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Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz
David Wojnarowicz was an abused child, a teen runaway, and a former Times Square hustler who used art to re-create himself. He never went to art school, barely finished high school, but emerged as one of the most important voices of his generation. He was a romantic figure, nurtured in a more vivid, more dangerous New York and central to its last bohemia. He also developed a reputation as an agitator because he dealt so openly with his homosexuality, so angrily with his circumstances as a Person With AIDS, and so fiercely with his would-be censors.
Wojnarowicz found his tribe in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and ’80s for both drugs and blight, as well as a burgeoning art scene. His creativity spilled out in paintings, photographs, films, texts, and installations, and in his life and its recounting – creating a sort of mythos around him, even among friends. First displayed in start-up storefront galleries, his art found greater notice – along with that of peers such as Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat – as uptown art collectors started looking downtown for the next big thing.
These artists moved into the national spotlight just as the AIDS plague began its devastating advance through so many creative worlds. Wojnarowicz spent some of his last years fighting not just the virus but the right-wing cultural warriors who wanted to end federal funding for artists, especially those who were openly gay. Indeed, Wojnarowicz’s work was still provoking and inflaming them in 2010, when the Catholic League protested the inclusion of an excerpt from his film A Fire in My Belly in a show at the National Portrait Gallery and the museum removed the piece, causing counter-furor. By then, Wojnarowicz had been gone for some eighteen years, having lost his battle with AIDS in 1992 at the age of thirty-seven.
Twenty years later, Cynthia Carr has written the first biography of Wojnarowicz, exhaustively researched and drawing heavily on interviews with family, friends and contemporaries. It is the untold story of a seminal and polarizing figure at a pivotal moment in American culture.
Wojnarowicz found his tribe in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and ’80s for both drugs and blight, as well as a burgeoning art scene. His creativity spilled out in paintings, photographs, films, texts, and installations, and in his life and its recounting – creating a sort of mythos around him, even among friends. First displayed in start-up storefront galleries, his art found greater notice – along with that of peers such as Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat – as uptown art collectors started looking downtown for the next big thing.
These artists moved into the national spotlight just as the AIDS plague began its devastating advance through so many creative worlds. Wojnarowicz spent some of his last years fighting not just the virus but the right-wing cultural warriors who wanted to end federal funding for artists, especially those who were openly gay. Indeed, Wojnarowicz’s work was still provoking and inflaming them in 2010, when the Catholic League protested the inclusion of an excerpt from his film A Fire in My Belly in a show at the National Portrait Gallery and the museum removed the piece, causing counter-furor. By then, Wojnarowicz had been gone for some eighteen years, having lost his battle with AIDS in 1992 at the age of thirty-seven.
Twenty years later, Cynthia Carr has written the first biography of Wojnarowicz, exhaustively researched and drawing heavily on interviews with family, friends and contemporaries. It is the untold story of a seminal and polarizing figure at a pivotal moment in American culture.
613 pages, Hardcover
First published March 27, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 127 reviews
August 17, 2012
I wept as I read the last pages of this astonishing book. It brought the most painful years of my life back so forcefully, so vividly. Anyone who was in New York in the 80s and early 90s will recognize just how accurately Cynthia Carr has evoked that time and place. And what can you say about David Wojnarowicz that hasn't been said before. He was a force, a comet, a genius--it's miraculous that the abused, abandoned, beaten, neglected boy who barely finished high school became the most important artist/activist of AIDS pandemic. But he was a genius. He was our Rimbaud. It was Rimbaud who said "Genius is the recovery of childhood, at will." Wojnarowicz's harrowing childhood fueled his anger and his art. We can only be grateful.
January 21, 2016
A beautiful and devastating love letter both to late artist David Wojnarowicz and to his surviving partner Tom Rauffenbart, this was quite possibly the most heartfelt and raw biography I've ever read. Cynthia Carr, an arts reporter who began observing Wojnarowicz's career from afar but would later become an integral part of his life toward the end, creates a portrait of Wojnarowicz that is intimate and gentle yet also honest and heartbreaking. You'll read about his rage during well-known battles against the Catholic Church and Sen. Jesse Helms and also about his less-well-known rage during unprovoked battles with close friends, lovers and colleagues. Always one step ahead of himself and one step behind, Wojnarowicz's one constant was a state of battle.
Chronicling Wojnarowicz from his tumultuous childhood in an abusive household and years surviving on the streets of New York to finding an outlet for his rage and pain in the arts and ultimately using his art to fight back against the powers perpetuating the plague of illness and discrimination upon homosexuals, Carr has left no archive material untouched, no person uninterviewed (save for the people no longer alive, a heartbreaking list of whom she begins the book with.). Her tone and scope magically and impressively exist within the DMZ between pop and academic histories; this rare achievement alone deserves extended applause for Carr and her publisher. Carr's intimate pre-invovlement with the subject only slightly becomes burdensome when the middle of the book becomes overly weighed down by a too extensive overview and retelling of the '80s art scene. But that's to be expected and ultimately simply provides an even greater canvas from which to watch Wojnarowicz blossom and grow.
As Carr writes in the introduction, "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." There will never be another David Wojnarowicz. Whether because the world doesn't need one any longer or because the world cannot create one is unclear. But the crater left by Wojnarowicz in our souls, both homosexual and non-, will be felt for generations. Studying his artifacts--in paintings, photographs, films, words and stories--will unfortunately have to be enough. Carr's phenomenal biography will surely be near the top of that pile.
Chronicling Wojnarowicz from his tumultuous childhood in an abusive household and years surviving on the streets of New York to finding an outlet for his rage and pain in the arts and ultimately using his art to fight back against the powers perpetuating the plague of illness and discrimination upon homosexuals, Carr has left no archive material untouched, no person uninterviewed (save for the people no longer alive, a heartbreaking list of whom she begins the book with.). Her tone and scope magically and impressively exist within the DMZ between pop and academic histories; this rare achievement alone deserves extended applause for Carr and her publisher. Carr's intimate pre-invovlement with the subject only slightly becomes burdensome when the middle of the book becomes overly weighed down by a too extensive overview and retelling of the '80s art scene. But that's to be expected and ultimately simply provides an even greater canvas from which to watch Wojnarowicz blossom and grow.
