by Olivia Laing
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Klaus Nomi was the first famous person to die of AIDS, but within a handful of years the disease was running like wildfire through the community he came from: the close-knit world of downtown New York, composed of artists, composers, writers, performers, musicians. As the writer and activist Sarah Schulman puts it in Gentrification of the Mind, her trenchant history of AIDS and its consequences, the disease, at least in the early years, disproportionately affected ‘risk-taking individuals living in oppositional subcultures, creating new ideas about sexuality, art and social justice’. Many were queer or otherwise antagonistic to the family values promoted by conservative politicians, and though their work varies wildly, much of it, even before the AIDS crisis, existed in resistance to the isolation that comes from being marginalised or legislated against, made to feel not just different but unwanted and irrelevant.
One of these people was the photographer Peter Hujar, who was diagnosed with full-blown AIDS on 3 January 1987. Hujar was an old acquaintance of Warhol’s, and had appeared in several of his Screen Tests, as well as his film Thirteen Most Beautiful Boys. He was an exceptionally talented photographer in his own right. Working always in black and white, and moving fluidly between landscapes, portraits, nudes, animals and ruins, his images possess a graveness, a formal perfection that is very rarely attained.
As such, he was much in demand for fashion and studio work. He was friends with the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, and his subjects included William Burroughs and Susan Sontag, the famous portrait of her lying on a couch in a ribbed sweater, her hands behind her head. He was also responsible for the picture of the Warhol Superstar Candy Darling on her deathbed, surrounded by white roses, later the cover of Antony and the Johnsons’ second album, I Am a Bird Now.
Hujar’s own work patrols something of the same milieu as that of another friend, Diane Arbus. Both were drawn to drag queens and street people, to those whose bodies and experiences were outside the norm. But while Arbus’s work is sometimes alienating and estranging, Hujar looked at his subjects with the eye of an equal, a fellow citizen. His gaze is just as steady, but it has a deeper capacity for contact – the tenderness of an insider, rather than the chilliness of a voyeur.
Despite his talent, Hujar was perpetually indigent, living on the very edge of destitution in his loft on Second Avenue, above what is now the Village East cinema, where I sometimes went to while away Saturday afternoons. And despite his capacity for intimacy, his exceptional gifts at both listening and speaking, let alone his promiscuous genius for sex, he was also profoundly isolated, separate from the people around him. He’d flared up at almost every magazine editor and gallerist in the city and fought with most if not all of his wide and varied circle of friends, exploding into paroxysms of terrifying anger. According to Stephen Koch, a close friend and later Hujar’s executor, ‘Peter was probably the loneliest person I’ve ever met. He lived in isolation, but it was a highly populated isolation. There was a circle drawn around him that no one crossed.’
If anyone did manage to make it inside that circle, it was David Wojnarowicz. Hujar was one of the most important people in David’s world: first as a lover, and then as best friend, surrogate father, surrogate brother, soulmate, mentor and muse. They’d met in a bar on Second Avenue back in the winter of 1980, or perhaps early in 1981. The sexual aspect of their relationship hadn’t lasted long, but the intensity of their connection never slackened, though Hujar was almost twenty years older. Like David, he’d had an abusive childhood in New Jersey, and like David he carried around a reservoir of bitterness and rage.
Somehow, they got through each other’s defences (Stephen Koch again: ‘David became part of the circle. He was in it’). It was because of Hujar’s interest and belief that David started to take himself seriously as an artist. Hujar persuaded him to take up painting, insisting too that he stop dabbling with heroin. His protection and love helped David step aside at least a little from the burdens of his childhood.
Though they took multiple portraits of each other, the only image I’ve ever seen of them together is by Nan Goldin, their mutual friend. They’re in the corner of a dark room, standing side by side, their shirts flaring white in the flash. David is smiling, his eyes closed behind big glasses, like a happy, gawky kid. Peter is smiling too, his head tilted conspiratorially. They look at ease, these two men who often weren’t.
In September 1987, Hujar went as he often did to a restaurant on 12th Street, right next to his apartment. While he was eating, the owner came over and asked if he was ready to pay. Sure, Peter said, but why? Bruno held out a paper bag, saying: ‘You know why . . . just put your money in here.’ A minute later he brought the change back in another paper bag, which he tossed on Peter’s table.
This story comes from Close to the Knives, which in addition to documenting the magical pre-AIDS world of the piers records the gathering horror of the epidemic as it began to annihilate David’s world. When he heard what had happened to Hujar, his first impulse was to go to the restaurant and pour ten gallons of cow blood over the grill. Instead, he went in at lunchtime, when the place was packed, and screamed at Bruno, demanding an explanation, until ‘every knife and fork in the place stopped moving. But even that wasn’t enough to erase this rage.’
