“He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.” That’s writer James Baldwin reflecting in a 1984 interview on his late mentor Beauford Delaney, the queer Black painter who introduced the young writer to New York City and opened up for him a new way to see the world.
Their bond comprises just one thread in the interwoven artistic lineages we’re laying out this month, during a year in which a well-worn truism feels freshly urgent: The first Pride was a riot. For your June reading, we recommend art books that celebrate both this generational resistance and the freedoms queer and trans artists have always found in their work, from Nina Chanel Abney’s new catalog of butch portraiture and a biography of the late-19th-century lesbian photographer Alice Austen to an archive of the annual Fire Island invasion and a reissue of a slim book of David Wojnarowicz’s reflections and watercolor paintings. —Lakshmi Rivera Amin, Associate Editor
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline by David Wojnarowicz
When Amy Scholder was preparing the first edition of this book in 1992, David Wojnarowicz was dying in his East Village apartment, the one he moved into after the death of artist Peter Hujar — his lover, friend, and mentor. Years later, Ocean Vuong would come across a book by Wojnarowicz at a downtown Housing Works; he pens the introduction to this reissue by Nightboat, tracing one of many queer lineages into the present, during a “different yet not too changed socio-political hellscape,” as he puts it.
On top of essays by the above, Memories includes watercolors based on Wojnarowicz’s memories of porn theaters and other drawings, what Scholder calls a “diary of desire”: men getting head in the dark, slumped over railings, engaging in group sex. The four accompanying stories tell tales drawn from or inspired by his adolescence as a vagabond, to put it lightly. As you might imagine, this collection is sometimes upsetting: In one of the stories, the 15-year-old narrator recounts the violent assaults he suffered as a sex worker in New York. Disease is all over this book — STDs and cancers, but most pressingly, the ravages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The powerful last story tells of the experience of being emptied out by the virus: “I’m a xerox of my former self. I can’t abstract my own dying any longer.” But the writing is hypnotic, colloquial, and often surprising — the first story, for instance, ends with the obliterative brightness of a policeman’s flashlight, the prose dissolving into short line segments, too. – Lisa Yin Zhang