Close to the Knives

by David Wojnarowicz

  Are photographs just tiny windows looking onto the world, frozen moments of it that lie flat and quiet without sound or smell or movement? Susan Whatsername said something about photographs being like small deaths which is maybe true. Maybe not. Maybe such a statement reflects that person’s fear of being photographed. Certain people in certain places for ages have felt that a photograph steals a part of your soul, so when someone aimed a camera at them they were likely to throw a spear or cut the photographers throat or shoot them, or slug the photographer on the chin and demand a fifteen percent cut of the royalties. To me, photographs are like words and I generally will place many photographs together or print them one inside the other in order to construct a free-floating sentence that speaks about the world I witness. History is made and preserved by and for particular classes of people. A camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history.

  Not long ago, I had a retrospective of my paintings, photographs and sculptures in the midwest. A university professor who teaches a class on “pornography” brought his students to view my work and ask me questions. A student raised his hand and stated that he had learned from his teacher the difference between pornography and erotica but wanted to know what I considered some of my work which contained explicit sexual images. I told him that I don’t think there is a separation in images of sexuality such as pornography and erotica. Some images are capable of being insulting to me because they underscore the acceptance and maintenance of straight white male fantasies, of which our museums contain many examples, while excluding the diversity of sexual possibilities. Also, what may be considered erotica by me because of its familiarity and reflection of my desire may be considered pornography by someone who still considers the human body a taboo subject. Consider this: as a society we had to endure the media spectacle surrounding the polyps in Ronald Reagan’s asshole found during a routine examination and subsequently removed, and yet for the eight years during his presidency, he was completely silent about the AIDS epidemic. In those eight years we were denied access to any real information concerning our own bodies in the midst of this crisis. We still are. The Health and Human Services Department in 1990 finally has gotten around to printing a pamphlet explaining how to use a condom but will only release it to people who call an AIDS hotline and to some health professionals. James Brown, a department spokesperson defended this murderous decision by saying, “Obviously the federal government does not tell local communities what to teach their children. We’re telling them it’s available. It’s up to them to decide to use it.” But if you were to substitute any other disease for AIDS in this situation, do you think it would be so socially acceptable for government to just leave it up to a handful of individuals to decide whether they educate anyone about a deadly epidemic or not.

  At the moment, we have more of these bozos in the senate, such as Jesse Helms and William Dannemayer, who are trying to dismantle the NEA because a few public coins have supported images of diverse sexuality, as well as examinations of organized religion. Their hysteria gives the impression that these few images will cause the foundations of civilization to crumble and family structures to implode. The reality is that the NEA already has a terrible track record in funding minorities’ expressions. It also ignores the fact that our tax dollars are paying for bigots in the churches to open their quivering yaps and get their agendas spread all over the media. These are agendas which adversely affect all people of all religions and nonreligions in this time of the AIDS epidemic. Our tax monies are being used to support the catholic church in its hiring of lobbyists to intimidate politicians on issues such as condom use and abortion.

  Helms is the man who introduced and helped pass legislation that cut all federal funding for safer-sex information and AIDS education designed for lesbians and homosexuals. Why doesn’t any reporter or colleague ask Helms whether he believes in capital punishment for homosexuality? His actions amount to the same thing where death is delivered in a crap-shoot created by state-enforced ignorance. Why don’t they ask him why he is obsessed with homosexuality? Why don’t they ask him at what age he might have first experienced same-sex attractions and what in his environment caused such a strong, murderous reaction?

  In early January of 1990 I heard a story from a journalist concerning a bunch of videotapes that were seized by american troops during the invasion of panama. Apparently Noriega had been secretly videotaping visiting politicians and north american public figures who made trips down to panama over the years for what they may have considered fun, rest and relaxation, away from the eyes of the u.s.a. The journalist thought that Helms’ name had surfaced among those rumored to be implicated on the tapes. In researching this story, the rumor that his name was connected to others on the tapes proved to be unfounded. He may not have ever gone to panama. What a pity.

  The tapes were discovered in the ransacking of one of Noriega’s houses. They were quickly cataloged by members of the C.I.A. along with slathers of other videos, sculptures, baggies of suspicious white powder, and photographs and then were “disappeared” into government top-secret archives where the tools that could topple governments and regimes and political careers usually find their dark sleeping finales. At the time every major news station carried stories of PORNOGRAPHY and COCAINE and STATUES OF HITLER found in Noriega’s house. This information was bandied about on our television sets as if this were the moral excuse for invading and ransacking a foreign country and killing hundreds of poor people who happened to live in the vicinity of one of the Noriega strongholds. The cocaine turned out to be flour or plaster dust; dummy coke props. The laughability of using pornography as a moral reason for invading panama can only be measured against the fact that pornography is a multi-billion-dollar industry in the cornfields and alleyways of america. The reporters who stared at the studio cameras and gave horrified accounts of statues of Hitler being found in Noriega’s house forgot to tell you that they also found statues of american presidents as well. Or maybe the C.I.A. just “forgot” to include these facts on their log-in sheets.

