In the Shadow of the American Dream

by David Wojnarowicz

  In the Shadow of the American Dream

  The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz

  David Wojnarowicz

  Editor’s Note

  Of the thirty-one diaries excerpted here, this selection represents perhaps ten or fifteen percent of all the writing. I have organized the journals as chapters, with dates and a title when there is one. I have made some notes within the text in brackets. Some of the entries I have introduced with notations in italics if contextualizing seems useful. I have tried to keep footnotes to a minimum to avoid interrupting the experience of reading the entries fluently. For the most part David Wojnarowicz used first names only of the cast of characters in his life. The last names appear here only when he made a point of using them. Drawings and photographs, expecially photo booth strips, postcards and letters, labels and ticket stubs, receipts and notes of things to do—all these items were filed within each diary. Near the end of his life, the author intended these totemic notebooks for publication.

  Introduction

  This book of diary writings by David Wojnarowicz comes from over thirty journals he kept from age seventeen, one summer in 1971, until another summer, in 1991, a year before he died. In the first diary (he saved, that is; there were probably earlier ones that weren’t saved), David is on an Outward Bound expedition. He has high hopes for solitude and discoveries in nature but is then thwarted by severe conditions and physical hardship. He is unable to endure the diet and isolation, and he desperately wishes to get off the island, to return to the city from which he had wished to escape. Strangely, the end of his life reads similarly. His health deteriorates, and he feels more and more isolated and alone. With anguish he describes himself “disappearing.” He realizes that, having gone through the experiences he has with AIDS and a culture that never deals honestly with death or dying, even if he were to survive, he would be filled with anger and hopelessness, anathemas to him. “I’m empty, other than of illness and dark thoughts. I want to die but I don’t want to die. There’s no answer right now” (August 1, 1991).

  Anyone who turned the pages of these diaries would make different selections than I did, so it is important to introduce this set of writings, made from thousands of pages, as very much my own assemblage. I decided to follow a number of threads throughout David’s journals that I believe are illustrative of the values he cherished, the struggles he endured, and the pleasures he sought.

  The adolescent in the first diary is a typical boy fascinated with snakes and insects and what his body will do when put through an endurance test. But he is also a loner, not able to assimilate, a boy not fully aware of himself except for that queer feeling of not belonging and not particularly wanting to either. Expressing an interiority to the extent that he does in his diary is the first sign we have of David’s literary talent for inscribing his condition on both a quotidian and a profound level. What he doesn’t describe in this early journal, or in any of the subsequent chronicles that go into depth about who he is and what his dreams are, are the hardships of his childhood. In the biographical time line he provided for Tongues of Flame,* David gives a personal account of his youth: He is born in Red Bank, New Jersey, to a sailor from Detroit and a very young woman from Australia, in 1954. His parents get divorced two years later, leaving David and an older brother and sister in a sinister orphanage. His father visits occasionally, a year or two later kidnaps the children from the orphanage and brings them to Detroit, where they live with uncles and aunts in an unstable household until his father remarries a young woman from Scotland and moves his children back to New Jersey. His father is away sailing most of the time. When David is seven, his father forgets him and his brother and sister at a shopping center miles from home the day before Christmas. There is a blizzard, and his father is drunk.

  David spends most of his time in the woods looking at animals. He starts hanging out with teenage boys in a local gang. An older boy tells David to play with his dick. A year later, another boy tells David to put his dick in his mouth. They do it to each other. By now he is eight years old, has taken up smoking, and his father has become more brutal, shooting off guns in the house, killing family pets.

  In 1963, soon after Kennedy is assassinated, David and his brother and sister find their mother’s name listed in a Manhattan phone book and secretly meet her in New York City for a few hours. She takes them to the Museum of Modern Art, and David wants to become an artist after that. His father finds out about the trip, and one day when he is drunk, he puts them on a bus to Port Authority, where their mother meets them. They live in Midtown next to a Howard Johnson’s where later Angela Davis will be caught in a wig and dark sunglasses. David is approached several times by strange men before he finally begins hustling. Living in Hell’s Kitchen, discovering his homosexuality, and being encouraged by his mother to paint and draw, David, at age twelve, shows signs of depression and considers suicide.

  In 1968–69 he lives on the streets in New Jersey, Long Island, and New York City, sniffs glue, smokes pot and hash, attends Black Panther Party demonstrations, and meets a married lawyer in Times Square who takes him to his home in New Jersey when his family is vacationing elsewhere. This relationship helps David regain some self-worth, and after nearly starving for a year, he is taken care of. In high school David becomes acutely aware of the inequities in society. In 1970, he drops out of school, where he studied art, and lives mostly on the streets. He is drugged once, raped, and beaten while unconscious. He leaves New York City occasionally to escape his life, works as a farmer on the Canadian border, gets a job as a bookstore clerk (in a legitimate bookstore) in Times Square, falls in love with a woman, has a relationship with her for six months, realizes he is truly queer, and goes freight hopping across northern states to San Francisco, where he lives openly gay for the first time and realizes how calm and healthy he feels as a result. He also realizes that being queer is “a wedge that was slowly separating me from a sick society” (Tongues of Flame, p. 117).