As Carr writes in the introduction, "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." There will never be another David Wojnarowicz. Whether because the world doesn't need one any longer or because the world cannot create one is unclear. But the crater left by Wojnarowicz in our souls, both homosexual and non-, will be felt for generations. Studying his artifacts--in paintings, photographs, films, words and stories--will unfortunately have to be enough. Carr's phenomenal biography will surely be near the top of that pile.
March 4, 2015
I’ve been reading this book on and off for the last two months, and, in a lot of ways, have been dreading writing a review: so much will be lost in trying to recount my thoughts from this massive work. Reading this has been – as I’m sure it has been for a lot of people – incredibly emotional and draining. I’ve had to stop a few times and come back to it because of that. During all of this I watched these movies, which didn’t help with the intensity of it all: Silence=Death (which prominently features Wojnarowciz), How to Survive a Plague, United in Anger, and Vito.
In wanting closure (if you can call it that) about Wojnarowicz’s life, I read the last 30 or so pages first, which detail his final few months. I cried throughout almost all it, and woke up in the next morning still thinking about him. I’ve just finished the book – and those last 30 pages again, less crying this time, but still very powerful – and am going to try and put some thoughts together.
Close to the Knives is one of the best books I’ve read in years. I was attracted particularly to David’s rage, tenacity, adventurous spirit and his (proto?) critique of civilization, or the Pre-Invented World. While reading about David in his teens and 20s, I was torn between appreciating being able to see him develop his thoughts about the world and what experiences, friendships and theories helped create that, but also feeling like it was an intrusion (especially about someone who seems to have been so private and a perfectionist about his work).
Ideologically, Dada and surrealism (along with some friendships) have gotten me to rethink some of my ideas about art (though in practice surrealism seems to almost utterly fail). I was glad to see surrealism (and Genet) as some of his influences. His eventual rejection of civilization and the time he spent in Paris made me wonder if he’d ever read Situationist theory.
His friendship and support of Peter Hujar and the impact of that loss for him are some of the most powerful parts of Close to the Knives for me. The couple of chapters about Hujar filled in a lot gaps for him that I’d been wondering about, and they serve as a well-done little biography of him.
There were a few times where it was hard to tell if a characteristic of David’s was exceptional or Carr was hung up on it: all of the examples of David’s explosive personality (especially with close friends) seems to be true, but early on and then occasionally throughout Carr keeps talking about how David intentionally crafted his personality. The evidence for this seems to be based on journal entries, which I imagine might skew this sort of thing. One talks about themselves differently in private, in journaling or in one’s own head.
In a similar vein, Carr points out a lot how David was actually a few years older than he said he was for some of the more devastating parts of his life – street hustling, abuse at the hands of his father and neglect from the absence of his mother – things that can’t really be quantified that well to begin with. I interpreted those age differences as David saying “I was too fucking young to have this happen to me, to deal with this.” Carr’s judgmental commentary on things like Hujar washing his pants in the sink also stand out.
Similar to Patti Smith’s Just Kids, I found the history of the Lower East Side and the artists in it interesting, though wanted a more critical eye to it – one that Carr seems incapable of bringing. The gentrifying role the artists she documents played is hardly touch upon, nor are the people who were the people living in the Lower East Side before or during the influx of artists. (I was glad the Tompkins Square Riot at least got a mention). Radicals and artists can often get tunnel vision and forget that there are other people living around them, exemplified in the synecdoche of referring to streets, neighborhoods or whole cities but meaning just the dozen or so friends they have there.
If there are a handful of personality traits that most artists share in common or if there is a role that the Artists plays in society, I’m both drawn to and repulsed by it. The attribute that most often exemplifies this for me is provocative unorthodoxy, particularly of libertory tendencies that think about themselves as beyond orthodoxy (but wreak of it nonetheless). Artists seem to be able to challenge this (the effects of some of this I’ve benefited greatly. If anarchism was the same as it was a hundred years ago it would be god awful. As much as it’s hard for me to admit this, art, among other things, has played a role in this). But to be close to artists as they push these limits is often hard for me, particularly when they have the mentality that anything can be talked about by anyone, at any time and if that upsets people they either just don’t get it, are anti-free speech or not tough enough.
It’s hard for me to say, but while I think I likely would not have been friends with David in real life(especially if his explosive personality is as true and ubiquitous as Carr makes out), I have indirectly benefitted from his rage against this world and directly benefited from his writings.
While thinking of the outbreak of AIDS and the pandemic of it in the US in the 80s and 90s, I’m often left wondering if I’d been alive then would I have survived? I’m profoundly grateful to those who spent their final years fighting for prevention and treatment of AIDS, and refusing to let themselves and myself inherent a sexuality that only has abstinence as a way of practice.
When David died, inspired by his writings on the topic, ACT-UP commemorated his life with the first of their political funerals. Ending in a bon-fire of his memorial banner, signs and reproductions of his work, this image from that march particularly moves me:
http://www.actupny.org/diva/CBwoj_fun...
For works of David’s:
http://www.ppowgallery.com/artist/the...
For Peter Hujar’s:
http://peterhujararchive.com/images/
In wanting closure (if you can call it that) about Wojnarowicz’s life, I read the last 30 or so pages first, which detail his final few months. I cried throughout almost all it, and woke up in the next morning still thinking about him. I’ve just finished the book – and those last 30 pages again, less crying this time, but still very powerful – and am going to try and put some thoughts together.
Close to the Knives is one of the best books I’ve read in years. I was attracted particularly to David’s rage, tenacity, adventurous spirit and his (proto?) critique of civilization, or the Pre-Invented World. While reading about David in his teens and 20s, I was torn between appreciating being able to see him develop his thoughts about the world and what experiences, friendships and theories helped create that, but also feeling like it was an intrusion (especially about someone who seems to have been so private and a perfectionist about his work).
Ideologically, Dada and surrealism (along with some friendships) have gotten me to rethink some of my ideas about art (though in practice surrealism seems to almost utterly fail). I was glad to see surrealism (and Genet) as some of his influences. His eventual rejection of civilization and the time he spent in Paris made me wonder if he’d ever read Situationist theory.
His friendship and support of Peter Hujar and the impact of that loss for him are some of the most powerful parts of Close to the Knives for me. The couple of chapters about Hujar filled in a lot gaps for him that I’d been wondering about, and they serve as a well-done little biography of him.
