another beach, David lay in a hammock, and Tom realized it was the only time he’d ever seen David relax on a vacation. “He was swinging very slowly, with his finger in the sand, and I whispered to Anita, ‘Look, look, look. He’s just laying there.’ And we were shocked. Neither of us had seen that before. Usually he was on the go. Always running.”
David told them he was too depressed to enjoy himself. He wanted to leave. In Cancún, Tom went with him to see if they could arrange a ticket back to New York, but they couldn’t get it done. While they were with the travel agent, she told them there was a suite available at the Sheraton in Cancún. It could easily accommodate three people, and the price wasn’t bad. They had not expected to like Cancún but actually quite enjoyed it for a few days. David even went parasailing off the beach. But when they went out to shop, he still wasn’t interested. He left before Tom and Anita did, but that was part of the original plan. He had to get back. Still, said Tom, “He was definitely off. The spark was leaving.”
That was David’s last trip to Mexico.
He got back to New York on May 1. On May 2, he went to the Village Voice office, where a reporter showed him a fax of a photocopy of the original AFA mailing, which easily gave him enough of an idea of what had been done to his work. He was outraged. As he would say many times over the next two months, his work had been turned into “banal pornography,” stripped of its artistic and political content. And these bowdlerized images had reached way more people than his real art ever had. He began to have trouble sleeping.
He called John Carlin, the former art critic for Paper magazine who’d become an entertainment lawyer. “I gave him some basic copyright info, but told him it wasn’t my area of expertise,” Carlin said. Carlin had just founded the Red Hot Organization, which that fall would release its first CD, Red Hot and Blue, to raise money for AIDS charities. He suggested another lawyer and stayed in touch with David as the case developed, trying, he said, “to help him understand the counterintuitive aspects of the law as best I could.” David actually applied for copyrights on all the pieces Wildmon had used on May 11, something that would never have seemed necessary to him before this.
When he discussed the issue with Wendy Olsoff, one of his dealers at P.P.O.W, she contacted her brother Jonathan Olsoff, an attorney with Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, a major corporate law firm with an extensive pro bono practice. Olsoff quickly decided to take David’s case, and brought in Kathryn Barrett, a colleague at Skadden Arps who specialized—as he did—in intellectual property. They were joined by David Cole, then an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who specialized in First Amendment issues.
The culture war was about to intensify on several fronts. On May 13, the National Council on the Arts convened. This group of presidential appointees with more or less distinguished careers in the arts met quarterly to advise the chair on agency policy and, usually, to rubber-stamp grants recommended by peer panels. This time, Frohnmayer told them, there were some problematic grants in the solo-performance category. “Holly Hughes is a lesbian and her work is very heavily of that genre,” he told them. Tim Miller’s work was “aggressively homosexual.” John Fleck was said to have urinated into a toilet onstage during a performance. And Karen Finley had just been labeled “a nude chocolate-smeared young woman” by conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. The council tabled a decision on the four artists, but took action to terminate two grants to the Institute for Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the organizer of Mapplethorpe’s show “The Perfect Moment.” Killing a grant was an unusual move by the council, quite possibly unprecedented, and it was widely understood in the art world to be punishment.
David couldn’t afford to get completely distracted by the culture war. He had to finish his book. He also had an installation to make for “The Decade Show,” opening May 12, 1990. This survey of the 1980s was an unusual collaboration among three institutions: the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. The focus was “identity.”
The New Museum gave David a small room with the fourth wall open. David had hired Judy Glantzman to help him. They drove to the Palisades together in her car to collect twigs, leaves, and branches. He knew what elements he wanted to include, and he’d sketched a very complex, very labor-intensive plan in his journal. Then he cut that back after feeling his way in the space allotted him. “The wild thing about David—watching him work,” Glantzman said, “was that he would smoke four thousand cigarettes, the deadline was getting closer, I’m a nervous wreck, and he’s sitting still smoking, but he’s working. His wrist wasn’t working but his brain. And then the piece came out fully formed.”