  But what if Mr. Helms had been to panama and he were included on one of the surreptitious videotapes documenting the desires of visiting politicians—what could his desire possibly consist of? I spent long afternoons reading copies of the congressional record and could only surmise one thing—Giant Roosters. I could imagine him somewhere in the rolling hills of summertime panama, inside a specially constructed sanitized chicken coop, naked with a hen’s feather Scotch-taped to his ass, wearing giant red plastic chicken’s feet and hopping around in a room full of roosters making gobble gobble noises.

  Someday our curiosity may quenched and we’ll actually find out what Mr. Helms’ desires consist of. Until then, Helms joins the ranks of characters sliming around the contours of the great petri-dish of washington, William Buckley, William Dannemayer, and John Cardinal O’Connor: Sexually insecure men who make it their lives’ work to create policies that contribute heavily to the state-condoned violence and murder toward Lesbians and Gays.

  What exactly is Helms afraid of? What image of sexuality can be so disturbing in the tail end of the twentieth century? How do you consider the images of death and murder on the evening news in comparison to an image of someone’s desire or sexuality? Why are paintings of rape any more or any less scandalous compared to an image of two men kissing or fucking? Helms, by the way, had more of a problem with the fact that the two men on “a marble tabletop” happened to be a black man and a white man than with the idea that they were engaged in an act of sexuality. What is that all about? Another crackerjack racist is going to legislate what our desires should be?

  What some people call “pornography” is simply a rich historical record of sexual diversity that has been made invisible in this world for centuries by organized religions. Control their bodies and you can control their minds. The u.s. supreme court has decided that the state can determine who you can make love with and how. They may soon determine whether women can decide
for themselves whether or not to give birth to a baby. If Helms can make a determination on whether or not I can make love to the person who has consented to make love with me, then I DEMAND THE IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF WHAT I CALL THE PANAMANIAN ROOSTER VIDEO SO WE CAN DETERMINE WHETHER HE HAS A RIGHT TO HIS SEXUALITY.

  Bottom line, only a person with a twisted and repressed sexuality would think it their right to tell consenting adults that they cannot explore their own bodies. Boneheads such as Phyllis Schlafly and Pat Buchanan have represented Helms in the media, whining that public funds should not be used for art or educational materials that reflect the true diversity of sexuality in this country. If they truly believe this then I propose we change the electoral process—put everything on the ballot—make election day into election week. Make the voting process a three-hour process for each person with information printed in every language, as well as having interpreters on hand. Make it a paid holiday as well. Let us all decide how and where and for whom and for what our tax dollars are spent. Let us truly decide without the bogus representation we are presently stuck with in our antiquated electoral process. Let us decide, in our communities, in our cities, in our states how our taxes will be spent. Of course this has little chance of ever taking place because the government will not have enough to buy the left wing of a stealth bomber.

  Each painting, film, sculpture or page of writing I make represents to me a particular moment in the history of my body on this planet, in america. Therefore each photograph, film, sculpture and page of writing I make has built into it a particular frame of mind that only I can be sure of knowing, given that I have always felt alienated in this country, and thus have lived with the sensation of being an observer of my own life as it occurs. I have had this feeling ever since I can remember—beginning with a childhood when instead of Heads of State or Politicians, there were Heads of Family: Mom and Dad. Once outside the home, Mom and Dad were replaced with Teacher or Policeman or Store Owner or Land Owner or Neighbor or Priest or God or Arresting Officer or Detective or Psychiatrist or Politician or President. It always felt to me that most people in this country feel a sense of relief when Heads of Family are replaced with Heads of State. I have felt and believe this to be true because most people never indicate otherwise. But maybe it isn’t true. As times goes on, I have come to believe that all things are not necessarily what they appear if you judge them only by their silence or invisibility.

  If I say I am homosexual, or “queer,” does it make you nervous? I have experienced various reactions to that simple disclosure in the course of life. I often wonder whether my being a queer who asserts his sexual identity publicly makes some people see the word “QUEER” somehow written across my forehead in capital letters. And I wonder whether or not that revelation prevents some from hearing anything else I say, or whether or not it automatically discounts anything else I might say. Dismissal is policy in america. Our elected “representatives” have come up with a fail-safe system of symbols based on a prehistoric moral code built by other humans years, decades or even many centuries ago. The moral code is chameleonic in nature. Its design changes and twists on whim by those who wield it. In this country the elected representative has only to attach one of these symbols from the moral code to any social problem and people who are not immediately affected by that problem feel safe and distanced. If there is homelessness in our streets it is the fault of those who have no homes—they chose to live that way. If there is a disease such as AIDS it is somehow the fault of those who contract that disease—they chose to have that disease. If three black men are shot by a white man on a subway train—somehow they chose to be shot by that man. And life goes on and on and on. Most people tend to accept, at least outwardly, this system of the moral code and thus feel quite safe from any terrible event or problem such as homelessness or AIDS or nonexistent medical care or rampant crime or hunger or unemployment or racism or sexism simply because they go to sleep every night in a house or apartment or dormitory whose clean rooms or smooth walls or regular structures of repeated daily routines provide them with a feeling of safety that never gets intruded upon by the events outside. There are scores of the population who either feel safe for the same reasons or else are too exhausted from trying to survive in this society by working dehumanizing jobs to keep a roof over their heads. Or else they feel safe because they are part of the structure that keeps the moral code intact. Or they feel safe only because once in a great while they can enter the illusion of the ONE-TRIBE NATION by stepping into a tiny curtained cubicle and pulling a metal lever that elects a twelve-inch-tall man or woman they saw for a short period of time transmitted across the boundaries of space into the antennae of their television screens.