There were a few times where it was hard to tell if a characteristic of David’s was exceptional or Carr was hung up on it: all of the examples of David’s explosive personality (especially with close friends) seems to be true, but early on and then occasionally throughout Carr keeps talking about how David intentionally crafted his personality. The evidence for this seems to be based on journal entries, which I imagine might skew this sort of thing. One talks about themselves differently in private, in journaling or in one’s own head.
In a similar vein, Carr points out a lot how David was actually a few years older than he said he was for some of the more devastating parts of his life – street hustling, abuse at the hands of his father and neglect from the absence of his mother – things that can’t really be quantified that well to begin with. I interpreted those age differences as David saying “I was too fucking young to have this happen to me, to deal with this.” Carr’s judgmental commentary on things like Hujar washing his pants in the sink also stand out.
Similar to Patti Smith’s Just Kids, I found the history of the Lower East Side and the artists in it interesting, though wanted a more critical eye to it – one that Carr seems incapable of bringing. The gentrifying role the artists she documents played is hardly touch upon, nor are the people who were the people living in the Lower East Side before or during the influx of artists. (I was glad the Tompkins Square Riot at least got a mention). Radicals and artists can often get tunnel vision and forget that there are other people living around them, exemplified in the synecdoche of referring to streets, neighborhoods or whole cities but meaning just the dozen or so friends they have there.
If there are a handful of personality traits that most artists share in common or if there is a role that the Artists plays in society, I’m both drawn to and repulsed by it. The attribute that most often exemplifies this for me is provocative unorthodoxy, particularly of libertory tendencies that think about themselves as beyond orthodoxy (but wreak of it nonetheless). Artists seem to be able to challenge this (the effects of some of this I’ve benefited greatly. If anarchism was the same as it was a hundred years ago it would be god awful. As much as it’s hard for me to admit this, art, among other things, has played a role in this). But to be close to artists as they push these limits is often hard for me, particularly when they have the mentality that anything can be talked about by anyone, at any time and if that upsets people they either just don’t get it, are anti-free speech or not tough enough.
It’s hard for me to say, but while I think I likely would not have been friends with David in real life(especially if his explosive personality is as true and ubiquitous as Carr makes out), I have indirectly benefitted from his rage against this world and directly benefited from his writings.
While thinking of the outbreak of AIDS and the pandemic of it in the US in the 80s and 90s, I’m often left wondering if I’d been alive then would I have survived? I’m profoundly grateful to those who spent their final years fighting for prevention and treatment of AIDS, and refusing to let themselves and myself inherent a sexuality that only has abstinence as a way of practice.
When David died, inspired by his writings on the topic, ACT-UP commemorated his life with the first of their political funerals. Ending in a bon-fire of his memorial banner, signs and reproductions of his work, this image from that march particularly moves me:
http://www.actupny.org/diva/CBwoj_fun...
For works of David’s:
http://www.ppowgallery.com/artist/the...
For Peter Hujar’s:
http://peterhujararchive.com/images/
February 19, 2015
A fascinating bio of a man who, in his day, exemplified a social type now gone extinct: the angry AIDS activist. LIke the best bios, FITB not only tells the story of its subject, but the times he lived through. The evocation of the early '80s East Village art explosion is particularly well rendered. DW's story is, of course, mostly a sad one - childhood abuse, runaway teenage street hustling, early and utterly miserable death from AIDS - but his all-too-brief career as an art star and a few romances are in there too. My only quibble with this exhaustive bio is that it was a bit exhausting. To put us in DW's head Carr recounts not only his dreams, but the details of inconsequential squabbles between friends and business associates... and since DW was a notoriously prickly character, there are a LOT of these. She also spends too long detailing his youthful flounderings before he became an art star. Overall, though, the book does a truly excellent job painting a warts-and-all-but-still-sympathetic portrait of a thought-provoking, historically important, and utterly beguiling character.
November 4, 2014
David Wojnarowiz (voyna-ROW-vich) was born in 1954. His father beat him, and he was sexually abused by older boys. He barely finished high school and did not attend college, yet in the 1980s he became, for a short time, an art sensation in New York. He didn’t care about success, often living hand to mouth, and refused to take the next step that would ensure stability. That would have been selling out.
David was gay but arrived at that place by way of a rather indirect route. He preferred the intimacy of a relationship but often turned to the anonymous sex prevalent in New York City until the AIDS crisis became a problem. In the late eighties, he and his longtime companion were tested and both came up HIV positive.
The death of so many men may be one of the reasons why I continue to write. Not only must I do so in order to stay sane, alive, but I must do it for these people whose lives were cut short by a hateful and unrelenting disease—and a still indifferent culture. I’m surely not as gifted as David Wojnarowicz, but I must not waste the time given me. I participated in some of the same risky behaviors that many of my contemporaries did, and I was fortunate enough to emerge with a different roll of the dice. I must work to honor David and Tom. Would they still be together now? Would David have embraced his success? Would his burgeoning career have matured or fizzled out? Multiply his life times the hundreds or thousands of gifted gay men of that era who died. Their voices continue to shout at us from their discordant chorus. We owe a great debt to Cynthia Carr for allowing us to hear one of these voices loud and clear.
“David’s work was full of sex and violence—politics expressed at the level of the body. He painted distress. Soldiers and bombers. Falling buildings and junkies. His images had the tension of some niceness opened up to its ruined heart. In the montages he began to develop, David would expose the Real Deal under the artifacts—wars and rumors of wars, industrial wastelands, mythological beasts, and the evolutionary spectrum from dinosaur to humanity’s rough beast” (231).
David was gay but arrived at that place by way of a rather indirect route. He preferred the intimacy of a relationship but often turned to the anonymous sex prevalent in New York City until the AIDS crisis became a problem. In the late eighties, he and his longtime companion were tested and both came up HIV positive.
“David was beginning to consciously connect his family’s pathology to a larger worldview. He added an anecdote in the Eye about watching a cop kick a dope-sick junkie while arresting him: ‘And I’m feeling rage ‘cause in the midst of my bad mood this cop is inadvertently reaching in with his tentacles and probing in ice-pick fashion some vulnerable area from years ago maybe when my dad took me down in the basement for another routine of dog chain and baseball bat beatings or when he killed my pet rabbit and made me eat it . . . blam . . . blam . . . blam’“ (312).
