IN 1992, JUST AFTER I turned 19, I moved cross-country to San Francisco to find a way to survive in a world that wanted me to die or disappear. As a faggot and a queen growing up in the midst of the AIDS crisis, I found so many of my heroes as they were dying of AIDS, or just after their deaths—writers, artists, performers, filmmakers, activists, iconoclasts, dreamers, outsiders, freaks, fruits, perverts, and whores trying desperately to continue making art against the grain of a dominant culture that was more than happy to see us perish. This was art as a means of self-expression, intervention, a desperate drive to create a legacy against death, against a government and a world that conspired in this death, and against forced removal from memory, history, and humanity.
Among the faggots and queens and gender-bending weirdos I found in this way, people who spoke to my self and sensibility, were Derek Jarman, Sam D’Allesandro, Essex Hemphill, David Feinberg, Marlon Riggs, Assotto Saint, Gil Cuadros, Cookie Mueller, Greer Lankton, Félix González-Torres, Joseph Beam, Ray Navarro, Vito Russo, Thomas Avena, Bo Huston, Jerome Caja, Reinaldo Arenas, David McDiarmid, Severo Sarduy—the list goes on. It never ends. Still today, I find new inspirations in those who died far too young, in their work that remains thanks to the tireless efforts of friends and lovers who survived them.
But no writer or artist spoke to me more powerfully than David Wojnarowicz. When I first found his work, it was as if I had found my rage in print for the first time, and simultaneously a feeling of hope in a world of loss. In his writing, desire pulses around everything: it charges the world and it changes the landscape. His invocation of public sex as a means of deep connection in the moment allowed me to let go of the shame I felt at cruising public bathrooms every day after high school, a secret world I had discovered.
Wojnarowicz’s refusal of propriety, of reprobation, of limits on the form of writing itself—all of this showed me a way into embodiment and, can I say, home? Because I’ve put his stencil of a burning house on my wall in every apartment I’ve lived in since I found his work. Burn it all down, he says, all those violent homes from which we emerged, the violence of the nuclear family itself, burn it all down before it smothers us.
I first found David Wojnarowicz via a review of Memories That Smell Like Gasoline, a book that came out just before his death of AIDS in 1992, and I rushed to Modern Times bookstore, around the corner from my apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District, to get a copy. There it was on the queer table. I picked it up and was surprised by the images (“surprise” would be an understatement). Was I shocked? In one, a big man with a navy tattoo holds the arm of what looks to be a tiny child, and a caption reads: “He suddenly pushed it against his butt. My hand disappeared. I was all shook up. Where did my hand go?”
Was this art? I’m embarrassed to say that I asked this question. So I read Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) first. This was the book that blew me open. What I mean is that it opened me up to the world.
Just listen to the opening sentence: “So my heritage is a calculated fuck on some faraway sun-filled bed while the curtains are being sucked in and out of an open window by a passing breeze.” I say “listen” because Wojnarowicz’s writing sings as much as it sears. Close to the Knives is a paean to desire and an evisceration of the American dream, a scraping-away of the detritus of the everyday and an ode to the shock of connection in the midst of violence. The writing knows no bounds: it tears through sex and politics, religion and craving and death, the intertwining of the AIDS crisis with governmental neglect, drugs and sex and intimacy and more death, always more death on the horizon, and yet there’s that sudden connection on the subway or the feeling of driving through the landscape with the sun in your eyes an open frame.
What I found when I first read Wojnarowicz was kinship. It felt like he was writing about my life. Even though I had grown up in upper-middle-class privilege and he was writing about the street, the way he describes childhood brutality—this was what I survived. And I didn’t even know it quite yet. Soon I would remember that I was sexually abused by my father, and this would change everything. It’s why that image in Memories That Smell Like Gasoline frightened me so much when I first saw it. I wasn’t that child, but I was that child. No hope for survival except dissociation.
Close to the Knives opens in a dissociative moment: “I’d be lying if I were to tell you I could remember the smell of sweat as I hadn’t even been born yet.” Past and present coagulate, commingle, conspire. Wojnarowicz never lets go of the disaster, because the disaster will never let go of us.
After Close to the Knives opened me up, I went back to Memories That Smell Like Gasoline—a much smaller book, dreamlike, the text suffused with watercolors and sketches. This time the images felt mundane—yes, the story of my life, I kept thinking. A naked guy on his knees with two dicks in his face, that was the sex club I just went to. The guy leaning back for a blow job in ecstasy as everything disappears or appears in the wash of the background like the clouds of memory. Men in the shadows. The clenching of a hand. Two guys posing for the camera. The macho man hiding in the shadows, always shadows until they become more cartoonlike, stories below, and the trauma is back, if it ever wasn’t there it’s there now, always the trauma, alongside everything else.
