"I’m tired of being perceived as a radical when I know I ain’t particularly radical" - David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz - Untitled (Genet after Brassaï), 1979


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.
(p. 9*)

Peeka [Trenkle] said. “My big question was, do we have to destroy ourselves in order to be creative. I felt like he was kind of hell-bent on it. He wanted that. He wanted the dark part.”
(
p. 64*)

[...] what he saw in Hujar was a kind of mirror image; they were both desperate and confused, but David felt he still had hope about the future, and Hujar did not. Maybe because David’s art was still developing, while Hujar’s art was fully formed and his career had never flowered.
(
p. 166*)

Hujar counseled him not to throw out any drawings. “I shouldn’t start compromising and trying to adapt to other people’s taste, that no matter what my taste is and what my ideas are, or what my work looks like, if it’s good, there’ll be somebody who’ll pick up on it,” David said Hujar told him in a taped journal entry. “And last night, I was standing around here at five, six in the morning, looking through the portfolio, looking at my photographs, just leafing through boxes, and I was really startled. It was like the first time that I sat down and looked at these drawings in ages and ages, since I did them and I realized they are good, and there’s absolutely no reason for me to deny them or correct them or throw them away or bury them. They’re my life.”
(
p. 168*)

Zoe told David that day that he always acted like he didn’t really like “some of us.” He replied, “No, it’s not that,” and explained: “I have this whole area of myself I can’t share or talk about.… Because of that and because I don’t want to lose that part of myself, I just get distant. I feel so different from most people I know.”
(
pp. 169-170*)

As he explained on the tape, sometimes he wanted to be by himself and sometimes he loved people so much. Sometimes he wanted to walk out the door, just disappear and start a new life somewhere else. Sometimes he thought he was struggling in a way that would keep him struggling for the rest of his life. Sometimes he talked to the winos in the neighborhood and he could tell that they’d once had abilities to create things that might even exceed his, yet there they were—homeless. Sometimes he thought of his own death but always projected it as way in the future. And then there were times when he thought it could be soon. But he didn’t think about death much. “It won’t let itself be thought of.”
(
p. 202*)

By the end of his life, David had a reputation as someone who would speak out and hold nothing back. When it came to politics—absolutely. I think people also had the impression that he was telling “everything” because he spoke so freely about sex. But sex was easy for him to talk about, and it wasn’t everything. He
never told everything.
(
p. 227*)

“I think it was part of his frustration, his wanting to feel connected to the scene that was still evolving around Keith Haring and feeling ostracized and not welcomed into that,” Nanney said. “It was kind of around that time that he became really anti-Keith and started going around town drawing radiant babies.” That was Haring’s trademark image.
(
p. 236*)

What he realized later was that his newly secure foothold in the art world had relieved all that pressure just to survive—the pressure that had kept him from facing his past.
(
p. 266*)

“All of this media stuff, you get lost in it. You can take it too seriously and become self-conscious. It seemed like a joke at a certain point. People just come into the gallery and take what you put out and they don’t even look at it. You just become a workhorse filling a list. You self-imitate to meet demand.”
(
p. 312*)

Society is almost dead and yet it continues reproducing its madness as if there were a real future at the end of its collective gestures.
(
p. 314*)

And I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg and there’s a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and I’m waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping Amazonian blowdarts in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians … and at the moment I’m a thirty seven foot tall one thousand one hundred and seventy-two pound man inside this six foot frame and all I can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.
(
pp. 383-384*)

But pieces like
Spirituality (for Paul Thek) make it clear that, for him, photos functioned as the words he could not construct from an alphabet. As he put it, “I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness.”
(
p. 386*)

“I thought if there was indeed a place one goes after death then it could only be a place determined by one’s vision of the world; of life; of concerns. Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head. The garden is the place I’ll go if I die.”
(
p. 388*)

My rage is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.

(
p. 425*)

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.”
(
p. 445*)

“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.
(446*)

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.
(472*)

“When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending.… If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time to me I would. If I could open your body and slip up inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fuse with yours I would.”
(491-492*)

He had been a victim of sexual violence and now he was facing death from a sexually transmitted disease—yet for David, holding on to sex was a way of holding on to life, and he was trying to understand the contradictions.
(
p. 505*)

When he [Tom Rauffenbart, DW's boyfriend] calls lately it’s usually at the end of the day to say goodnight and my head is so filled with fear and darkness it’s almost an insult. Everything is scary and I feel shook with the reality of the situation. I AM DYING SLOWLY. CHANCES DON’T LOOK TOO GOOD.
(
p. 508*)

I’m too young for this yet I’m feeling old from all the deaths. Phil died a few days ago on the 7th of May. I couldn’t feel anything but maybe a little relief for him that it was over. That lasted until evening of the 8th. Then I got scared and sad. Now I can’t believe all the death I’ve seen. It’s so outrageous, it’s like a long slow fiction that overtakes what you come to know as “life.” It’s like waking up one morning to see that the sky has disappeared and it never comes back no matter how patiently you wait.
(
p. 510*)
*according to my reader

Cynthia Carr - Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz (Bloomsbury, 2012)

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