“In the years after David’s death, Tom Rauffenbart sprinkled David’s ashes in places that had held meaning for him. He took some to the beach in St. John’s where they’d had their first sexy romantic vacation. He left ashes at the Great Swamp of New Jersey, at Teotihuacán, and at what was left of the Christopher Street pier. Then in October 1996, he joined in ACT UP’s second ‘Ashes Action’ in Washington, D.C. He got up to the fence and threw David onto the White House lawn” (578). It was something David had wanted, when he realized there would be no cure, to have his dead body thrown on the White House lawn.
The death of so many men may be one of the reasons why I continue to write. Not only must I do so in order to stay sane, alive, but I must do it for these people whose lives were cut short by a hateful and unrelenting disease—and a still indifferent culture. I’m surely not as gifted as David Wojnarowicz, but I must not waste the time given me. I participated in some of the same risky behaviors that many of my contemporaries did, and I was fortunate enough to emerge with a different roll of the dice. I must work to honor David and Tom. Would they still be together now? Would David have embraced his success? Would his burgeoning career have matured or fizzled out? Multiply his life times the hundreds or thousands of gifted gay men of that era who died. Their voices continue to shout at us from their discordant chorus. We owe a great debt to Cynthia Carr for allowing us to hear one of these voices loud and clear.
September 14, 2018
I’m sitting at the end of the dock, blinded by the sun’s reflection on the calm water and the tears that have been brimming my eyes for the last half an hour, only several escaping over the edge of my eyes. I had to remove myself from the commotion in our small, crowded cabin to finish the final pages of the book, which each took me three to four times as long to read as a normal page, partly due to not being able to see clearly and partly due to wanting to fully process every single last word Cynthia Carr wrote. Maybe this is dramatic to write in this review but I don’t know how to otherwise emphatically recommend this book. The combination of stories of David’s life and the lives of those in his surrounding community, the history of the late 70s, early 80s Lower East side art scene, and of course the emotional account of the AIDS crisis in New York City leading up to David’s death on July 22, 1992 made this biography the best I ever read and, I imagine, one of the best I will ever read.
January 6, 2013
The highpoints in this book are incredibly high. Two chapters which focus on Wojnarowicz's great friend and mentor Peter Hujar amount to a fantastic short biography of the latter (like Wojanrowicz, part of a class of 20th century artists I can't resist - volatile, hostile, self-destructively anti-careerist queer geniuses). And the final chapter, which deals with the point where Carr became friends with Wojnarowicz just as he began to slip into dementia and then passed away, is just heartbreaking.
In these sections, Carr's plain prose style serves her brilliantly. Elsewhere, it can seem lacking in nuance, variation, or simply excitement. Wojnarowicz is by no means always a sympathetic figure, and reading about his pre-fame angst and Beat-wannabe pretentions, or the abused-child rage that erupted over and over again to (verbally) batter and drive away his friends is testing, at best. A lot of this material would have benefited from being compressed. Tom, his last boyfriend, comes across at times as the secret hero of the story, and I sometimes found myself wanting to read his biography more than the book I had in my hands.
This took me ages to read. A few months back I was talking to my friend Tracey about how stressed and overwhelmed I was feeling. I'd just come back to Melbourne after a bad break up, I was hating my emotionally demanding, poorly paid job, and was trying to put my self-confidence back together after a run of bad decisions collapsed around me. We got onto the books we were reading, and I was like, "This biography of David Wojnarowicz, it's pretty great but I can't read it in public anymore because all the parts about the AIDS epidemic make me cry too much." Tracey looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Shane, I think you should read another book." It was good advice and I am putting it here because it was funny and I want to remember it, but I am glad I ended up finishing this.
In these sections, Carr's plain prose style serves her brilliantly. Elsewhere, it can seem lacking in nuance, variation, or simply excitement. Wojnarowicz is by no means always a sympathetic figure, and reading about his pre-fame angst and Beat-wannabe pretentions, or the abused-child rage that erupted over and over again to (verbally) batter and drive away his friends is testing, at best. A lot of this material would have benefited from being compressed. Tom, his last boyfriend, comes across at times as the secret hero of the story, and I sometimes found myself wanting to read his biography more than the book I had in my hands.
This took me ages to read. A few months back I was talking to my friend Tracey about how stressed and overwhelmed I was feeling. I'd just come back to Melbourne after a bad break up, I was hating my emotionally demanding, poorly paid job, and was trying to put my self-confidence back together after a run of bad decisions collapsed around me. We got onto the books we were reading, and I was like, "This biography of David Wojnarowicz, it's pretty great but I can't read it in public anymore because all the parts about the AIDS epidemic make me cry too much." Tracey looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Shane, I think you should read another book." It was good advice and I am putting it here because it was funny and I want to remember it, but I am glad I ended up finishing this.
April 27, 2024
I can’t say enough to describe how devastating this was. Cynthia Carr did an exceptional job bringing color to a sliver of New York history out of the east village. I’m beyond moved by David’s vision and what he believed in. He had so much rage, but he lived a fast and romantic life. The amount of loss to AIDS is unfathomable. This book was deeply moving and I’d encourage anyone to read it.
Additionally, I pieced together that “Hujar’s Place” is above the Angelika theater on second and twelfth. A place I’d call “my movie theater.” David spent the last 5 years of his life there and ultimately passed in the space. I have tickets to see a show there later today.
Additionally, I pieced together that “Hujar’s Place” is above the Angelika theater on second and twelfth. A place I’d call “my movie theater.” David spent the last 5 years of his life there and ultimately passed in the space. I have tickets to see a show there later today.
July 17, 2024
I read this book over several months - it's so damn long - so I didn't really have a constant state of mind throughout like I do with some books. But, also like a lot of longer reads, it becomes this constant backdrop to my life, like a mood or world that I get used to slipping back into and then when I get close to finishing the book I start dreading it because it'll feel a little disorienting to not have that mind frame to slip back into anymore. I think that's why when I was a kid I would literally finish a book and flip back to the beginning and start over again from page one. But it's not the same as reading it for the first time anyway and that feels like not a good use of time now.
I did start this book and give up a few times before I read it all the way through. David Wojnarowicz only lived to be 37 and this book is 624 pages so you can do the math on the level of detail. His artistic development and intellectual/emotional evolution is examined carefully throughout essentially every year of his life. So you should be interested and invested in him and his work if you read this book. If you are, this will be an extremely rewarding read.