  From 1974 to 1978, David reads avidly, Genet and Burroughs in particular, and he takes several hitchhiking trips between coasts, interacting with the poverty population and growing more and more angry about the greed and disproportion of wealth and privilege in America. He begins writing street monologues based on the stories of people who live and work on the margins of society, and taking photographs with a camera a street buddy has stolen for him. He keeps a diary regularly, recording the things that happen to him and his feelings about them, letters he writes but doesn’t always send, and art projects he plans to make.

  In 1977 David goes to Paris, where his sister lives, and he plans to stay there. After a magical time in Paris and Normandy with a man who speaks little English, David decides to go back to New York City. In 1978 David’s ideas about art making shift: he becomes interested in constructing with words, drawings, photographs, and objects an alternative version of history that disputes the “state-supported” form, which doesn’t take into account how minorities survive. David’s father commits suicide. In 1979 David begins working on a Super-8 film in the abandoned warehouses along the Hudson River, which is also where he spends much time exploring sexual possibilities, creating stencil murals, and gathering stories that he later documents in more monologues.

  The 1980s were a cruel time for the poor in America, thanks to Reagan administration policies. Social structures that protected minority populations were dismantled, and any vestiges of humane public policy were abandoned. David becomes more and more invested in documenting these realities in his work—the images, words, and objects he creates have deep meaning to a thoroughly divested underclass, who have less and less access to cultural production and ma
ss media.

  Despite his brutal upbringing, and perhaps because of it, David had an invincible will to take control of his life and make of it what most deeply reflected his ideals. Hanging out with junkies and aspiring artists on the Lower East Side, David always resisted their lethargy and nihilism.

  Working at Danceteria, taking heroin and speed, he never lost his drive to make work, to understand the world around him, and to improve his self-awareness. He had and wrote about countless sexual encounters, and almost always described these scenes as “lovemaking,” as expressions of himself moving toward another, of gestures, however anonymous and arbitrary, with potential to change him forever.

  Memory figures large in David’s life: As a young adult, because of the images he has to overcome in order to heal from his past. As an artist, because his memory is the basis for connecting personal history and social conscience. And, once he becomes ill with AIDS-related symptoms, memory becomes his lifeline. At twenty-one, while hitchhiking, David reflects, “I saw a face in a passing car that looked like someone I once knew. It’s like that when you move on to other places in your life—memories of faces fading like thin ice sheets in winter sidewalk puddles, they melt, become only a part of the water so you can’t separate them ever again, but they do remain there” (July 25, 1976). Memory is also a path to thinking about mortality. As a teenager, he wrestles with these thoughts: “If I turned from twenty-three to eighty in the simple sway from window to bed what lives would remain in my heart, what answers to the questions of solitude and movement?” (September 19, 1977).

  David was preoccupied with death and dying long before his peers began to succumb to the AIDS epidemic. But once he loses his friend, mentor, and onetime lover Peter Hujar, and receives his own diagnosis, his visions become overwhelmed by disappointment and rage. It is an intensely creative final period for him, and the diary entries are stricken and mournful:

  I’m afraid I’m losing touch with the faces of those I love. I’m losing touch with the current of timelessness.… 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 to 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? Nothing, and that saddens me. (no date, 1989)

  In 1987, I was editing a selection of writings on AIDS for City Lights Review (I had been working as an editor there since 1984), and I invited David to contribute to this forum. I was familiar with his visual art and had not been aware of his writings until he sent me a piece called “AIDS and the Imagination.” This work later became part of his book Close to the Knives. I was awed by the power of his writing, and in our correspondence we became friends. Not until after he designated me to edit his diaries and any other writings that could be collected posthumously, after he died and left his estate to his lover Tom Rauffenbart, and I moved to New York from San Francisco, sublet Tom’s apartment, and read through all of David’s journals, did I discover David’s dream to be published by City Lights, and why he’d responded so openly and generously to my query years ago. That request for material on a subject few of us had been able to articulate: What is the impact of AIDS on the arts? The culture had been altered dramatically by 1987, most abruptly by the loss of great and potential talent, and in a subtle and pernicious way in which a youthful generation became enraged and grief-stricken, seemingly isolated from history and biological families and a dominant culture who for the most part felt exempt from this tragedy and blamed the victims for their own devastating fate.