It wasn’t just one intolerant restaurant owner that was making him feel almost insane with fury. It was the way the sick were being dehumanised in the eyes of others, reduced to infectious bodies against which people sought to protect themselves. It was the politicians getting up bills to quarantine the HIV positive in camps, and the newspaper columnists suggesting people be tattooed with their infection status. It was the massive surge in homophobic attacks, ‘the rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in nightly news suburbs’. It was the governor of Texas saying, ‘If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers,’ and the mayor of New York running to a sink to wash his hands after distributing cookies to children who had AIDS. It was your best friend dying in front of your eyes, without a cure in sight, taking typhoid shots made from human shit prescribed by a quack on Long Island to try and shock his failing immune system into life.
Peter was terrified by the prospect of dying, and his terror made him furious, livid at everyone and everything. After his diagnosis, David saw him almost every day, visiting him at the loft or in hospital rooms high above the city. He went with him on quixotic, exhausting errands to find faith healers and doctors who promised miracle cures. He was there when Peter was ill, and he was there at the Cabrini Medical Center when Peter died on 26 November 1987, at the age of fifty-three, only nine months after he’d received his diagnosis.
After everyone left the room David closed the door, picked up his Super 8 camera and filmed Peter’s emaciated body, lying in a spotted gown on the hospital bed. After he finished sweeping up and down, he got his camera and took twenty-three photographs of Peter’s body, his feet and face, ‘that beautiful hand with the hint of gauze at the wrist that held the i.v. needle, the color of his hand like marble’.
Peter was here. Peter is gone. How to configure the transition or translation, the monumental change? In the suddenly empty room he tried to speak to whatever spirit was hovering, perhaps afraid, but found himself unable to find the right words or make the needful gesture, saying at last helplessly, ‘I want some kind of grace.’
In the reeling weeks that followed, he drove out to the Bronx Zoo to film the Beluga whales in their tanks. The first time he went, the glass case had been emptied for cleaning. Too much, this sign of absence. He got in his car immediately and drove away, coming back later to capture the image that he wanted: the whales rolling and drifting in circles, the light falling through the water in grains and sheaves.
Later, he made a film for Hujar that was never finished, intercutting the whales with the footage of Peter’s dead body on the hospital bed. I’d watched it on a monitor in Fales Library, tears streaming down my face. The camera moved tenderly, grievingly over Peter’s open eyes
and mouth, his bony, elegant hands and feet, a hospital bracelet looped around his skinny wrist. Then white birds by a bridge, a moon behind clouds, a shoal of something white moving very fast in the dark. The fragment ended with a re-enactment of a dream: a shirtless man being passed through a chain of shirtless men, his supine body slipping gently from hand to tender hand. Peter held by his community, conducted between realms. David cut it with footage of baggage on a carousel: movement again, but this time beyond the domain of the human.
Peter’s was one death in a matrix of thousands of deaths; one loss among thousands of losses. It makes no sense to consider it in isolation. It wasn’t just individuals; it was a whole community that was under attack, subject to an apocalypse that no one outside even seemed to notice, except to demonise the dying. Klaus Nomi, yes, but also the musician and composer Arthur Russell, the artist Keith Haring, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller, the performance artist Ethyl Eichelberger, the artist and writer Joe Brainard, the filmmaker Jack Smith, the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the artist Félix González-Torres: these and thousands of others, all gone before their time. ‘The beginning of the end of the world’, Sarah Schulman called it in the opening sentence of her 1990 novel about AIDS, People in Trouble. No wonder David described being filled with rage like a blood-filled egg, or fantasised about growing to superhuman size and wreaking vengeance on the people who considered his life and the lives of those he loved expendable.
A few weeks after Peter’s death, David’s partner, Tom Rauffenbart, found out that he too had AIDS and in the spring of 1988 David was also diagnosed. His immediate reaction was of intense loneliness. Love, he wrote that day: love wasn’t enough to connect you, to ‘merge one’s body with a society, tribe, lover, security. You’re on your own in the most confrontational manner.’ He’d moved by then into Hujar’s loft on Second Avenue, was sleeping in Hujar’s bed.
During the AIDS years he kept painting a repeating image of creatures attached to one another by pipes or cords or roots, a foetus to a soldier, a heart to a clock. His friends were sick, his friends were dying; he was in deep grief, thrust face to face with his own mortality. Again and again with his brush, painting the cords that tethered creatures together. Connection, attachment, love: those increasingly imperilled possibilities. Later, he’d express this urge in words, writing: ‘If I could attach our blood vessels so we could become each other I would. If I could attach our blood vessels in order to anchor you to the earth to this present time I would. If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would.’
Though David’s first reaction was loneliness, how he chose to deal with that feeling was to join forces, to make alliances and to fight for change; to resist the silencing and isolation he’d suffered from lifelong; and to do it not alone but in the company of others. In the plague years, he became deeply involved in non-violent resistance, part of a community that was combining art and activism into an astonishingly creative and potent force. There wasn’t much to find inspiring about the AIDS crisis, except the way that it was combated not by people contracting into couples or family groupings, but by communal direct action.
Fight back: the idea was beginning to gain currency in the city that year. Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS! was one of the rallying cries of the direct action group ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, which had been established in New York in the spring of 1987, a few weeks, as it happened, after Hujar’s diagnosis. Or I’ll never be silent again, which I remember shouting on London Bridge during Gay Prides of my own childhood, perhaps two or three years later.
