by Olivia Laing
At the library I’d show my pass and take the elevator to the third floor, deposit my illegal pens in a locker and borrow a pencil to fill out a request sheet. Series I, Journals. Series VIII, Audio. Series IX, Photographs. Series XIII, Objects. Week by week, I worked my way through all of it, unpacking dozens of boxes of the Halloween masks and dollar toys David loved. A red plastic cowboy. A tin ambulance. A devil doll, a Frankenstein. I leafed through diaries, sometimes dislodging old menus and receipts, and watched scratchy VHS tapes of old summer vacations: David swimming in a lake, repeatedly dunking his face beneath the surface as nets of light broke across his chest.
In the evenings, as I walked home past Plantworks or the old Grace Church on Broadway, my head would be filled with images that had surfaced long ago, in the looking glass of someone else’s mind. A man shooting heroin in an abandoned pier, tumbling out of consciousness, limp and lovely as a Pietà, spit bubbling from his lips. Dreams of fucking. Dreams of horses. Dreams of dying tarantulas. Dreams of snakes.
So much of Wojnarowicz’s life was spent trying to escape solitary confinement of one kind or another, to figure a way out of the prison of the self. There were two things he did, two escape routes that he took, both physical, both risky. Art and sex: the act of making images and the act of making love. Sex is everywhere in David’s work, one of the animating forces of his life. It was central among the things he felt driven to write about and depict, to wrestle free from the silence in which he’d felt entrapped as a boy. At the same time, the act itself was also a way – the best way, maybe – of reaching beyond himself, of expressing his feelings via the secret, taboo language of the body. Just as making art allowed him to communicate his private experience, undoing the paralysing spells of speechlessness, so too sex was a way of making contact, of revealing the wordless, unspeakable things he kept concealed deep inside himself.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the same period in which he was making the Rimbaud images, he went out cruising all the time, looking for what some people would describe as casual sex – anonymous and with strangers – but which David almost always both named and viewed as love-making. He recorded these encounters in his diaries and later in his published writing in graphic detail, in both senses of the word: electrically visual, electrically explicit. He also logged his own responses, charting the subtle landscape of the emotions, the instances of longing or paralysing fear.
Almost every night he went out walking, down to the Brooklyn Promenade or over the abandoned West Side Highway to the Chelsea piers, a place that captured both his erotic and creative imagination for many years. The piers ran along the Hudson from Christopher Street to 14th Street and had been rotting ever since the decline of shipping back in the 1960s. As the commercial lines moved their traffic to Brooklyn and New Jersey, most of the Chelsea piers were closed for business and at least three were virtually destroyed by fires. By the middle of the 1970s, the city could no longer afford either to secure or destroy these immense, decaying buildings. Some were squatted by homeless people, who built camps inside the old goods sheds and baggage halls, and others were adopted by gay men as cruising grounds. It was a landscape of decay, of ruined grandeur reclaimed by a dissident, hedonistic population.
David recounted what he saw and did there with an extraordinary mixture of tenderness and brutality. On the one hand, the place was an outdoor whorehouse, reeking of piss and shit, where people were regularly murdered and where he once encountered a screaming man with blood pouring from his face who said a stranger in a navy windcheater had knifed him in an empty room. On the other hand, it was a world without inhibitions, where people whose sexuality was elsewhere the subject of intense hostility could find an absolute freedom of encounter and where moments of unexpected intimacy sometimes bloomed amongst the rubble.
In his diaries, he described prowling the Beaux-Arts departure halls at night or during storms. They were vast as football fields, their walls damaged by fire, their floors and ceilings full of holes, through which you could see the river moving, sometimes silver and sometimes a sludgy, toxic brown. He’d sit at the end of the pier with a notebook, his feet dangling over the Hudson, watching the rain falling, the giant illuminated Maxwell House coffee cup pouring its drips of scarlet neon over the Jersey shore. Sometimes a man would join him, or he’d follow a figure down passageways and up flights of stairs into rooms carpeted with grass or filled with boxes of abandoned papers, where you could catch the scent of salt rising from the river. ‘So simple,’ he wrote, ‘the appearance of night in a room full of strangers, the maze of hallways wandered as in films, the fracturing of bodies from darkness into light, sounds of plane engines easing into the distance.’
