Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  Meanwhile, back in Washington, John Frohnmayer had decided to tell people what he might have said during the Artists Space meltdown: “Tongues of Flame” had been funded before he got there, and he did not have to comment on it. Frohnmayer was only off the hook until the self-appointed watchdogs found their next “degenerate” artist. And David wasn’t off the hook at all.

  Patrick McDonnell was an Illinois State graduate student in the Art Department who worked at University Galleries and acted as preparator for David’s retrospective, unpacking the work and helping to hang and light it. He and David had met during David’s first visit to Normal, the previous October. Patrick knew nothing about David’s work, and they didn’t speak until David started laughing at a piece Patrick had made from an empty Etch A Sketch; on it he’d spray-fixed a drawing of an armless man with a huge erection. Patrick had just come out. The piece was about his frustration over being gay and never acting on it. For the remaining days of that October visit, said Patrick, “if there was a moment that we had to share, we were having it.”

  When David arrived before the opening in January, he said to Patrick, “Take me through the show and tell me what you like and what you don’t like.”

  “I still didn’t know anything about his work. So I took him over to this one piece and said, ‘This looks unfinished.’ ” It was one of the driftwood totems.w “David said, ‘Really!’ And I said, ‘Yes. This piece looks like you just stopped.’ David went into the office and he grabbed some brushes and paint and brought them out to me, and he said, ‘Here. You finish it.’ “ Patrick declined.

  One night David went to see Driving Miss Daisy with Patrick and his roommate, Anna Marie Watkins. When they got back to Barry Blinderman’s house, where David was staying, he said to them, “I don’t want to become friends with you guys, because I’m going to die. It’s not right to impose that on someone.”

  Patrick told him he’d had friends who died and he’d almost died himself, and it didn’t matter. “I wanted to be near him and I told him so,” said Patrick. “I felt like I could relate to him on so many different levels.” For one thing, Patrick had spent time as a kid living on the streets of Houston—along with his mother and siblings. His father had abandoned the family. His mother was schizophrenic. They lived intermittently with Patrick’s grandmother, but she was incapacitated and poor. So the kids all cleaned houses and mowed lawns to get money for food, and when that didn’t bring enough, they’d borrow from the neighbors, who knew they weren’t going to get it back. Their grandmother would throw them all out when the mother became particularly difficult. Sometimes the mother would find a guy to move in with, and he’d provide for a while, then get tired of it, and they’d try going back to their grandmother. Patrick and his siblings also lived briefly with an uncle and did a couple of stints in foster care. He attended seventeen different schools, thinking everyone lived that way. Finally, at the age of seventeen, with two years of high school to go, Patrick moved in with his brother’s ex-girlfriend, who gave him the first stress-free environment of his life. Eventually, he was able to get a full scholarship to Texas A&M at Corpus Christi.

  David was a revelation. Patrick had bought into all the stereotypes about gay men, and David didn’t fit any of them: “He was just himself, and that’s what I wanted to be.” Patrick was nine years younger than David. They spent a lot of time together just talking, going out for breakfast, driving around town. David would tell him, “You’re driving Miss Daisy.” This was the last major friendship David developed in his life. He treated Patrick as though he were a younger brother, encouraging and advising him. He tried to be the mentor Hujar had once been to him. “He wanted me to make a way for myself that I didn’t have as a child growing up,” Patrick said. When he told David, for example, that he wanted to drop out of graduate school, David urged him not to, saying, “You’ll regret that.” In the end, Patrick was glad he took that advice.

  “He wanted me to explore my sexuality beyond what I had,” said Patrick. “I really wasn’t dating anybody, but there were some guys I wanted to date, and he would say, ‘Well, ask ’em, Patrick.’ “ He even suggested an icebreaker: “Tell them you know the famous artist from New York, and you can introduce them.”

  Patrick told David about “the Square,” a gay cruising area that extended from the courthouse in Bloomington to an adult bookstore in Normal. He commented that the men who went there were desperate. David said, “You know, Patrick, you’re a prude. Those men are not desperate. They happen to know what they want, and they’re going to go get it. You tell me all the time what you want, and you’re not going to go get it, so fuck you.”