David started attending ACT UP meetings in 1988, shortly after his diagnosis. At its height, the group had thousands of members, and spawned chapters across the globe. One of its greatest strengths was its diversity. You don’t have to spend long reading the interviews in the ACT UP Oral History Project to realise how complex it was, in terms of both membership and agenda. It was emphatically heterogeneous, mixing gender, race, class and sexuality, and organised not hierarchically but by consensus. Many of the members were artists, among them Keith Haring, Todd Haynes, Zoe Leonard and Gregg Bordowitz.
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, this group of people at the very margins of society succeeded in forcing their country to change its treatment of them: a reminder of how powerful collective action is as a force for resisting the processes of isolation and stigmatisation. Among its many successes, ACT UP persuaded the Food and Drug Administration, the F.D.A., to change the approval process for new drugs and to alter the protocols of clinical trials so that they became accessible to addicts and women (who couldn’t otherwise legitimately access experimental drugs, vital in an era in which the only approved treatment was AZT, a drug so toxic many people couldn’t tolerate it). It used sit-ins to force pharmaceutical companies to lower the price of AZT, initially the most expensive drug ever launched; organised a die-in of thousands during mass at St Patrick’s Cathedral to draw attention to the Catholic Church’s stand against safe sex education in New York public schools; and lobbied the Center for Disease Control to change their definition of AIDS so that women as well as men were eligible for Social Security benefits.
David attended many of these protests, including the October 1988 demonstration at the F.D.A., where he and fellow affinity group members staged a die-in, clutching the styrofoam tombstones that would swiftly become a staple at AIDS actions. In United in Anger, a documentary about ACT UP made by two surviving members, Sarah Schulman and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard, he can periodically be seen standing amongst a crowd, identifiable by his height and by the jacket that he wore, on the back of which was printed a pink triangle and the words IF I DIE OF AIDS – FORGET BURIAL – JUST DROP MY BODY ON THE STEPS OF THE F.D.A.
Making even the clothes on your back communicate: during those years, David fused language and image, using every means at his disposal – photography, writing, painting and performance – as a way of bearing witness to his times. In April 1989, he was featured in Silence = Death, a documentary about activism in New York in the early years of the epidemic made by the German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim. He appears repeatedly: a tall, rangy man in glasses, wearing a white t-shirt hand-painted with the words FUCK ME SAFE. He stands in his apartment, talking in a deep agitated voice about how it feels to live with homophobia and hypocritical politicians, to watch your friends die and to know that your own body contains the virus that will kill you.
What’s striking about this film is not just the intensity of his anger, but the depth of his analysis. In an era in which people with AIDS tended to be portrayed as helpless and isolated, dying wasted and alone, he refuses the identity of victim. Instead, he sets about explaining, in rapid, lucid sentences, how the virus reveals another kind of sickness, at work inside the system of America itself.
David’s work had always been political. Even before AIDS, he’d dealt with sexuality and difference: with what it’s like to live in a world that despises you, to be subject every single day of your life to hatred and contempt, enacted not just by individuals but by the supposedly protective structures of society itself. AIDS confirmed his suspicions. As he put it in both the film and Close to the Knives: ‘My rage is really about the fact that when I was told that I’d contracted this virus it didn’t take me long to realise that I’d contracted a diseased society as well.’
One of the strongest of his explicitly political art works is ‘One Day This Kid’, which he made in 1990. It shows David at the age of eight, a reproduction of the only childhood photograph he had. He’s grinning, a little all-American boy in a check shirt, jug-eared, his teeth enormous. Running either side of his head are two columns of text. ‘One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid,’ it begins:
One day families will give false information to their children and each child will pass that information down generationally to their families and that information will be designed to ma
ke existence intolerable for this kid . . . This kid will be faced with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies in laboratories . . . He will be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable freedoms. All this will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.
It was his story, but it was also the story of his community, of a whole strata of America, of the world itself. The piece’s power derives from the way it scrapes away at the accretions of stigma, the poisonous mess civilisation has made out of sex. It returns to basics, to the first small flowering of adolescent desire, to what I am tempted to spell as innocence or purity, had those words not been so thoroughly co-opted by conservatives. All that isolation, all that violence and fear and pain: it was the consequence of wishing to make contact by way of the body. The body, the naked body, burdened and miraculous, all too soon food for flies. Raised Catholic, David placed what faith he had in redemption here. As he said elsewhere, smell the flowers while you can.
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Innocence, what a joke. In 1989, David got caught up in one of the most gruelling and public battles of the culture wars, when some of his collages, which contained miniature photographs of sexual activity, were used by the American Family Association, a right-wing, fundamental Christian lobbying group, in an attempt to discredit the funding decisions of the National Endowment of the Arts. In the end, he took the A.F.A. to court for using his images out of context, winning a landmark case about how an artist’s work can be reproduced and used.
In his testimony from the trial, which I’d read at Fales, he talked with an intense eloquence about his paintings, explaining the context and meaning of all their intricate parts. In addition, he addressed the use of explicit imagery in his work, telling the judge: