When Jesse Helms stands up in Congress to inveigh against pervert artists, David Wojnarowicz is one of those he has in mind. Wojnarowicz, who’s “queer” and an AIDS activist, is seemingly better known for the confrontations his work has provoked than for the work itself–he’s been a frequent target of the censorship crowd. “Some of us,” he observes in his recent book, “are born with the cross-hairs of a rifle scope printed on our backs.” Wojnarowicz has returned the attacks in kind, denouncing Helms as a “repulsive senator from zombieland” and depicting him in one painting as a crawling insect.
Nowhere is the complexity of Wojnarowicz’s project more evident than in his essays, brought together in Close to the Knives. The book–subtitled a “memoir”–combines autobiographical fragments with caustic political polemics. The autobiographical pieces, despite their unflinching depictions of the most terrifying brutality, are evocative and lyrical. And even the most strident political outbursts (which are so often quoted by those writing about him), when returned to their proper contexts within the essays seem almost a kind of common sense. A gifted writer, Wojnarowicz emerges in his essays even more than in his art a powerful and original social critic.
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This rage leads to frequent outbursts that are far from gracious. In one essay Cardinal O’Connor becomes a “fat cannibal from that house of walking swastikas up on fifth avenue.” Wojnarowicz’s “rudeness” goes well beyond such unflattering epithets. Further along in the same essay–a sprawling and controversial piece entitled “Postcards From America: X-rays From Hell”–Wojnarowicz fantasizes about unfettered sexuality and violent revenge. “At least in my ungoverned imagination I can fuck someone without a rubber,” he writes, “or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw congressman William Dannemeyer off of the empire state building. These fantasies give me distance from my outrage for a few seconds. They give me momentary comfort.”
Denied the possibility of love and tenderness by “respectable” society, Wojnarowicz sought escape in the underside of New York City. Living on the streets as a teenager, he sold his body to anyone who would pay, from suburban closet cases to disrespectable types just barely off the streets themselves. “I crawled through the walls of every social taboo I could come across,” he writes of his life in the 70s. “I wanted to celebrate everything we are denied through structures of laws or physical force.” Eventually Wojnarowicz was able to get away from this life, though he never returned to respectability. He began at this time to realize, as he later told art critic Lucy R. Lippard, that “my queerness was a wedge that was slowly separating me from a sick society.” His outsider status began to serve as a kind of moral badge.
Wojnarowicz looks upon his work as a way of preserving an “alternate history” of the times, a history far different from that made and preserved by American elites. His essays on the Hudson River piers memorialize a bygone time that was to many a kind of sexual paradise, before the advent of AIDS. Because he’s able to explain both the terror and the beauty of this sexual underground, he makes available the complex, highly equivocal historical meanings of this particular subculture in a way few other writers could.
In The Fire Next Time Baldwin attempted to go beyond his anger at injustice to the higher ground of love. Wojnarowicz does not emphasize the need to love his oppressors. Perhaps this is a fault; I find it hard to blame him. It is difficult to love the homophobes who have been cheerleaders for genocide, like the Texas politician Wojnarowicz quotes as saying, “If you want to stop AIDS shoot all the queers.” As Baldwin sadly noted, it “demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck.” Wojnarowicz does attempt to get beyond his rage–he is, as he says, “horrified that I feel this desire for murder”–but again and again he’s overcome by the feeling. At least he’s honest enough to admit his hatred, unlike many of his opponents, who hide their bigotry within faux-philosophical discussions of “immorality.” He critiques his own hatred even as he attacks the conditions that have brought it forth.