  “So,” Patrick said, “I took that challenge.” He started cruising the Square with David. “We never picked anybody up. We would just look.” Sometimes they would drive around town and see an attractive guy and start howling or woofing.

  David told Patrick stories about the days when he went to the piers for sex. When he wanted to find a run-down site like that in Bloomington or Normal so he could stage a photo, Patrick took him to an old warehouse in an abandoned railyard. There David photographed Patrick in a headdress made from maps, kind of a Krazy Kat with a long nose that said “culture.” He’d made masks like this for himself in years past. This time he added a clown collar fashioned from large fake dollars, painted Patrick’s arms blue with darker blue spots, and had him wear a polka dot shirt. “Pose like Coco Chanel,” David told him. He called the resulting Cibachrome print A Formal Portrait of Culture.

  One day Patrick and David went to a coffeehouse in Normal, and David began to talk about the problems he was having with the building conversion engulfing his loft. They’d opened a hole in his roof and water was leaking through it. “I said to him, ‘David, what is stability anyway?’ Because I was kind of reflecting on my horrific childhood, having everything constantly taken away from us. And this moment of the roof leaking at his house—it would pass. I was saying, ‘We all have to understand that life throws you curveballs.’ And he just came unglued in that restaurant. In front of everyone.”

  David exploded into one of his purple-faced rages, yelling that he wasn’t talking about ‘stability,’ that Patrick wasn’t listening to him, that he had a fucking hole in his fucking ceiling. Everyone in the restaurant turned and looked. Patrick said, “OK. Calm down. Sorry I spoke.”

  And David was able to recover. He told Patrick, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what comes over me. I do that all the time. I’ve been working on it with my therapist.”

  Keith Haring died of AIDS on February 16, 1990, at the age of thirty-one.

  California representative Dana Rohrabacher had developed a new strategy in his campaign to kill the National Endowment for the Arts.

  Early in February he sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to every member of Congress, condemning the agency for funding Annie Sprinkle’s Post Porn Modernist, a performance in which the former porn star talked—graphically—about her experiences as a sex worker. Above Rohrabacher’s headline, “The National Endowment for the Arts Is at It Again!” he ran a quote from Sprinkle’s show: “Usually I get paid a lot of money for this but tonight it’s government funded.” That was a joke. Sprinkle had never applied for a grant, much less received one. But the show was a perfect vehicle for generating outrage among enemies of the agency.

  On February 13, the American Family Association took out a full-page ad in the Washington Times headlined “Is This How You Want Your Tax Dollars Spent?” and using Sprinkle’s comment that her show was “government funded,” then listing about a dozen supposed NEA outrages, a list riddled with misrepresentations and errors. For example, “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” was described as “an art exhibit in which angry homosexuals denounced Catholic clergyman John Cardinal O’Connor.” The NEA quickly released a fact sheet to correct all the mistakes. When the AFA bought its next full-page ad, in USA Today, it had to cite its sources, most of them right-wing publications not known for their fact-
checking departments.

  Susan Wyatt had an appointment with Congressman Rohrabacher on February 20. She was there to advocate for the arts. And he would ask, “What’s your religion?” But when she first got to his office, everyone was looking at Rohrabacher’s latest “Dear Colleague” letter.

  “They were all so thrilled, and they showed it to me,” she said.

  His new letter, again sent to every member of Congress, condemned the NEA for supporting David Wojnarowicz’s “Tongues of Flame,” described by Rohrabacher as “an orgy of degenerate depravity.” His missive carried an image of Jesus shooting up that had been clipped from the corner of Untitled (Genet), the collage David created in 1979 while he was still living in Vinegar Hill. That piece wasn’t even in the exhibition. As with One Day This Kid and photos from the Rimbaud in New York series, the image appeared only in the catalog. Rohrabacher asked his colleagues to consider whether their constituents would want their tax dollars subsidizing a show of such work. He wrote, “The art is sickeningly violent, sexually explicit, homoerotic, anti-religious and nihilistic.”