He called the piece America: Heads of Family/Heads of State. At the center he suspended a large papier-mâché head, blindfolded with the word “QUEER” written in red paint across the forehead. Below it were two video monitors on a stand, running some of the ITSOFOMO footage. He placed images around that stand—a photo of anti-gay picketers with signs like “AIDS is a Punishment from the Eternal Father” next to a photo of Nazis destroying the Institute of Sexual Science. For the sides of that video stand, he’d enlarged some of the hate mail that started coming into University Galleries in Normal after his work was discussed on The 700 Club, in the weekly Human Events, and in the AFA mailing. Laid out in front of that on a kind of nest made from branches and flowers was the child skeleton wearing a white dress. He placed a large print of One Day This Kid … on the back wall, with photos of politicians like Reagan and Helms and pictures of his own parents on the side walls. Between the video setup and This Kid, he’d created a kind of village on a leaf-and-twig-strewn floor, with a couple of small houses covered with dollar bills, his globe where the only country is America (repeated in all hemispheres), a doll reclining in a Plexiglas cube, a child’s chair with branches growing from it—and nestled at the center, Horton Hears a Who.
On May 18, 1990, David’s team of lawyers filed for a preliminary injunction in U.S. district court to stop Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association from further publishing or distributing the two pages of severely cropped images.
Then on May 21, David’s lawyers filed a complaint charging Wildmon and the AFA with “unauthorized copying, deliberate distortion and mutilation of, and misrepresentation of seven works of art” and “false and malicious defamation of the character, reputation and professional standing of Mr. Wojnarowicz.” They were asking for a million dollars in damages on each of five legal claims.
That same day, David wrote to Philip Zimmerman, the friend who was with him when he witnessed the death of Keith Davis. Zimmerman had just tested positive for HIV, and he told David in a letter that he would consider suicide before going out the way Keith had David wrote back.
Despite some of my fears I feel I am approaching the spectacle of my own death with interest in everything around me. I see my own contradictions and feel less afraid of them, I see my weaknesses and my strengths and they are becoming important to me. It’s hard to define what I am trying to give you here; I guess its reassurance in whatever you do. I think it’s beautiful what you carry and what you make and all the impulses that you outline because they reek of life. I would like to be parting air with my body’s movement for years and years even in exhaustion, but in the event of my possible death … I feel kind of satisfied in mapping down my interior world with each thing I make. I’m realizing that there is something elementally important in bringing what is deep inside to light. It can ease things for others. It can ease the pressure of being alien in the visible structure that we had no hands in creating.… Philip, I have no threshold for physical pain and have always wondered in the last couple years what to do if I reach a point of pain I can’t endure. I think living has been painful to an extent in this society that was and is blind to who and what I am, but its been a bearable pain because it simultaneously revealed me to myself over these years. I hold on to my body’s life and feel reluctant to think much about giving it up.
On Memorial Day weekend 1990, David went back to Normal to finish work on the lithographs. Though he would be back in New York by June 2 or 3, he worried about leaving for even a short time because of the ongoing work at his building. The landlord now wanted to put in a new boiler, to replace the radiators with baseboard heaters, and to install new double-glazed windows. He wrote to the lawyer he had on retainer to say he felt vulnerable. Some tenants had been going through eviction proceedings. His gas had been shut off without notice. It had taken three weeks to get a lightbulb changed in the hallway. He’d had to endure a lot of carbon monoxide and thick black soot from heavy equipment idling for hours along the sides of the building. Noise and vibrations had been intense at certain periods.
Not mentioned to the lawyer—and more irritating than threatening—the hookers who worked his corner at night were so noisy that he kept a carton of eggs on top of the refrigerator to throw at them. Sometimes he painted the eggs black.
David arrived in Illinois with a gift for Patrick, Gran Fury’s “Read My Lips” T-shirt with an image of two men kissing. “I put it on immediately,” said Patrick, “and we were going to a gun shop to buy police targets.” That would be the background image for Fire. “David said to me, ‘Wait. You’re going in there with that shirt on?’ He didn’t want me to get hurt. I said, ‘Why not? They’re just going to look at me like I’m some freak—if they even notice.’ Actually, they didn’t bat an eye. I bought the targets. David didn’t come in with me. He sat in the truck.”
Patrick worked with him on the lithographs. David had never done one before, and he had some trouble with the touche technique that can give a lithograph the look of a watercolor. He told Patrick he couldn’t control it, and he didn’t like it.
Someone had let them into the workshop at ten P.M. and they were alone. Patrick asked, “Did they show you the crayons?”
David brightened. “Crayons? They’ve got crayons?”
David told Patrick to draw the snowman for Water. “He let me into his work,” said Patrick. “That was a huge gesture for me. He told me he wanted me to believe in myself. ‘Believe in your vision,’ he would say. I didn’t know I had a vision.”
Donald Wildmon sent an urgent five-page letter to the 425,000 members of the American Family Association, telling them that “David Wojnarowicz, the homosexual creator of the NEA-funded ‘Tongues of Flame’ catalog—which featured ‘Christ the Drug Addict’ amidst hardcore homosexual photographs”—was now suing him for a million dollars. “This is the most important letter I have ever written you,” Wildmon told his members. “I am asking you to make as generous a gift to AFA as possible.”
He pointed out how the “left” had repeatedly used the courts “to take away the rights of Christians while promoting the ‘rights’ of pornographers, atheists, child molesters, abortionists and homosexuals.” He was not asking for help to pay off the million dollars. He would win this lawsuit. No, he wanted contributions to set up a “crack team” of Christian lawyers.
“The AFA Legal Team will not only react to actions made against Christians,” he promised, “but initiate actions that will put the pornographers and child abusers and homosexuals and humanists on the defensive.”
In a “VERY IMPORTANT!!!” flyer enclosed with the letter, Wildmon stated that he’d made an error. The “radical homosexual artist/activist” was actually asking for five million dollars.
That spring, before David heard about the AFA mailing, he’d learned that he and Phil Zwickler had won a New York Foundation for the Arts grant of five thousand dollars for Fear of Disclosure. It isn’t clear how much they actually received, since neither was able to complete the public service event required of NYFA recipients.
Zwickler was then working as editor of the People with AIDS Coalition Newsline. “When the Wildmon thing came up, he thought that David had an opportunity to become a very public figure,” said their mutual friend Norman Frisch. “He thought David should be doing a lot of press, making appearances, and David was just too weighted down and overwhelmed and angry to be in public very much. He was not making himself available to people.”
Frisch’s work with the Los Angeles Festival brought him to New York frequently, but he’d been unaware of the Wildmon case. “David explained to me how he had been personally singled out as the devil by this guy,” Frisch said. “He really felt victimized by it. Through his writing, he worked it out. He fought back. But at this point, he hadn’t done that writing yet. And he was afraid of what was coming down on him. He was very paranoid about people trying to get at him, so he was not responding to the press or to activists who wanted to push him upfront. He just wasn’t ready to go public. He thought, you know, people were going to try to kill him.”
Frisch witnessed big shouting matches between David and Zwickler about the right way to conduct the politics of the response. “Phil was a very volatile person and not a good patient when he was ill,” said Frisch. “On top of everything else, he was losing his eyesight, which made him very, very fearful that he was going to lose his independence. And he realized that this was really the end of his career, so he became even more volatile. When he and David would disagree, they would kind of explode at each other. They’d get into a big argument about who was sicker. David would say, ‘You don’t realize how fucking sick I am and how bad I feel, and I just don’t have the energy for this.’ Phil would say, ‘I’m sicker than you, and I have the energy for it.’ Then they would start with what drugs they were on and what infections they had. They would try to outdo one another with their symptoms. It would have been comical if it wasn’t so sad.”
In June, David signed his contract for Close to the Knives. The five-thousand-dollar advance was small but he didn’t care. He didn’t think he had a lot of time left. He just wanted the book to get out there.
Arguments for both sides in Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association were laid out that June in the pretrial briefs. Lawyers for Wildmon and the AFA responded to the complaint with several motions to dismiss. For example, Wildmon’s lawyers asserted that no artwork had been mutilated, only reproductions. That the reverend’s descriptions of the pictures as “part of” the “Tongues of Flame” catalog indicated that they were details of larger pieces. That, in any case, the whole piece did not have to be shown: “One may criticize Hitler for the gas chambers without being required to compliment him on the trains running on time, even if it is argued that the failure to so compliment him gives a distorted view of his regime. So one may criticize an artistic creation for the moral repugnance of a part of it without being required to evaluate the rest as to its artistic merit.” They argued that David’s reputation had been enhanced, not damaged, by their attack on him. That if he was going to take NEA money, he couldn’t cry foul when some of his work was shown to Congress. That Wildmon’s criticism of his work was political and therefore “protected” speech, which the artist hoped to censor. Most startling was their point that even if Wildmon really intended to label David a pornographer, that was not defamatory since “pornography can in many instances exist as a protected art form.”
Then, barring dismissal, they wanted a change of venue so the case would be tried in Wildmon’s home state of Mississippi. To support the latter motion, Wildmon’s lawyers stated at a status conference on May 30 that the reverend had mailed only one copy of his broadside into the Southern District of New York—and that to Cardinal John O’Connor. The discovery process (ordered by the court over AFA objections) revealed that he had actually sent 210 copies into New York state, including 63 to newspapers and 25 to radio stations.
