Fire in the Belly Read online

  CONTENTS

  The Truth: An Introduction

  1 Where Something Broke

  2 Dissolution

  3 The Street

  4 The Secret Life

  5 At the Shattered Edge of the Map

  6 The Flaneur

  7 Go Rimbaud

  8 Nightclubbing

  9 The Poverty of Peter Hujar

  10 A Union of Different Drummers

  11 Rampages of Raw Energy

  12 “Will They Allow Me on the Moon?”

  13 Pressure Point

  14 A Burning Child

  15 Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

  16 “Something Turning Emotional and Wild”

  17 Some Sort of Grace

  18 Elegiac Times

  19 Acceleration

  20 “Like a Blood-Filled Egg”

  21 Witnesses

  22 With a Target on His Back

  23 “Desperate to Bring a Light”

  24 “Like a Marble Rolling Down a Hill”

  25 “Disappearing But Not Fast Enough”

  Epilogue Throw My Body on the Steps of the White House

  Acknowledgments

  Plate Section

  Footnotes

  Notes

  Bibliography

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Imprint

  For Tom Rauffenbart

  And in memory of those who could not be interviewed

  Arthur Bressan Jr. 1943–1987

  Steve Brown 1954–1995

  Iolo Carew 1955–1987

  Emilio Cubiero 1947–2001

  Keith Davis 1954–1987

  Tim Dlugos 1950–1990

  Ethyl Eichelberger 1945–1990

  Luis Frangella 1944–1990

  Steve Gliboff 1949–1991

  Timothy Greathouse 1950–1998

  Keith Haring 1958–1990

  Montana Hewson c. 1952–1990

  Peter Hujar 1934–1987

  Greer Lankton 1958–1996

  Haoui Montaug 1952–1991

  Michael Morais 1945–1991

  Nicolas Moufarrege 1947–1985

  Cookie Mueller 1949–1989

  Paul Proveaux 1948–1988

  Bill Rice 1931–2006

  Tom Rubnitz 1956–1992

  Dean Savard 1958–1990

  Huck Snyder 1953–1993

  Paul Thek 1933–1988

  Phil Zwickler 1954–1991

  THE TRUTH: AN INTRODUCTION

  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 su
rely 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.”

  1 WHERE SOMETHING BROKE

  One day in September 1954, Ed Wojnarowicz lost his salary gambling. All of it. This led to a quarrel with his wife, Dolores, and he went out to get plastered. When he came home drunk, he seized Dolores by the throat, choking her, muttering that he’d kill her. He grabbed a gun, threatening to shoot her, the children, and then himself. Dolores locked herself in the bedroom with the kids and heard Ed fire three shots. Silence. She crept downstairs to find him slumped over the kitchen table. Dead? When she approached, he jumped up laughing, waving the gun in her face. The divorce petition describing this incident does not specify whether it occurred just before or just after the birth of the couple’s third child, David, on September 14.

  Ed Wojnarowicz was a seaman on passenger ships, working the boiler room. He stood a wiry five foot ten, hawklike around the eyes and nose, with a tattoo on his left upper arm. He had met Dolores McGuinness in Sydney, Australia—at a soda shop. At least that was the story. She’d been raised in a convent. Or in an orphanage. Or in a fractured family where she’d been abused. So their three children variously told me. None of them knew much about her. Nor the year their parents had married. Nor whether they had family in Australia. Dolores was a brunette with delicate features, a beauty. The divorce papers state that she’d married Ed in Sydney in 1948, on September 14—the same day as David’s eventual birth. She was sixteen to Ed’s twenty-six.

  Dolores had just turned eighteen when their daughter, Pat, was born in January 1950. In the short marriage of Ed and Dolores, major events clocked in at two-year intervals. After Pat came Steven in 1952, then David in ’54, and the parents’ separation in ’56.

  David, Steven, and Pat experienced childhood without stability or security, spiked for some years with violence, then chaos, then neglect. Ed committed suicide for real in 1976. Dolores did not respond to repeated phone calls and a letter to her home in Manhattan requesting an interview. She was not in touch with David at the end of his life. Nor had she been in touch with her two surviving children since the early 1980s. Pat attempted to reconnect in 2002, but it didn’t work out. (Dolores called her daughter late in 2011, but the upshot was unclear.) Nor did Pat and Steven have any contact with each other. This family was beyond dysfunctional; it had shattered.

  Ed Wojnarowicz at his mother’s house in Michigan with (from left) Steven, Pat, and David. (Courtesy of Steven Wojnarowicz)

  Childhood was painful to resurrect for David’s brothers and sisters, including his half-siblings from Ed’s second marriage, Peter and Linda. All but Pat cried at some point while talking to me, and Pat had big holes in her memory. She has lived in Paris since the late 1970s and goes for weeks at a time without speaking the language in which these things happened. As she put it: “I have a lot of stuff that’s been blocked out.”

  Pat insisted, however, that her very early years were happy—the years spent in or near Red Bank, New Jersey, where David was born. Asked for an example, she recalled sitting unde
r a big tree with Steven and David when she was probably six, and suddenly feeling an overwhelming love for them. What Steven remembered of the years when his parents were married was that Dolores would occasionally lock all three of them in the attic and leave for the day while their father was at sea. Steven remembered the attic’s intense heat, and having to pee out the window. Pat said that usually they were locked in there as punishment, sometimes for a long time—“we’d amuse ourselves by going to the toilet in boxes.” David remembered nothing from this period of his life. If he had, he might have mentioned the corrective braces he had to wear on his legs at night because he was pigeon-toed.

  Steven (left), David, and Pat on their way to visit relatives in Massachusetts. David is about five. (Courtesy of Steven Wojnarowicz)

  When Dolores filed for divorce in October 1956, she alleged that Ed’s cruelty had started in May 1948, five months before the wedding. The date is mentioned three times, including once in Ed’s rebuttal, so it can’t be a typo. But the cruelty didn’t turn physical until the month of David’s birth. Before that, Ed was often drunk, verbally abusive, and absent from home without explanation. But he was just beginning his alcoholic spiral in the 1950s, and the violence was intermittent. In 1955, he threw a mirror at Dolores, cutting her on her face and head. In 1956, he came home drunk, chased Dolores upstairs, then closed all the windows and turned on the gas. She heard a crash and came downstairs to find Ed on the floor, laughing. A few months later, Ed again threatened to kill her.

  In his counterclaim, Ed denied everything, adding that in August 1954 he had won six hundred dollars gambling and had given it all to Dolores. He pointed out that they had reaffirmed their wedding vows in July 1951, at a Catholic church in Highlands, New Jersey. (They had married in Australia under the auspices of the Church of England, and Ed was a serious Roman Catholic.) Ed also claimed that Dolores had deserted him in the summer of 1956. That was when the couple separated. Dolores moved, with the children, to the Molly Pitcher Village Apartments in Red Bank. When the divorce papers were filed that fall, Ed gave his address as Pier 86 in Manhattan, his ship’s berth—later the site of the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum. He was paying seventy-five dollars a week in support and getting two or three hours with the children every sixteen days.