  The conservative weekly Human Events ran a short piece on this “NEA-funded blasphemy” a few days after Rohrabacher circulated it. Human Events then used it in a subscription offer to members of the American Family Association. The image from Untitled (Genet) also became a featured outrage on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club.

  Since David left for Berlin and then Paris on February 21, he knew nothing about this until he returned March 3 and spoke to Blinderman.

  A young man had come to University Galleries after hearing about David’s work on The 700 Club. “I feel the show is bad,” he told Blinderman. “I want to take it down.”

  Blinderman talked him out of it. “I ended up going into this big art historical argument.” He invoked, for example, Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, painted in the sixteenth century for a monastery where monks cared for people with skin diseases—so the suffering Christ in that painting shows symptoms of skin disease. “It’s because he’s the man of sorrows,” Blinderman argued. “He takes on the suffering of the world. So if Christ were to appear physically today, one of the sicknesses he would have to take on would be drug addiction.”

  “Here I am—a secular Jew,” Blinderman said. “But as an art historian, I had to learn a lot about Christian art, and I love it.” He reminded the man that Jesus had said “you who are free of sin cast the first stone” and “turn the other cheek” and “judge not and be not judged.” He spoke of compassion and humility and sacrifice. The man looked baffled, but he left.

  “Tongues of Flame” was on view in Normal until March 4. On March 5, 1990, President George H. W. Bush sent the image of Christ with hypodermic to John Frohnmayer with an “eyes only” note stapled to it. The president stated, “I know you are as offended as I am by the attached depiction of Jesus Christ. I think you have been doing a superb job, so I send along this note not in any critical vein whatsoever, but simply to inquire if there isn’t something we can do about excessive cases like this.”

  Frohnmayer told the president, “Yes, I was offended by both the work and the man, since I had encountered him directly at Artists Space where he was very angry and abusive toward me personally. Our original legislation, however, warns the Endowment to avoid imposing … a single aesthetic standard or to direct artistic content.” Frohnmayer thought this a wise policy, and he would fight to defend it from Helms.

  When Frohnmayer related the incident in his book, though, he admitted that he had not been offended by this work. He understood it. “In fact, an image of Christ with a needle in his arm, particularly when he is not holding the needle, is consistent with an interpretation of Christ taking on the sins of the world—hardly a blasphemous concept.”

  That March, Jesse Helms directed the General Accounting Office to investigate a list he provided of the NEA’s “questionable activities,” among them “Tongues of Flame.”

  While he was in Normal, or shortly after, David made notes in his journal for what he thought would be new photo pieces: “FLEURS DU MAL … Photo blow-ups of color flowers (Hawaii book, Louisiana book). Sew in images and information on homophobia, AIDS issues, sexual issues, invasions, distortions, health papers.” Ultimately these ideas developed into the flower paintings in his last show.

  During the trip to Berlin, where he was in a group show, he stayed for three days with Andreas Sternweiler, co-founder of the world’s first (and only) gay museum. Sternweiler later sent him photos of the Nazis destroying the Institute of Sexual Science, an organization that had advocated for women’s liberation and gay rights. Nazis burned the institute’s books as part of a government censorship program, so David contemplated a piece linking this event with the Helms agenda.

  In one of the airports where he waited on this trip, David wrote, “I won’t grow old and maybe I want to. Maybe nothing can save me. Maybe all my dreams as a kid and as a young guy have fallen down to their knees. Inside my head I wished for years that I could separate into ten different people to give each person I loved a part of myself forever and also have some left over to drift across landscapes and maybe even go into death or areas that were deadly and have enough of me to survive the death of one or two of me—this was what I thought appropriate for all my desires and I never figured out how to rearrange it all and now I’m in danger of losing the only one of me that is around. I’m in danger of losing my life and what gesture can convey or stop this possibility? What gesture of hands or mind can stop my death?”