Wandering the piers, David rarely encountered the same men twice, though sometimes he looked for them, half in love with an imagined personality, a mythic being he’d conjured out of an accent or a single word. This was part of the pleasure of cruising, the way it allowed him to be sexual and also to stay separate, to maintain a degree of control.You could be alone in the city, could relish the way ‘the solitude of two persons passing in opposite directions creates a personal seclusion’, knowing that places existed where physical connection was almost assured.
The public nature of what happened on the piers was in itself an antidote to secrecy and shame. He tried to give people a degree of privacy, but there was clearly a two-way dance between voyeurism and exhibitionism going on, part of the pluralistic pleasure of the place. At the same time, the scene invoked his archivist’s instinct for recording, for getting down what he saw in words, preserving what might have seemed even then like a transient, impossible utopia. He took photos, his camera at his hip, and carried a razor in case of attack. It all came so fast, anyway, a hail of images, a lovely scrambling assault to the senses. Two men fucking, so hard that one of them fell to his knees. An upside-down couch, scattered office furniture, the carpet pooling with water at every step. Kissing a French man with brilliant white teeth and then staying up all night to make a black and yellow salamander out of paint and clay, a talismanic beast.
Art and sex, the two things bound together. Sometimes he took a can of spray-paint, and scrawled odd scenes from his imagination on to the crumbling walls: stray dreamlike phrases, some by him and some borrowed from artists he admired. THE SILENCE OF MARCEL DUCHAMP IS OVERRATED: he’d written that, in homage to Beuys, then sprayed a version of the Rimbaud face, roughly outlined on a pane of glass. Lines about a Mexican dogfight, a drawing of a headless figure shooting up. Often he incorporated his graffiti into the background of the Rimbaud photos, building up layers of his presence, inscribing himself into the fabric of the place.
He wasn’t by any means the only person to be inspired by the wreckage of the piers. Artists had been coming there for almost a decade, drawn by the vast scale of the rooms, the freedom of working without scrutiny or supervision. In the early 1970s, there’d been a series of avant-garde happenings, recorded in weirdly beautiful black and white photos. One shows a man suspended from a loading entrance, dangling from a rope tied to his foot. He teeters above a great heap of trash, from which a single Christmas tree protrudes: the Hanged Man in a post-apocalyptic Tarot deck. The same artist, Gordon Matta-Clark, was also responsible for the most ambitious artistic intervention on the piers. For Day’s End, he and a team of helpers carved massive geometric shapes out of the floor and walls and ceiling of Pier 52 with chainsaws and blowtorches, letting in a torrent of light and converting the space into what Matta-Clark described as a sun and water temple, built without consultation or permission.
As for the cruising years, they were also documented by dozens of photographers, some amateur and some professional, among them Alvin Baltrop, Frank Hanlon, Leonard Fink, Allen Tannenbaum, Stanley Stellar and Arthur Tress, as well as Peter Hujar, the man who would become the most stabilising and important figure in David’s life. With their cameras, they captured it for posterity: the crowds of naked sunbathers on the dock; the
cavernous rooms with their broken windows and damaged girders; the half-dressed men embracing in the shadows.
Others came to paint. Wandering around Pier 46, exploring the stinking labyrinth, David encountered the graffiti artist Tava, born Gustav von Will, who was working on one of his enormous priapic figures, far larger than life. More of them kept appearing, guardians and witnesses to the embracing bodies below. A faun in sunglasses, fucking a bearded man on all fours. Naked muscled torsos with enormous cocks, which David described as caryatids. Images of sexual freedom, licentiousness and pleasure, shocking in their rawness, though as David pointed out later, what was really shocking was that sexuality and the human body were taboo subjects at this late juncture in time, this ebb-end of a violent, image-saturated century.