Motions for dismissal and change of venue would be addressed at the beginning of the trial, set for June 25. In mid-June, David and Reverend Wildmon were each deposed by a lawyer from the opposing side, part of pretrial fact finding.
Wildmon had assembled a small team of religious right lawyers to defend him. Joseph Secola, the lawyer for Operation Rescue, deposed David. Often a future witness will try to say as little as possible, but the transcript of David’s deposition is notable for answers about his work and process that go on for pages. Secola finally complained, “I’m getting narrative responses to almost every question I ask.” He wanted to establish some things that could be used at trial. Had the AFA actually called David a pornographer? David wouldn’t say the word “no” but—no, they’d only made him look like one. Secola pulled out a copy of the letter David had written to the dean at Illinois State explaining why it was important to him that the “Postcards” essay be included in the “Tongues of Flame” catalog. David had addressed it “to the Dean and whomever else it may concern.” Who was “whomever else”? Had it been widely distributed? (No.) Wildmon’s lawyers were also using the Village Voice article I had written about David as a defense exhibit because I said he’d used Hujar’s porn collection to make the small circular insets in The Sex Series. Secola wanted to know if this was accurate. David replied that he would call them “sexual images,” not porn. It didn’t seem like much was discovered by either side. Wildmon, deposed by Kathryn Barrett, readily admitted that he’d gone through the catalog, plucking out images he thought would be most offensive to “the average taxpayer.” He also testified that he had mailed just over six thousand copies of the pamphlet; the pictures were simply too offensive to send to 178,000 pastors.
David’s lawyers had charged the AFA with libel, with two counts of copyright infringement, and with violating a New York state law against altering, defacing, mutilating, or modifying a work of art and then presenting it as the authentic work of the artist. The lawsuit also charged that the AFA’s misleading description of David’s work violated a federal law against trademark violation and false advertising.
On June 25, the trial began with Judge William C. Conner dismissing the latter charge. He ruled that it applied to false statements about a competitor’s product and the AFA was not selling a product. He did not throw out anything else. He would not allow the trial to move to Mississippi. And he would dispense with opening statements since he’d read all the preliminary papers. This was a nonjury trial, and a no-nonsense judge who clearly wanted the proceedings to move right along. Judge Conner showed little patience for political posturing from either side.
Some of David’s friends were seated in the gallery. Tom had taken the day off from work. I was there to cover the trial for Artforum and noted that Wildmon stayed out in the hall as David began testifying about how his work had been misrepresented. He had brought in an actual-size replica of Water to show how large and complex it was, how little had been excerpted. There were no surprises in his testimony.
The proceedings got spikier during the cross-examination by Wildmon’s lawyer, Benjamin Bull, once part of Charles Keating’s Citizen’s for Decency Through Law, and later senior counsel at Pat Robertson’s American Center for Law and Justice and chief counsel for James Dobson’s Alliance Defense Fund. Bull queried David, for example, about the letter he’d written to the dean at Illinois State. When David’s lawyers objected, Bull explained to the judge that he wanted to show that David “was fully aware” that his work was going to be criticized. “I submit there is an inference that it could have been copied and shown to Congressmen as part of that criticism,” Bull said. But the judge excluded it.
Bull then went through the catalog, directing David to read lines from his own essays and those written by critics, attesting to the centrality of sexual imagery in his work. Then there was the interview with Blinderman, where David said, “If my work is going to reflect my life, then I’m going to put sexuality into my work.” And what about The Sex Series? Wasn’t sexuality an integral part of it?
Bull also wanted to make the case that the AFA had had little impact on David’s career. So he asked if it wasn’t true that museums steered away from sexually explicit work, especially work about homosexuality. Wasn’t it true that major museums would not show his work, with or without an AFA mailing? When David said he didn’t know that to be true, Bull directed him to his own “Postcards” essay, in which David had written that what Helms and D’Amato had done was just an extension of standards formed in the arts community itself, where visible sexual images were usually for the straight, the white, and the male, and where Mapplethorpe had been one of the few to break through. Bull inquired about David’s 1989 income of thirty-four thousand dollars—hadn’t he earned most of that after “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” opened. (No!) But didn’t he have shows coming up? “Tongues of Flame” was touring. And wasn’t it true that no one had canceled the exhibit? And hadn’t the price of Mapplethorpe’s and Serrano’s artwork gone up?