What attracted me to David W. as an artist initially was his writing and not his visual work. His writing about AIDS and the experience of being sick expressed something I had never seen or heard before and that totally and completely resonated with me. It's raw and stripped back and makes me think of a dissonant guitar chord or scraping your knee on cement.
(For example, in writing about the Cardinal John O'Conner who served as Archbishop of New York from 1984 to 2000 and condemned homosexual activity throughout his tenure, blocking safe sex education programs and working to defeat gay rights bills in the city."This fat cannibal from that house of walking swastikas up on Fifth Avenue should lose his church tax-exempt status and pay retroactive taxes from the last couple centuries... I believe in the death penalty for people in positions of power who commit crimes against humanity...")
But he was also angry in this philosophical way. How completely unfair and isolating this kind of suffering was. How it's impossible to live with this sense of being ill and things never getting better but only ever getting worse. The loss of hope and the loss of purpose when you realize there's no grander theme to dying. It's just gross and human and messy and smelly and at the end a lot of times it's pitiful. To die gracefully is to die isolated. The way most people deal with pain is imagining the other side of it all, when there is no hope at the end of the tunnel, being sick or at least dealing with being sick, managing it, becomes a sort of identity.
David W. writes about his swings between numbness and rage. "I abstract the disease I have in the same way you abstract death. Sometimes I don't think about this disease for hours. This process lets me get work done, and work gives me life, or at least makes sense of living for short periods of time. Because I abstract this disease, it periodically knocks me on my ass with its relentlessness...I find myself after a while responding to it for a fractured moment with my pre-AIDS thought processes: "All right this is enough already; it should just go away." But...at this point in history the virus' activity is forever."
The author, Cynthia Carr, talks about David learning about "the wrong way to die" from caring for his mentor and sometimes lover, the photographer, Peter Hujar. Hujar passed away from AIDs in the years before David was diagnosed. Never a particularly warm and fuzzy personality, Hujar became a downright menace in the last years of his life. He couldn't come to terms with the fact that he was sick and suffering and there would be no relief, it would only get worse until he died. He lashed out at those trying to care for him, told his friends he never wanted to see them again then accused them of abandoning him. I thought about this part a lot. His reaction is probably appropriate to what he was going through. But to react fully to the whole scope of it and to feel how unfair and purposeless and painful it is all the time, is also to function as kind of an insane person. /
Last thought about the author herself -- Cynthia Carr was close with David personally, they met when she covered his work as a young critic for the Village Voice and I liked how in the later chapters of the book Carr starts inserting herself more into the narrative. After she explains historically the progress of gentrification or the devastation of the AIDS crisis she'll finish with an illustration of those events from her own memory. It's never more than a sentence or two but always poignant. What it felt like to see her community strive, flourish and then crumble.
I did start this book and give up a few times before I read it all the way through. David Wojnarowicz only lived to be 37 and this book is 624 pages so you can do the math on the level of detail. His artistic development and intellectual/emotional evolution is examined carefully throughout essentially every year of his life. So you should be interested and invested in him and his work if you read this book. If you are, this will be an extremely rewarding read.
What attracted me to David W. as an artist initially was his writing and not his visual work. His writing about AIDS and the experience of being sick expressed something I had never seen or heard before and that totally and completely resonated with me. It's raw and stripped back and makes me think of a dissonant guitar chord or scraping your knee on cement.
(For example, in writing about the Cardinal John O'Conner who served as Archbishop of New York from 1984 to 2000 and condemned homosexual activity throughout his tenure, blocking safe sex education programs and working to defeat gay rights bills in the city."This fat cannibal from that house of walking swastikas up on Fifth Avenue should lose his church tax-exempt status and pay retroactive taxes from the last couple centuries... I believe in the death penalty for people in positions of power who commit crimes against humanity...")
But he was also angry in this philosophical way. How completely unfair and isolating this kind of suffering was. How it's impossible to live with this sense of being ill and things never getting better but only ever getting worse. The loss of hope and the loss of purpose when you realize there's no grander theme to dying. It's just gross and human and messy and smelly and at the end a lot of times it's pitiful. To die gracefully is to die isolated. The way most people deal with pain is imagining the other side of it all, when there is no hope at the end of the tunnel, being sick or at least dealing with being sick, managing it, becomes a sort of identity.
David W. writes about his swings between numbness and rage. "I abstract the disease I have in the same way you abstract death. Sometimes I don't think about this disease for hours. This process lets me get work done, and work gives me life, or at least makes sense of living for short periods of time. Because I abstract this disease, it periodically knocks me on my ass with its relentlessness...I find myself after a while responding to it for a fractured moment with my pre-AIDS thought processes: "All right this is enough already; it should just go away." But...at this point in history the virus' activity is forever."
The author, Cynthia Carr, talks about David learning about "the wrong way to die" from caring for his mentor and sometimes lover, the photographer, Peter Hujar. Hujar passed away from AIDs in the years before David was diagnosed. Never a particularly warm and fuzzy personality, Hujar became a downright menace in the last years of his life. He couldn't come to terms with the fact that he was sick and suffering and there would be no relief, it would only get worse until he died. He lashed out at those trying to care for him, told his friends he never wanted to see them again then accused them of abandoning him. I thought about this part a lot. His reaction is probably appropriate to what he was going through. But to react fully to the whole scope of it and to feel how unfair and purposeless and painful it is all the time, is also to function as kind of an insane person. /
Last thought about the author herself -- Cynthia Carr was close with David personally, they met when she covered his work as a young critic for the Village Voice and I liked how in the later chapters of the book Carr starts inserting herself more into the narrative. After she explains historically the progress of gentrification or the devastation of the AIDS crisis she'll finish with an illustration of those events from her own memory. It's never more than a sentence or two but always poignant. What it felt like to see her community strive, flourish and then crumble.
January 18, 2014
I started reading Fire in the Belly last January, but read the latter half of the book over the first week of 2014. A year ago I wasn't very familiar with David's writing or visual art. For instance, I wasn't aware of the litigation he went though later in his career for the sexual and the political content in his work. During his lawsuit against the American Family Association, David defended his use of sexual images by stating that "If my work is going to reflect my life, then I'm going to put sexuality into my work."