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Reading David’s diaries was like coming up for air after being a long time underwater. There is no substitute for touch, no substitute for love, but reading about someone’s else’s commitment to discovering and admitting their desires was so deeply moving that I sometimes found I was physically shaking as I read. That winter, the piers took on a life of their own in my mind. I pored over all the accounts I could find, fascinated by the spaces, the recklessness of encounter, the freedom and creativity they permitted. They seemed like an ideal world for someone who was struggling with connection, in that they combined the possibilities of privacy, anonymity and personal expression with the ability to reach out, to find a body, to be touched, to have your doings seen. A utopian, anarchic, sexy version of what the city itself offers, but unsanitised, permissive rather than restrictive – and queer of course, not straight.
I knew this was idealistic, only half the story. I’d read plenty of reports that testified to how dangerous the piers were, and how rejecting and brutal they could be if you didn’t look the part or know the code, let alone the bleak consequences that would befall this libidinal haven as AIDS took hold. Still, the piers as they had been gave my mind a place to wander, outside the gleaming factory of monogamy, the pressure to cuddle up, to couple off, to go like Noah’s animals two by two into a permanent container, sealed from the world. As Solanas bitterly remarked: ‘Our society is not a community but merely a collection of isolated family units.’
I didn’t want that any more, if in fact I ever had. I didn’t know what I did want, but maybe what I needed was an expansion of erotic space, an extension of my sense of what might be possible or acceptable. This is what reading about the piers was like: it was like those dreams when you push on the wall of a familiar room in a familiar house, and it gives way, opening on to a garden or a pool you never knew was there. I always woke from those dreams flushed with happiness, and it was the same when I read about the piers, as if each time I thought about them I relinquished a little more of the shame that almost every sexual body bears.
One of the things I was reading alongside Wojnarowicz was The Motion of Light in Water, a radically candid memoir about living in the Lower East Side in the 1960s by the science fiction writer and social critic Samuel Delany. In it, he described his own nights on the waterfront, ‘a space at a libidinal saturation impossible to describe to someone who has not known it. Any number of pornographic filmmakers, gay and straight, have tried to portray something like it – now for homosexuality, now for heterosexuality – and failed because what they were trying to show was wild, abandoned, beyond the edge of control, whereas the actuality of such a situation, with thirty-five, fifty, a hundred all but strangers is hugely ordered, highly social, attentive, silent, and grounded in a certain care, if not community.’
In a later book, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, he returns to this thought about community in greater detail. Times Square is a memoir-cum-polemic, in which come is the operative word. It chronicles Delany’s experiences in the Square, and particularly in the porn cinemas of 42nd Street, like the one that appears with its declarative X in the background of the Rimbaud photo. Delany went to these cinemas often daily over a period of thirty years to have sex with multiple strangers, some of whom became deeply familiar to him, though their relationships rarely transcended the location.
Delany was writing in the late 1990s, after the gentrification – the literal Disneyfication, in fact, considering the identity of one of the major investors – of Times Square; which is to say that he was writing in praise and grief at what had already been destroyed. In his thoughtful as well as practised estimation, what had been lost was not just a place to get your rocks off, but also a zone of contact, and particularly of cross-class and cross-racial contact - a site that facilitated intimacy, albeit transient, between a diverse multitude of citizens, some wealthy and some poor, some homeless, some mentally unsettled, but all soothed by the democratic balm of sex.
His take wasn’t so much nostalgic as utopian: a vision of a lubricated city of exchange, in which brief, convivial encounters kept satiated those otherwise nagging and sometimes agonising needs for touch, company, playfulness, eroticism, physical relief. Furthermore, these interactions in stalls and balconies and orchestra pits created as a by-product the kind of weak ties that sociologists believe glue metropolises together, though admittedly they tend to be thinking of repeat encounters with shopkeepers and subway clerks, rather than amiable strangers who might give you a hand job once every three years.
As to whether these places did reduce loneliness, the city itself provided proof of that. Writing of the systemic closures that came in the 1990s, Delany regretfully observed: ‘What has happened to Times Square has already made my life, personally, somewhat more lonely and isolated. I have talked with a dozen men whose sexual outlet, like many of mine, were centered on that neighborhood. It is the same for them. We need contact.’