“Sometimes it gets dark in here behind these eyes I feel like the physical equivalent of a scream.” This short sentence begins the book. Short for Wojnarowicz, whose sentences often refuse the standards of punctuation and flow like water, like the wind, like the story you have to tell fast in order to get it down before it’s gone. But this short sentence—we don’t know where here is, but we know it’s dark and we can feel the scream.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is divided into four chapters, and the first chapter is the shortest, a spiral of memory on the road. “I hate highways but love speeding and I can only think of men’s bodies and the drift and sway of my own”—this short chapter takes us to the rest area, under the stalls, into a guy’s truck for the pleasure of that drive to swallow everything. The specificity of the restroom, a puddle between the stalls where Wojnarowicz can glimpse this guy jerking off. And then, when they’re together in that truck, and Wojnarowicz recounts how “his fingers and face scattered into shards of light.”
Wojnarowicz’s prose forms this light, these shards, that feeling of holding your breath. The desire for freedom, for company, it’s the language that holds us steady.
“Memories That Smell Like Gasoline,” the title chapter, is about taking a bus to a lake as a teenager in order to escape the struggle for survival on the streets of New York, and ending up getting raped in the back of a truck far from everything except pain. “What’s he doing kneeling on my head, I ain’t no doll with replaceable body parts.”
“Funny how everything all my life moved excruciatingly slow until this moment and now I’m just begging for it to stop,” Wojnarowicz writes, though the images that accompany this chapter don’t seem to go along with the story—a group sex scene, a guy bent over with his pants down, a hand in front of a naked chest, two guys jerking off together. So it’s as if this brutal memory belongs alongside the mundane, the everyday violence thrust back into Wojnarowicz’s head 15 years later in the lobby of a movie theater when he thinks he sees the guy who raped him, the shock of recognition as past and present intermingle. Past, in present tense: “I feel like I’m in motion like something flung out of a giant sling shot.” Present, in past tense: “I shrunk mentally and in size like a kid with no defenses not even my pocket knife.”
“I wanted walls to suddenly and abruptly burst out of the floor and rise between us,” Wojnarowicz continues. There’s an aching honesty about how survival works, and doesn’t work, how you’re frozen in that moment. Even when this guy is gone, Wojnarowicz writes, “I could still feel his gaze.” And yet, later, he admits to an affinity for “the violence that floats like static electricity that completely annihilates the possibility of future or security; I’m attracted to living like that, moment to moment, with very little piling up of information.” So, the threat of violence and the lure of attraction sit together side-by-side in this book. Violence as an escape from stultifying norms; violence as punishment for living outside these norms.
In the final chapter, we’re in the “spiral” of the sex club—desire and memory, memory and desire, desire and desire met. Which leads to visiting a friend in the hospital. Dreams of trying to escape death. Images of hospital light as his friend lies dying in a room filled with TV images of “large groups of kids in the saudi desert yakking about how they were going to march straight through to baghdad,” but “my friend is too weak to turn the channels on other people’s deaths.”
Turn the page and there’s a drawing of a man covered in lesions, eyes closed like it’s all too much, and, below, the inscription: “He burst into my home naked and covered in Kaposi threw me on the bed: ‘you would’ve thought I was sexy if you saw me before I got sick.’”
Desire and death. Death and desire. It’s not until the next page that we learn of Wojnarowicz’s own diagnosis: “When I found out I felt this abstract sensation, something like pulling off your skin and turning it inside out and then rearranging it so that when you pull it back on it feels like what it felt like before, only it isn’t and only you know it.”
We’re still in the sex club. No, we’re in the hospital: “I’ve been trying to fight the urge to throw up for the last two weeks. At first I thought it was food poisoning but slowly realized it was civilization.” Civilization is what Wojnarowicz is against, all this organized dying. But on the next page, a sex scene scribbled in the park with a caption that says, “I wish my eyes were movie cameras so I could record things like this in movement.” Desire still moves the text, in the midst of loss.
The final sketch in the book shows the softness of a guy’s naked body “reaching up towards me as I lay down on him.” Still the evening news, “all the flags in the streets and the zombie population going about its daily routines. I just want to puke it all out like an intense projectile.”
In Close to the Knives, Wojnarowicz writes, “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.” It’s what he’s doing here, in Memories That Smell Like Gasoline: making the private into something public to puncture the illusion of conformity to the death machine. By offering the most intimate vulnerability, images suffusing the text, a fever dream.
“I feel like a human bomb tick tick tick,” Wojnarowicz writes, on his deathbed. Fevers, nausea, headaches, “half-hour commercials disguised as talk shows,” dreams and nightmares, “I am convinced I am from another planet.”
But still the bathroom stall, desire as a refuge until it becomes a wound that reveals a TV screen with “the current president, smiling like a corpse in a vigilante movie […] a cannibal banquet attended by heads of state and the usual cronies.” Everything becomes one big hallucination of Oliver North, Whitney Houston, and the star-spangled banner until Wojnarowicz finally gets out of bed to vomit it all up.
“I am / disappearing but not fast enough,” Wojnarowicz writes—a description reminiscent of the opening sentence: “Sometimes it gets dark in here behind these eyes I feel like the physical equivalent of a scream.” What is the physical equivalent of a scream if not the scream?