David’s lawyers were allowed to call only one expert witness, and they chose Philip Yenawine, MOMA’s director of education, who brought some perspective to the questions above. “Sexual explicitness as this [AFA mailing] represents Mr. Wojnarowicz to make is anathema to museums, and they won’t present it,” he testified, for example. “More people have heard his name than have seen his work. If they think this is what he does, they will in fact refuse to show it.” He established that David had created a great many pieces with no sexual representations. As for Mapplethorpe and Serrano, Yenawine said that they were both more established in the art world and that the pieces of theirs attacked by the right had been presented in their entirety, not in fragments.
Yenawine’s testimony would have impact but, he told me later, he “felt muzzled from the standpoint of saying, ‘David is not going to recover from this. He is not well, and whatever damage has been done to his career, he’s not going to have time to repair it.’ “ This had been a moment of self-censorship. Said Yenawine, “I didn’t want to say in front of David that he was dying.”
Wildmon’s lawyers tried to keep the reverend off the stand. They’d announced that he would be their only witness, so David’s lawyers said they would wait to question him during cross-examination and rested their case. Technically, they could call no more witnesses. Then Wildmon’s lawyers announced that they would call no witnesses at all. David’s lawyer David Cole put the matter to the judge, who decided that he had induced plaintiff’s counsel not to call the reverend, so he would allow it. Bull registered his objection, but the gray-haired reverend had to take the stand.
This man so adept at intimidating corporate leaders and members of Congress was, in person, more mousy than magnetic. To make the libel charge stick, David’s lawyers had to prove that Wildmon had acted with “actual malice.” With his questions, Cole tried to establish “malice” by showing that the reverend excerpted the parts of larger pieces he thought people would find most offensive and by failing to correct the misrepresentations Frohnmayer had pointed out in his letter about “bearing false witness.” The judge didn’t seem to be buying this.
During cross-examination, Bull then tried to make the point that Wildmon was no art critic, just a concerned citizen. “Would you know the difference between a collage and a portrait?” Bull asked. The reverend said no. Would he object—as a taxpayer—to any sexually explicit images, even if done by, say, Rembrandt? The reverend said, “Yes I would.”
At the trial’s end, the judge declared that he had given them an accelerated trial and would now give them an accelerated ruling on the May 18 motion for a preliminary injunction. That was granted. The AFA was enjoined from any further publication or distribution of the pamphlet, since, said the judge, there was “a reasonable likelihood” that it “could be construed by reasonable persons as misrepresenting the work of the artist with likely damage to the artist’s reputation and to the value of his works.” He would rule later on the complaint alleging libel, copyright infringement, and violation of the New York Artists’ Authorship Rights Act.
Bull leaped to his feet to say that this injunction violated the First Amendment and would have a “chilling effect” on the American Family Association. Judge Conner, who characterized himself as “not entirely unacquainted with the First Amendment,” assured Bull that the AFA could publish anything it wanted about David Wojnarowicz’s work, as long as it was true.
After court adjourned, David told a reporter, “I consider this a vindication of sorts.”
But it had been startling to see Wildmon’s team appropriate every argument artists had used against their would-be censors: the First Amendment, the specter of fascism, even the “chilling effect.” What this short trial showed so clearly was that the culture war was really a battle between two irreconcilable ways of looking at the world.
During the week of this trial, NEA general counsel Julie Davis was on the phone, polling every member of the National Council on the Arts about the four performance artists they’d discussed at their meeting in May. A majority voted to kill the grants recommended by a solo-performance peer panel, but the final decision would be up to Frohnmayer. Later he would be self-critical about how he’d handled this: “Instead of saving the Endowment by demanding that Congress and the administration support the arts, warts and all, or giving up and admitting that our society is not strong enough to withstand controversy, I was trying to find middle ground that would appease everyone.”
So on June 29, 1990, Frohnmayer announced that he was defunding Karen Finley, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Tim Miller. These artists, soon known as the NEA Four, would file a lawsuit against the Endowment and Frohnmayer that September, charging that their grants were denied for political reasons.
Finley was long gone from the East Village by this time, but she and David had reconnected when he filed his lawsuit. They’d been talking politics. “He was a very big supporter to me when I started having my legal problems,” Finley said. “I would talk over the decisions I was making. And from my perspective, I didn’t feel that I had many artists I could talk to about it. We had been friends before, but at this time we became colleagues. He would know what I was talking about, because he was living it. He gave me strength.”