  It has been difficult for me to finalize this manuscript. As a work in progress, it has been a way for me to hold on to a set of feelings and a sense of reality that are perhaps no longer current, but relegating them to the past is like saying it’s over, and it’s not over. Thinking back on five or ten years ago, I realize how different my world was, knowing dozens of people suffering with AIDS-related symptoms, going to hospital wards and memorials, and considering estates of artists who left behind unfinished work. Most of the people I have known with HIV are dead now, and thankfully the few people in my life with AIDS who have survived this long can afford new treatments, and are responding positively to them. (No cure is around the corner, but what a difference it makes for people with symptoms suddenly to feel better for a sustained period of time.) My experience with AIDS now feels falsely part of my past, but I am more than haunted by a decade of loss. How to express the ways in which the images of young people dying in great pain have affected me and my generation? Nothing equips a young person for the horrors AIDS induced, through illness and prejudice and cultural neglect. In retrospect, the eighties and early nineties feel like a Poseidon Adventure some of us survived, and yet I know that many, many more people will lose their lives to AIDS-related diseases, and that my experience in urban America is altogether different from what is going on globally.

  How do we in this culture responsibly reflect on and honor the lives lost? How do we prevent ourselves from collapsing so many memories into a totality that effaces the individuality of each person we loved and now miss? These are some of the final questions David engaged in his work, and his frustrations in the end were compounded by his inability to overcome what was taking away his life. Most of us are bewildered by the enormity of such experience, and inaction is often the result. But David continued to write and make art and confront his feelings as long as he could. When he was no longer able to work, his alienation deepened:

  I feel like it’s happening to this person called David, but not to me. It’s happening to this person who looks exactly like me, is as tall as me, and I can see through his eyes as if I am in his body, but it’s still not me. So I go on and occasionally this person called David cries or makes plans for the possibility of death or departure or going to a doctor for checkups or dabbles in underground drugs in hopes for more time, and then eventually I get the body back and that David disappears for a while and I go about my daily business doing what I do, what I need or care to do. I sometimes feel bad for that David and can’t believe he is dying. (no date, 1989)

  David faced his own mortality with remarkable insight. In completely original terms, he invested his personal explorations and observations with fierce political analysis. In the work he produced, he shed light on facets of experience in America in the late twentieth century for an underclass who will forever be invigorated by his legacy.

  Amy Scholder

  September 1997

  *David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame, the catalog for a major exhibition of his work at University Galleries, Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, 1990.

  David’s first journal, his record of an Outward Bound expedition, was written when he was seventeen years old. The diary is illustrated with maps and drawings of the terrain.

  August-September 1971

  Hurricane Island Outward Bound School

  Grenfell Watch

  P.O. Box 438

  Vinalhaven, Maine 04863

  Thursday, August 19, 1971

  The first day we were coming over by ferry. It was foggy and the mist whipped at our faces. I was cold as hell. I started talking to my friend next to me whom I met at the airport. Soon he left with his friend and I sat behind a car to keep out of the cold. I began a conversation with a boy who was to be in my watch; his name was Tony. He is from Long Island. He lives there in the summer with his parents, but during college term he studies art in Sweden. Soon after, we reached Hurricane Island. Our watch officer’s name was Charlie.
We immediately went to our assigned tents and changed into running shorts. We ran once around the island and went to supper … a very small meal. I was hungry as hell afterwards. We went to sleep.

  Friday, August 20, 1971

  We got up and ran around the island. Very exhausting. I finished a cigarette I had and was going to smoke one last one before we signed a pledge to commit ourselves to do to our best ability the challenges and feats. And to stick by each other. Well I had the cigarette in my mouth and a lit match, about to light it. Then one person in my watch said that he feels we should all stick together before we sign the commitment. So in fewer words, I should not smoke my last cigarette. Well, I argued and everyone except Tony sided with George (the guy who started the whole mess). I said, Lordy, Lordy, I’m cured. And turned around all disgusted and walked away.

  The kids then came up and apologized about it and said that they realized one last cigarette couldn’t hurt. It was too late anyway since I broke up the cigarette. We went to sleep after supper and after signing the book.

  Saturday, August 21, 1971

  I learned the first steps in rock climbing. The man who teaches it hit me on the top of the head for doing a wrong signal at the wrong time. I was really pissed off. I am drawing the steps of preliminary rock climbing: Ombeli means I’m hooked up and ready for you to follow. Uprope means Pull up slack rope. The man situated on top of the hill pulls slack. When the slack is pulled up all the way, the man at the bottom shouts, That’s me. The man at the top then says, Climb. The man at the bottom begins to climb and says, Climbing. The man at the top says, Okay, and pulls in the slack as the man ascends. If you kick off any rocks you can call, Below. If you feel yourself falling you call, Tension. The man at the top will immediately brace himself for the impact of the rope when you fall.

  We ate lunch and got our swim trunks on and went for a swim in the granite quarry. We ate a lousy dinner of boiled ham and sweet potatoes. Ugh! I began to get tired. Sleep.