David’s memorial took place at St. Mark’s Church on what would have been his thirty-eighth birthday—September 14, 1992. But at the urging of Judy Glantzman and Steve Brown, Tom opened the loft to David’s friends on the Sunday after his death in July. Along with many friends, two members of an ACT UP affinity group called the Marys turned up. Joy Episalla and Carrie Yamaoka had never met David, but they knew Jean Foos. They wanted to talk to Tom about giving David a political funeral.
The Marys had an established reputation for commitment and audacity. These were the activists who rented a room at the Waldorf Astoria so they could throw fake money inscribed with “George Bush—Blood on Your Hands” out the window when the president’s car pulled up to the hotel. They’d shut down the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour to protest the scant attention paid to the war at home, AIDS, while the media covered the war in the Persian Gulf. They’d dumped a coffin full of bloody bones in the Citicorp atrium, with explanatory flyers, on ACT UP’s Day of Desperation. They’d organized a march on the Bush home in Kennebunkport, Maine, and helped shut down Grand Central Station during rush hour while other activists hung huge banners (“One AIDS Death Every 8 Minutes”). They met often, they were close-knit, and they regarded each other as family. Then in late ’91 and early ’92, two of them, John Stumpf and Dennis Kane, died of AIDS and had the usual ungratifying memorials.
Everyone in the Marys read Close to the Knives, and when they got to the part in which David suggests, that people drive the body of their loved one a hundred miles an hour to Washington, blast through the White House gates, and “dump their lifeless form on the front steps,” the group decided, in Episalla’s words, “Goddamn right. That sounds just about right to us.” They decided to dedicate themselves to David’s idea of making AIDS deaths visible to the public, and named the new project Stumpf/Kane. During the 1992 Gay Pride parade, they circulated flyers asking for volunteers who would agree to a political funeral, who would “leave your body to politics.” There were no takers.
David worried that people affected by the AIDS epidemic were becoming professional pallbearers, perfecting rituals of death instead of “a relatively simple ritual of life such as screaming in the streets.” (Photograph by Brian Palmer/bxpnyc.com)
When they came to Tom that day at the loft, he hesitated. He didn’t want violence. He didn’t want people arrested. Episalla and Yamaoka assured him that they could do this without mayhem. And so, one week after David’s death, he had the first political funeral to come out of the AIDS crisis.
The procession began outside the loft, moved down Second Avenue, then east to Avenue A and south to Houston. The Marys had created a banner wide enough to shut down traffic: “DAVID WOJNAROWICZ, 1954—1992, DIED OF AIDS DUE TO GOVERNMENT NEGLECT.” Two women beat snare drums. Others clapped sticks of wood together, but they all walked in silence. Someone had handed out a few sunflowers to carry, while friends held up reproductions of David’s work. As they marched through the East Village, people began to step off the sidewalk and join the procession. They had no permit, and the police were involved by the time they got to Avenue A—one squad car with lights flashing, leading them. Marchers walked west on Houston, then north on the Bowery.
Hundreds were marching by the time they got to the parking lot across from Cooper Union (now an undulating glass tower filled with luxury condos), where Yamaoka and activist Tim Bailey waited with a slide projector set up on top of Yamaoka’s car, plugged into a nearby electric pole. The slides playing across the wall behind parked cars showed David’s name and dates, then a photo of the White House with the passage superimposed about driving your dead friend to Washington, D.C. Dirk Rowntree read the extended version of this from David’s most controversial essay, “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” beginning with the words, “To make the private into something public is an action that has terrific repercussions in the pre-invented world. The government has the job of maintaining the day-to-day illusion of the ONE-TRIBE NATION. Each public disclosure of a private reality becomes something of a magnet that can attract others with a similar frame of reference; thus each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves as a dismantling tool against the illusion of a ONE-TRIBE NATION.” Rowntree ended his reading with that image of the lifeless body on the White House steps. It might be summarized as: My grief as a tool to fight the state is as good a tool as any other.
Episalla and activist Barbara Hughes then took the banner into the street and set it on fire. Friends tossed in the placards they’d been carrying. Friends tossed in the sunflowers. They stood in silence, watching the funeral pyre burn.
The Marys left that evening determined to carry out David’s idea. They all committed to having a political funeral when they died. Within the next year, three of them did. On November 2, the night before the presidential election, the Marys carried the body of Mark Lowe Fisher in an open casket from Judson Memorial Church all the way up Sixth Avenue to the Republican Party headquarters on Forty-third Street. On July 1, 1993, the Marys drove to Washington, D.C., with the body of Tim Bailey, planning to march past the White House, but authorities prevented them from even getting the casket out of the van. A couple of weeks later, they carried the body of Jon Greenberg through the East Village, and he lay in state in Tompkins Square Park, casket open. One of the Marys read the speech Greenberg had delivered at the first of these funerals, in which he spoke of the importance of what they were doing with this final act of empowerment and generosity.
In the years after David’s death, Tom Rauffenbart sprinkled David’s ashes in places that had held meaning for him. He took some to the beach in St. John’s where they’d had their first sexy romantic vacation. He left ashes at the loft, sealed inside a wall. He sprinkled some in Paris, in New Orleans, in the Great Swamp of New Jersey, at Teotihuacán, and at what was left of the Christopher Street pier. Then in October 1996, he joined in ACT UP’s second “Ashes Action” in Washington, D.C. He got up to the fence and threw David onto the White House lawn.