Twenty years later, his work still upsets people, but the problem isn't his sexuality. It's his anger. I discovered "Fire in My Belly" and "One day this kid..." because of an enormous controversy surrounding David's work in 2010. A friend organized a screening and discussion of "Fire in My Belly" at The New School. This was shortly after the film was withdrawn from the Hide/Seek exhibit at the Smithsonian, and this was my introduction to the art of David Wojnarowicz: an image of ants crawling across a crucifix being publicly labeled "a distraction." A distraction in show about homosexuality, in a world where the devout shout "You won't be here next year, you'll get AIDS and die, hahaha!" at a Gay Pride march outside St. Patrick's.
Cynthia Carr holds no pretense of being an unbiased or absent narrator; while throughout most of the book she commands a straightforward, journalistic tone, she also writes about her firsthand experiences as a friend of David's. Particularly toward the end of his life, she was among the few friends he hadn't shunned. She does not, however, paint a rose colored picture of David. His relationships and behavior were not immune to the rage that ignited his art, and many close to him suffered dearly.
I put down Carr's biography in March to read David's memoir, Close to the Knives, which had a huge impact on me. It took a long time for me to pick Fire in the Belly back up, and I think I can admit I wasn't ready to reach the end of David's life. Throughout the first half of the book, I can remember even positive developments were haunted by his eventual diagnosis and death, by Peter Hujar's death, by the deaths of so many of his friends and peers. The deaths themselves, while they carried emotional weight, weren't difficult to read about compared to gut plunging dramatic irony of reading David make preparations for a future he wouldn't get to live.
Twenty years later, his work still upsets people, but the problem isn't his sexuality. It's his anger. I discovered "Fire in My Belly" and "One day this kid..." because of an enormous controversy surrounding David's work in 2010. A friend organized a screening and discussion of "Fire in My Belly" at The New School. This was shortly after the film was withdrawn from the Hide/Seek exhibit at the Smithsonian, and this was my introduction to the art of David Wojnarowicz: an image of ants crawling across a crucifix being publicly labeled "a distraction." A distraction in show about homosexuality, in a world where the devout shout "You won't be here next year, you'll get AIDS and die, hahaha!" at a Gay Pride march outside St. Patrick's.
Cynthia Carr holds no pretense of being an unbiased or absent narrator; while throughout most of the book she commands a straightforward, journalistic tone, she also writes about her firsthand experiences as a friend of David's. Particularly toward the end of his life, she was among the few friends he hadn't shunned. She does not, however, paint a rose colored picture of David. His relationships and behavior were not immune to the rage that ignited his art, and many close to him suffered dearly.
I put down Carr's biography in March to read David's memoir, Close to the Knives, which had a huge impact on me. It took a long time for me to pick Fire in the Belly back up, and I think I can admit I wasn't ready to reach the end of David's life. Throughout the first half of the book, I can remember even positive developments were haunted by his eventual diagnosis and death, by Peter Hujar's death, by the deaths of so many of his friends and peers. The deaths themselves, while they carried emotional weight, weren't difficult to read about compared to gut plunging dramatic irony of reading David make preparations for a future he wouldn't get to live.
July 23, 2022
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. I feel the warmth and texture simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle disappearing from around the organs and detaching itself from the bones. I see the organs gradually fade into transparency leaving a gleaming skeleton gleaming like ivory that slowly revolves until it becomes dust. I am consumed in the sense of your weight the way your flesh occupies momentary space the fullness of it beneath my palms. I am amazed at how perfectly your body fits to the curves of my hands. If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. 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 up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would. It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.
June 22, 2024
This is one of the best biographies I have ever read. Written by someone who knew, loved, and talked many times with David Wojnarowicz over the years, it was put together so lovingly. It did not shy away from David at his worst, but it also showed David at his very best.
I really could not believe how much I did not know about the AIDS crisis and epidemic and the generation of people lost to a horrific disease. I have learned so much about David that I love sharing with other people.
He lived such a wild life. My favorite parts of this biography are his discussion of art, his writings, his complex relationships with men and women, Peter Hujar, his final partner Tom, and his political activism.
The last chapter of this book is truly devastating, following David’s slow descent into sickness he would never recover from. As the disease ate away at his brain, he became more childlike and showed wonder that he deserved to feel throughout his life, not just when he was dying of AIDS.
If you know anything about the AIDS epidemic, you’ve probably seen the iconic photo of David in a leather jacket that says to dump his body on the White House steps. His partner Tom spread the last of David’s ashes there during an ACT UP demonstration.. and I had goosebumps as the book ended.
Truly a remarkable life and devastating loss to the world and art community back in 1992.
I really could not believe how much I did not know about the AIDS crisis and epidemic and the generation of people lost to a horrific disease. I have learned so much about David that I love sharing with other people.
He lived such a wild life. My favorite parts of this biography are his discussion of art, his writings, his complex relationships with men and women, Peter Hujar, his final partner Tom, and his political activism.
The last chapter of this book is truly devastating, following David’s slow descent into sickness he would never recover from. As the disease ate away at his brain, he became more childlike and showed wonder that he deserved to feel throughout his life, not just when he was dying of AIDS.
If you know anything about the AIDS epidemic, you’ve probably seen the iconic photo of David in a leather jacket that says to dump his body on the White House steps. His partner Tom spread the last of David’s ashes there during an ACT UP demonstration.. and I had goosebumps as the book ended.
Truly a remarkable life and devastating loss to the world and art community back in 1992.
July 5, 2019
Beautiful, heartbreaking, and seemingly factually on point. Life was real for queer artists coming up in the 70s and 80s. He really had a good spirit that also frustrated a lot of people. I appreciated the glossy pictures of his paintings and street art as I was more familiar with his writings. David had a wonderful approach to art making, that anyone could do it, but he also worked extremely hard on his techniques and made his way through the New York City art world. It was also interesting to see the story of someone who came of age in that city, but then ended up being the antagonist and beneficiary of outside interests in the arts. He was very brave in the face of AIDS but the book also documents his pain in an elegant and respectful manner. Full of very serious moments with trauma, but also funny pranks that David pulled.
Thanks Pat!
We ended up listening to a vinyl set of his audio/cassette journals over a couple months. Similar to his writings, tragic, lovely and experimental.
Thanks Pat!
We ended up listening to a vinyl set of his audio/cassette journals over a couple months. Similar to his writings, tragic, lovely and experimental.
May 30, 2016
Biographies are often great, not only because you learn about the person but you learn about the world in which he or she existed, in this case the art world of the East Village in the 70s and 80s. Carr does a great job telling a difficult story about a difficult person who led a difficult life.