We do. But there was a glitch in this utopia, at least as far I was concerned. In the context of the cinemas, the piers, citizens meant men, not women. Once, Delany did bring a female friend with him to the Metropolitan: a small Hispanic woman who worked as an office temp, spending her evenings playing guitar and singing in nightclubs in the Village. Ana was curious about the scene and so she joined Delany for an afternoon, dressed in boyish clothes, though that didn’t stop a kid muttering fish as she walked past, or the manager accusing her of being a prostitute. The visit passed off smoothly enough – plenty of easy-going action on the balcony to watch – and yet this anecdote reads more queasily than any of the more graphic encounters elsewhere recorded. What hangs over it, what looms unsaid, is the threat of what could have happened: the potential violence, the all too plausible act of rape, the peculiar mix of disgust, objectification and desire that the female form engenders, particularly when it appears in sexual contexts.
God I was sick of carrying around a woman’s body, or rather everything that attaches to it. Maggie Nelson’s stunning The Art of Cruelty had recently been published and there was a paragraph I’d underscored and ringed in pen, struck by how well it explained my attraction to the world of the piers. ‘Of course,’ she wrote, ‘not all “thingness” is created equal, and one has to live enough of one’s life not as a thing to know the difference.’ In parenthesis, she added: ‘This may explain, in part, why the meat-making of gay male porn doesn’t produce the same species of anxiety as that of straight porn: since men - or white men, at any rate - don’t have the same historical relation to objectification as do women, their meat-making doesn’t immediately threaten to come off as cruel redundancy.’
Sometimes you want to be made meat; I mean to surrender to the body, its hungers, its need for contact, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily want to be served bloody or braised. And at other times, like Wojnarowicz’s Rimbaud, you want to cruise, to pass unnoticed, to take your pick of the city’s sights. This was why I’d been so frantic for a mask at the Halloween parade: because I didn’t want to be the thing that was looked at, that could be rejected or disparaged.
I was always walking that winter, up by the Hudson, poking about in the gentrified remnants of the piers, pushing up past the m
anicured lawns, with their population of glossy couples pushing strollers. Here and there, I found small relics of the past. A set of old wooden pilings, sticking up through the pewter-coloured water like pins from a cushion. Two fallen stone columns, carved with wings. Skinny trees, growing out of rock and rubble, locked gates, layers of graffiti, a poster that read sadly COST WAS HERE.
As I wandered, I kept trying to think of an image of a woman that could act as a counterpart to Rimbaud in New York: an image of a woman at loose in the city, free-wheeling, to borrow a term from Valerie Solanas (who had her own history with the piers and who was through with the whole business, writing with characteristic bitterness: ‘SCUM gets around . . . they’ve seen the whole show – every bit of it – the fucking scene, the dyke scene – they’ve covered the whole waterfront, been under every dock and pier – the peter pier, the pussy pier . . . you’ve got to go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex’).
I hadn’t at the time encountered the artist Emily Roysdon’s wry photographs of herself re-enacting the Rimbaud images, her face covered by a paper mask of David Wojnarowicz. Instead, I was looking at pictures of Greta Garbo, those tough dreamy images of her striding around the city in men’s shoes and a man’s trench coat, taking no shit from anyone, out solely for herself. In Grand Hotel, Garbo said she wanted to be alone, that famous line, but what the real Miss Garbo desired was to be left alone, a very different thing: as in unbothered, unwatched, unharried. What she longed for was privacy, the experience of drifting unobserved. The sunglasses, the newspaper over the face, even the string of aliases – Jane Smith, Gussie Berger, Joan Gustafsson, Harriet Brown – were ways of avoiding detection, inhibiting recognition; masks that liberated her from the burden of fame.
For most of the years of her retirement, which began in 1941 at the age of thirty-six and lasted for almost five whole decades, Garbo lived in an apartment in the Campanile building on East 54th Street, not far from the Silver Factory, though considerably more salubrious. Every day she went on two walks: long meandering strolls that might take her up to the Museum of Modern Art or the Waldorf; walks for which she shod herself in tan or chocolate or cream suede Hush Puppies, which I once came across for sale on an internet auction. Often she went all the way to Washington Square and back, a loop of six miles, stopping to gaze in the windows of bookstores and delis, walking aimlessly, walking not as a means but as an end, an ideal occupation in and of itself.