  Dean Savard died of AIDS on March 30, 1990, at the age of thirty-one.

  David got a letter from Montana Hewson, the friend of Tommy Turner’s and Richard Kern’s who’d had a small role in You Killed Me First.

  Montana wrote after the Artists Space imbroglio hit the papers in his home state of Texas, but he didn’t know David’s address. He sent the letter to Artists Space, and David finally got it either just before or just after he went to Normal. He decided then that, for the last chapter of his book, he’d do a profile of Montana, “a guy I psychically felt connected to because of the way he didn’t fit. I wanted to touch that thing that I knew he carried.”

  He sent Montana his address and phone number and told him he’d like to come visit, to ride around some back roads with him and talk. Montana could call him collect. After David heard nothing back, he sent a postcard in March. Then at the beginning of April, he received a mysterious letter addressed to “David W—” with no return address. The full text read, “David W—In response to your card, I regret to tell you that Monte committed suicide about January 18, 1990. His dad.”

  David thought about the last line of Montana’s letter: “No fair dying before I do.” It dawned on him that Montana had been dead by the time he wrote him back. He decided to do a chapter on him anyway, to write about self-destruction, about the circle of people around Montana he’d once been part of.

  He hadn’t been in touch with his Cinema of Transgression friends, Turner and Kern, since Hujar got sick. As David put it, “Emotionally it was too ugly to be taking care of a guy who was battling to live and then hang out with people that were jamming shit in their arms or throwing themselves into the varied arms of death.” Kern had moved to San Francisco and cleaned up but had recently returned to the East Village. Turner would eventually get completely off drugs, but at this point he was on methadone. David set up interviews with each of them and with Sophie Breer, she of Waje’s Cockabunnies, since they had all known Montana better than he had.

  He wanted to ask each of them: What attracted us to the dark things? Things most people recoil from? What was this death wish? What were the drugs about, really?

  Montana had been this paradoxical character who, as David put it, “built an elaborate shrine over a mouse hole.” He would not kill a cockroach. Yet he claimed to have murdered a drug dealer who ripped him off. (This can in no way be substantiated.) He was creatively and disturbingly self-destructive. And he had stolen money
from Tommy and Amy Turner to buy drugs. That was the transgression that haunted him till the end of his life. When Turner came to see David for his two interviews, he brought Montana’s letters—one after another begging forgiveness. Turner talked to Montana on the phone and forgave him, but it didn’t seem to assuage the guilt.

  Montana had lived in such extreme circumstances—sleeping at least part of one winter in Central Park, for example. He’d also lived in a building on the Lower East Side where, thanks to a fire next door, he had no heat and no unbroken windows. So he put blankets over the windows and kept a toaster oven propped up on a bureau. Then there was the ten-by-ten foot room in the residential hotel, where he had a bed and a hot plate and saved all his garbage. Newspapers stacked up the wall. Rows of bottles filled with piss. Montana was hopelessly in love with the heterosexual Kern. So, before his first suicide attempt—shooting ten bags of heroin—he wrote Kern a letter to say, “You can have my synthesizer. I’ll leave the door unlocked. Take pictures of me dead.” His second attempt, much grislier, involved massive blood loss but a neighbor found him in time.

  David had always romanticized those he regarded as “thug saints.” But there was more to it here. David was impressed, perhaps overly so, with Montana’s writing and drawing. He saw him as an artist, as someone who rebelled against the structure of things. When David called a friend of Montana’s in Texas, Mary Hayslip, to get what information he could about the suicide and what led to it, he explained that writing about Montana would give him a chance to confront his own alienation. “I feel like I’ve gone through my whole life pretty uncomfortable with what it is to live in the world,” he told her, “so in this writing, I just want to talk about those mixed feelings of either being human or not being human.” David too had thought about suicide, but in Montana, his worst impulses were magnified to the nth degree. This was someone who rebelled so hard against the structure of things that he’d rebelled against being alive.