April 1, 2020
One of the greatest books I’ve ever read.
August 4, 2021
The first part of the book established his turbulent childhood and relationship with his family. The second part of the book talked about his explorations different art forms, trying to find his style (while always being a hair's breadth from homeless). There was a lot of details on his early works and who are all the artists he collaborated with, it basically chronicled the rise and fall of East Village art scene as well. The last part focused on the AIDs epidemic and his activism, which hit his community especially hard. It seems like every few months someone he knows has died from AIDS and his anger at the negligence from the government fuels his work.
The first and second part was interesting and the last part was powerful. I liked that the author showed detailed interactions between him and other artist/people important to him, usually backed up by letters or witnesses, some were hilarious. I like how she was able to portray how charming/intense versus how difficult he could be, all through these interactions. For example, he started a road trip with a few friends, fought with them and ditched them, then called up a few other friends to continue the trip, and again fought and ditched these people, rinse and repeat a couple more times on the same trip. But it's this same intensity and introspection that helped him fight for a voice. One thing I wish there was more of is pictures of his work, reading descriptions of his work can be tedious at time.
The first and second part was interesting and the last part was powerful. I liked that the author showed detailed interactions between him and other artist/people important to him, usually backed up by letters or witnesses, some were hilarious. I like how she was able to portray how charming/intense versus how difficult he could be, all through these interactions. For example, he started a road trip with a few friends, fought with them and ditched them, then called up a few other friends to continue the trip, and again fought and ditched these people, rinse and repeat a couple more times on the same trip. But it's this same intensity and introspection that helped him fight for a voice. One thing I wish there was more of is pictures of his work, reading descriptions of his work can be tedious at time.
December 22, 2020
This is an historical and extremely intimate, revolutionary, fierce life of one of the most profound voices of his generation: New York, the art scene of the '80s, AIDS, and the right-wing religious crazed fanatics out for genocide. One of the all-time best biographies I've read. Didn't want it to end. Didn't want David or any of these brilliant, beautiful beings to go through hell and the endless torture of existence. Get ready to cry and live through this period. Absolutely unforgettable and mesmerizing! Should be required reading! In flames from start to finish!
I went to youtube while reading this and saw the retrospective of Wojnarowicz's work! and also his poetry. WOW!! Get a copy!
I went to youtube while reading this and saw the retrospective of Wojnarowicz's work! and also his poetry. WOW!! Get a copy!
April 10, 2021
I'm a bit overwhelmed tight now to write a proper review, because the last 100 pages of this biography have consumed all my tears and now i'll need quite a bit of time before I can start to read something else. This was an extremely intense and engaging biography, especially from the second half on - I've spent the last days reading it whenever I had 5 minutes of free time. Cynthia Carrr's work of research and narration is impressive; this seems less a biography than a long love letter to the East Village of the late 70s and 80s, and to the human and artistic personality of David Wojnarowicz. Acutely necessary, acutely recommended.
March 2, 2022
Não conhecia David Wojnarowicz antes de ler o livro The Lonely City.
Da leitura do livro fiquei muito curiosa e com muita vontade de saber mais sobre David Wojnarowicz.
A opção óbvia foi a leitura desta muitíssimo detalhada biografia (às vezes até demasiado, com episódios laterais que me pareceram pouco relevantes).
A vida dele é algo de esmagador. Desde a sua duríssima infância às lutas que teve de travar contra o preconceito oficial relativamente à sua obra (e à de outros artistas gay) e a profunda ausência de interesse , institucionalizada, no que respeita à luta contra a SIDA.
Paralelamente, é extraordinária a forma como vivia a sua arte, demarcando-se de uma forma incisiva do negócio e da perspectiva de se encarar uma obra de arte como um mero investimento.
Acabei o livro em lágrimas.
Da leitura do livro fiquei muito curiosa e com muita vontade de saber mais sobre David Wojnarowicz.
A opção óbvia foi a leitura desta muitíssimo detalhada biografia (às vezes até demasiado, com episódios laterais que me pareceram pouco relevantes).
A vida dele é algo de esmagador. Desde a sua duríssima infância às lutas que teve de travar contra o preconceito oficial relativamente à sua obra (e à de outros artistas gay) e a profunda ausência de interesse , institucionalizada, no que respeita à luta contra a SIDA.
Paralelamente, é extraordinária a forma como vivia a sua arte, demarcando-se de uma forma incisiva do negócio e da perspectiva de se encarar uma obra de arte como um mero investimento.
Acabei o livro em lágrimas.
November 13, 2024
The best biographies make you feel as if you are right next to the subject as their lives are unfolding. Carr not only gives us Wojnarowicz’s experiences but makes you feel as if you can see the worlds he is inhabiting. A magnificent book written without sentimentality but bursting with admiration and affection.
February 19, 2017
A 'warts and all' profile of an artist who led an extremely eventful life from childhood through to his death from AIDS, and whose work influenced some of ACT Up's campaign in the early 1990s. Interesting but very long...
November 7, 2025
Incredible biography and absolutely devastating look at the kind of losses AIDS had on art and culture. The author’s own semi-personal relationship with David seems to have had an big influence on the amount of intimate detail and insights into the authors life and work.
Really impressed with the way the early years of David’s life were retold and speculatively stitched together from what members of David’s family recounted.
The book was quite long but not at all dense in the way I’d expect an artist’s biography to be for someone with minimal knowledge of the art world or art history.
Really impressed with the way the early years of David’s life were retold and speculatively stitched together from what members of David’s family recounted.
The book was quite long but not at all dense in the way I’d expect an artist’s biography to be for someone with minimal knowledge of the art world or art history.
June 11, 2017
Wow, it took me a year to read this?? But it was great, and the last chapter gutted me. An amazing artist with an amazing life.
January 1, 2025
Best biography I've read maybe ever
January 1, 2026
Tohutu mammutraamat. Lugesin seda tükatiselt alates sügisest ja pingutasin, et aasta lõpuks läbi saada. Viimased lehed jäid 1. jaanuarisse. Ma polnud kuulnudki David Wojnarowiczist enne seda, sain viite Olivia Laingi New Yorgi üksinduse raamatust. Raske saatusega kunstnik, see polnud kerge lugemine, aga väga paeluv ja veenev. Sain nii palju teada East Village kunstielust 80ndatel ja AIDSi kriisist.
