DAVID WOJNAROWICZ
Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
This abrasive, masterfully written, self-eviscerating, entirely unsentimental memoir is one that is practically boiling over with anger and lust and menace. It was an influential book in its own place and time... much like Wojnarowicz's equally visceral yet haunting art. The free-flowing, stream of conscious writing recounts the author's life, his dreams, ambitions, failures, life on the streets, life with men, and - quite memorably - his dark and vindictive fantasies of vengeance on those who would limit the freedom of queers and treat people living with AIDS as anathema. Best of all, running through it all: a warm, glowing seam of compassion and tenderness, particularly for those who are awkward, weak, physically imperfect, alienated, rootless, out of balance: the un-beautiful.
Back in college, this was considered a profound work of art by me and my small distaff group of literary friends (I wonder what happened to them all?)...I also remember trying to explain this author and his impact on me to other, closer, more fratty and mainstream friends. To no avail. They could understand and appreciate Alan Moore or Herman Hesse but apparently Wojnarowicz was too intense for them, too queer. All they could focus on was the fact that one of his works became the cover of a U2 album. Ah well. Perhaps this book is destined to mainly be appreciated by queers who are impacted by AIDS and those who live and breathe outsider politics.
Outside of this work and his various art pieces, the author can be viewed literally sewing his mouth shut in the unsettling gonzo provocation Silence=Death by Rosa von Praunheim (agent provocateur for gay rights in Germany) - a video which also features the equally seminal Keith Haring and Allen Ginsberg, as well as some emotional AIDS Quilt commentary and a painfully resonant deathbed testimonial.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline
angry dark corrosive self-lacerating; stark sad lonely contemplative; the road the theater the restrooms the back alleys; driven diseased desperate despairing... these four stories, these four personal narratives put on display a hungry heart and an even hungrier dick - fully illustrated by graphic and haunting black & white drawings with blurred and shadowy line work - a heart and a dick and an emptiness and a need, four things that drove him out to the streets and inwards to himself, lashing himself and lashing out; his early life as a pre-teen and then teenage prostitute scarring him irrevocably but also providing fuel for his creative rage, a rage and a lust that is somehow so childlike - fully embraced by this version of a children's book that contains these stories - and yet something so old because terrible experiences can age a man, can make his outlook blurred and his world a shadowy place, can make him embrace death... and yet he lived, to embrace the ugly as beautiful and as real, he lived to write and rage and to comfort and mourn and most of all, he lived to tell... and then he died, before his time. rest in peace, David Wojnarowicz, you broken man who survived your breaking and showed your wounds for all the world to see, rest in peace you beautiful soul, one of my first inspirations; you taught me so much.