  I grew up in a tiny version of hell called the suburbs and experienced the Universe of the Neatly Clipped Lawn. This is a place where anything and everything can and does take place—and events such as torture, starvation, humiliation, physical and psychic violence can take place uncontested by others, as long as it doesn’t stray across the boundaries and borders as formed by the deed-holder inhabiting the house on the neatly clipped lawn. If the violence is contained within the borders of the lawn and does not mess up the real estate in any way that would cause the surrounding properties devaluation, anything is possible and everything permissible.

  I had a father who brutalized his first and second wives with physical violence. Any signs of life from the family he supported with his paycheck from his job as a sailor was met with extreme violence. In my home one could not laugh, one could not express boredom, one could not cry, one could not play, one could not explore, one could not engage in any activity that showed development or growth that was independent. I remember the first time I discovered the forests that grew in the distances from my neighbor’s houses. Once I discovered the universe of the forests and lakes, I went there whenever possible. In the universe of the forest I didn’t think about the Universe of the Neatly Clipped Lawn. I didn’t think of what it felt like as a five- or six-year old being dragged down the basement stairs and having my head and body hit with a dog chain or a sawed-off chunk of two-by-four. I didn’t think of my father picking up my sister and slamming her down on a sidewalk in front of our home in one neighborhood and I didn’t think of the brown stuff that came out of my sister’s ears and mouth and I didn’t think of the neighbors mowing their lawns and watering their flower gardens without missing a beat when my father did these things. In the forests I made human forms out of mud and sticks. When they dried they fell apart or I would throw them against tree trunks. I climbed trees and smoked pilfered cigarettes until I got so dizzy I would almost fall out of the branches. I found giant birds’ nests I could only assume were made by eagles. Or maybe it’s just a matter of perspective. When one is small, many things look relatively monumental. As one grows older, things tend to look less monumental, and things looking less monumental doesn’t always have to do with vision. It can be affected by thought processes and analysis. As I grow older, my father looks less monumental, both because he is dead now—he hung himself in the basement of his home about fourteen years ago—and because I can see and understand a little better his humanity and his demons. And he looks less monumental because I speak of him and bring the fear-charged memories of him outside of my head and make them public. Sound is so interesting in this way. Words are so interesting this way. Words can strip the power from a memory or an event. Words can cut the ropes of an experience. Breaking silence about an experience can break the chains of the code of silence. Describing the once indescribable can dismantle the power of taboo. To speak about the once unspeakable can make the INVISIBLE familiar if repeated often enough in clear and loud tones. To speak of ourselves—while living in a country that considers us or our thoughts taboo—is to shake the boundaries of the illusion of the ONE-TRIBE NATION. To keep silent is to deny the fact that there are millions of separate tribes in this illusion called AMERICA. To keep silent even when our individual existence contradict
s the illusory ONE-TRIBE NATION is to lose our own identities. BOTTOM LINE, IF PEOPLE DON’T SAY WHAT THEY BELIEVE, THOSE IDEAS AND FEELINGS GET LOST. IF THEY ARE LOST OFTEN ENOUGH, THOSE IDEAS AND FEELINGS NEVER RETURN. This was what my father hoped would happen with his actions toward any display of individuality. And this is the hope of certain government officials and religious leaders as well. When I make statements like this I do not make them lightly. I make them from a position of experience—the experience of what it is to be homosexual in this country. What it is to be a man who is capable of loving men, physically and emotionally.

  Judge Jack Hampton is a judge from Houston, Texas, and although I live in New York I know who this man is because about a year ago an eighteen-year-old guy was convicted of shooting to death two men who happened to be homosexuals. He was given a life sentence in prison for these shootings. Judge Jack Hampton of Houston, Texas, reduced this guy’s life sentence to 30 years solely because his victims were homosexual. Judge Jack Hampton said he didn’t think homosexuals should be on the streets and that he also didn’t think it would hurt his chances for reelection as judge if he said that he believed two men’s lives were worth a whole lot less because they loved men. He asked only that the journalist he spoke to that day spell his name right. J.A.C.K. H.A.M.P.T.O.N. He also said he would be hard put to convict someone who dragged prostitutes into the woods and shot them dead. Judge Jack Hampton of Houston, Texas, is just a pimple on the face of a society that suffers from what I consider to be an extreme disease. A disease that shows itself in the prevalence of FEAR OF DIVERSITY and is characterized by various symptoms. Among them are sweating palms, angry outbursts, hysteria, the discharging of handguns, the passing of certain legislation, the invasion of foreign countries, the burning down of homes, the running out of town, and ultimately the legalized murder of those who are diverse in their natures.