June 11, 2024
I cannot overstate how much I absolutely LOVED this slow-burn of a book which touches on so many urgent and important issues that remain relevant today some 35 years on...from Wojnarowicz's over-the-top dysfunctional/abusive family experience growing up to his general juvenile delinquency to his furtive days of hustling in Times Square & environs.
Within all of this, Carr also chronicles the meteoric rise and rapid fall of the early-80s East Village art scene--which also coincidentally meshed with the horrors of the growing AIDS pandemic--and the moral panic over NEA funding of "controversial" artists, such as Karen Finley and (of course) Wojnarowicz, neither of whom ever downplayed or otherwise hid the overt sexuality inherent in their work. Even better, Carr gives the reader an insider's view of Wojnarowicz's artistic process...the how & why he did what he did when he did it.
As one of the best depictions of the death and destruction wrought by AIDS that I have read, the devastating final 100 pages (or so) will haunt me for some time, I am quite sure.
“In the lands of dictatorships there are never billboards or newspaper ads announcing that oppressive policies are in action. It is always taking place in much more subtle ways such as in the guise of ‘taste’ or ‘morality’.”--David Wojnarowicz
Within all of this, Carr also chronicles the meteoric rise and rapid fall of the early-80s East Village art scene--which also coincidentally meshed with the horrors of the growing AIDS pandemic--and the moral panic over NEA funding of "controversial" artists, such as Karen Finley and (of course) Wojnarowicz, neither of whom ever downplayed or otherwise hid the overt sexuality inherent in their work. Even better, Carr gives the reader an insider's view of Wojnarowicz's artistic process...the how & why he did what he did when he did it.
As one of the best depictions of the death and destruction wrought by AIDS that I have read, the devastating final 100 pages (or so) will haunt me for some time, I am quite sure.
“In the lands of dictatorships there are never billboards or newspaper ads announcing that oppressive policies are in action. It is always taking place in much more subtle ways such as in the guise of ‘taste’ or ‘morality’.”--David Wojnarowicz
March 16, 2015
Huge, detailed, nuanced, and very moving biography of a complex man. Wojnarowicz created something of a mythology out of his awful childhood, which included terrible abuse and teen sex work in Times Square, but Carr deftly explore the ramifications it had on every aspect of his life. The section on Wojnarowicz's young adulthood dragged a bit, as he had not yet found his centre as a visual artist - young adult drift isn't that fascinating. But as I went on I began to see why it was a necessary piece of the whole. It was fascinating to see how Wojnarowicz moved from that drift to a real confidence in his own distinct approach to art.
Carr does a fantastic job bringing to life the New York arts scene of the 1980s, the culture wars of the era, the politics of gentrification, and the impact and sociopolitical history of AIDS. She was there too, and knew Wojnarowicz and many of the other people on the scene, so particularly towards the end of the book we find her there, visiting him as he was dying, and speaking with his partner. But she's never intrusive and the book's not about the author's journey of discovery masked as research - it's about Wojnarowicz and his world. Really excellent.
Carr does a fantastic job bringing to life the New York arts scene of the 1980s, the culture wars of the era, the politics of gentrification, and the impact and sociopolitical history of AIDS. She was there too, and knew Wojnarowicz and many of the other people on the scene, so particularly towards the end of the book we find her there, visiting him as he was dying, and speaking with his partner. But she's never intrusive and the book's not about the author's journey of discovery masked as research - it's about Wojnarowicz and his world. Really excellent.
July 4, 2019
This is a really strong biography of David Wojnarowicz, a fascinating artist who was dealt a shitty hand early in life but was able to persevere and channel a great deal of it into powerful images and beautiful words. It would seem that many have described him or his work as "angry", mostly due to his most-known images and visceral rage during the AIDS crisis, but I think that's far too simple. While it's known that he was kind of prickly, even to those he was closest to, and extremely resistant to being pigeon-holed (well, really, who isn't?), what I see is a pure romantic who displayed an overwhelmingly strong current of compassion and desire for connection - in every sense of the word - in everything he created. And that's what endures; it's everything.
Anyway, while it definitely wasn't an easy read as it left me in tears and very emotionally exhausted, I really did appreciate learning about this truly unique, complex and inspiring individual and the East Village art scene in such an immersive way.
Anyway, while it definitely wasn't an easy read as it left me in tears and very emotionally exhausted, I really did appreciate learning about this truly unique, complex and inspiring individual and the East Village art scene in such an immersive way.
September 1, 2012
Cindy Carr has written the essential book on David Wojnarowicz, neither academic study nor pop biography. Wojnarowicz has always been a sort of cultural lightning rod. He's a classic outsider, a high school dropout from a broken family, leaving home at 16 and living on the streets of New York, and like many outsiders he had a complex relation with the art world, where in some sense he became a true insider, an artist's artist. Carr knew him for the last decade of his life, and her familiarity with him, his sensibility, and the world he inhabited makes this a unique biography. Her crystalline writing heightens the wildness and brilliance of his work, and places him at the center of the reclamation of the way AIDS was thought about, expressed, and lived by a generation of HIV positive gay men. His galvanic effect remains powerful, with his art work still censored and vilified by mainstream cultural arbiters.
October 3, 2012
I can't recommend this book highly enough. It's impeccably researched, beautifully written, and utterly fascinating . . . along with completely heartbreaking. It's kind of easy these days to forget about the AIDS death toll of the 80s and early 90s. Each death, set apart in a one-line sentence, is like a knife to the heart. So many beautiful, vibrant people died while the government did nothing and society actively shunned the ill.
Wojnarowicz was an incredible writer and artist, but Carr goes deeper, revealing the sometimes difficult person he could be (and when you read about his childhood, you understand why), forming a beautifully nuanced portrait of a brilliant man.
Several friends have asked to borrow my copy, but I'm not lending it out. Art like this needs to be supported, so I urge everyone to buy their own copy. Also, if it wasn't returned to me in the same pristine condition, I would probably cut a bitch.
Wojnarowicz was an incredible writer and artist, but Carr goes deeper, revealing the sometimes difficult person he could be (and when you read about his childhood, you understand why), forming a beautifully nuanced portrait of a brilliant man.
Several friends have asked to borrow my copy, but I'm not lending it out. Art like this needs to be supported, so I urge everyone to buy their own copy. Also, if it wasn't returned to me in the same pristine condition, I would probably cut a bitch.
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