The artist / writer David Wojnarowicz is a representative of a turning point in gay culture: the moment when gay activism emerged out of the AIDS crisis. He points back to some of the writers we have read starting with O’Hara and Baraka (in his run-on, associative sentences), Burroughs, Selby and Carroll (in his gritty, sometimes vulgar realism), and punk. Write about 300-words describing his unique contribution to the “underground” tradition we have been investigating.
New York Underground in Film, Music and Literature 1955-85 
For me, the uniqueness of David Wojnarowicz’s writing, is indeed about his identity of a member of the AIDS community in the 80s; or to be more specific, I think it is his strong self-identification with the patient, because of his own experience of disease of course, that renders his writing a dimension that I have not yet seen in other works that we have read in this quarter. First of all, this book is written as “a memoir of disintegration,” and the documentary truthfulness makes the author’s political activism possible, for he collects not only his own experience of queerness and of the disease, but also integrates scientific statistics and his observation of the atrocity going on in the US society into his writing. Indeed, compared with other texts we have read, this memoire is more explicitly engaged in politics: in sections such as “living close to the knives,” “postcards from America,” or do not doubt the dangerousness of the 12-inch-tall politician,” the author directly comments on the inequity or even the brutality executed by Reagan’s government. He enriches his analysis with his reading of neo-liberalism (including mass media, mass culture, privacy problem, welfare state control over individuals, neo-liberalism’s motto of choice and individual freedom, etc.). This memoire, then, stands as an embittered attack on the 80s US society and especially politics; on the other hand, the author pays huge efforts to try to speak for and to act out for the AIDS group as well as his society (although this society is only “another world” for him). This type of political engagement, with a certain degree of maturity and pragmaticism, is rare in our former reading.
Yet more profoundly, the author’s strong identification with the queer and AIDS community makes his work unique in terms of its general concerns as well as of the language it gives birth to. Since the time of Ginsberg or the beginning of the tradition of Junky, it appears to me that the underground culture stands constantly on the opposite side of institution, which risks them into a strong, genuine, yet vague dissatisfaction. After all, since God is dead, everyone can be more or less miserable. Compared to that, Wojnarowicz’s identity as a queer and AIDS activist concretizes largely his revindication. This identity becomes his departing point to attack the institution, as he speaks uniquely for his community and hopes to go from this personal/communal specificity to a change of mind of the country as a whole. In the realization level, he, maybe comparable to some feminist writers, invents a new perception of the world (e.g. the eyeball image) as well as a new way of expression. In his beautiful but sad description of his intercourse with a stranger on roadside, for example, within a single long sentence, he shows us not only how he, as a queer person, perceives the world in which body and the entire outside world can be linked with eyesight, skin touch and linguistic narrative (56-57), all combined in his breathless sexual ecstasy. Also, the same sentence shows us how the violence of the heterosexuality and state authority, together with the fear and shame caused by the violence, plays an indelible and so forever tormenting part in the shape of the identity of the queer community.
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Wojnarowicz seems to combine, as the prompt states, a number of authors we read previously, but with the added fact that he is a gay author writing explicitly about the experience of being a gay man (not that this is the first gay author we have encountered, but to me this read as the one most explicitly tied directly into the gay scene). His writing style was reminiscent most prominently of Selby’s, with the almost stream-of-consciousness nature of it that read as very poetic at times combined with an unrestrained grittiness in the details, but it was also very unique, and captured a specific dialect, style, and experience within a specific subculture. I enjoyed the way that he positions himself as an outsider from the rest of society, reflecting on the mainstream and his existence as someone outside of the mainstream, as well as reflecting on the idea of how he is seen and witnessed in the world. The fact that he also is a visual artist adds another layer to his contributions as well, as he was able to deliver his vision in both literary form and visual form, and add a whole other dimension to the world he was building with his art and the concept of witnessing another person. I feel as though Wojnarowicz stays deeply entrenched in the world of underground art and literature and its clear that his work was written in conversation with and with the inspiration of the authors we have read before him, but he still works to highlight a universe of his own and build off of it to reflect on his own experience as a gay man with AIDS in the underground art world.
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Wojnarowicz delivers a mosaic of autobiography, fiction, and sociopolitical commentary in his “memoir of disintegration.” His chapters are laid out like short essays that mix stream of consciousness and essay-style critique. Imagery is a consistent technique throughout all the passages. His passage about a sexual experience with a tattooed man describes his body as a plain where “huge fish fins were riding his shoulders and tattooed scales of komodo dragons, returned from the wilds of jungular Africa” (14). His imagery covers every part of his body, the strength and age in his muscles to the animals living on his skin. Immediately after he gives a parataxis that begins with “In loving him,” he juxtaposes the imagery with something much darker. He describes a man’s bloody death with casual observers standing by, unable to stop his arms from “flailing like in some stream, backstroking his way out of this world, out of this life, away from this sea of blue uniforms and white boneless faces” (17). In the same world where he can experience a freeing love, there are random, unexplained acts of violence that one can happen to come upon while stopping for coffee. In this he sees a man escaping from the authority figures that have no authority in deciding if he lives or not. Wojnarowicz’s random juxtaposition of beauty with violence among passages of critique of the façade of civilization are not as random as they seem. His essays give insight to the various worlds functioning with a nation, the suburbia and the dark corners of cities filled with people rejected by their societies. He then gives detailed chapters like “The Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet” that depict how powerful, hegemonic systems are responsible for killing lives we see as marginal. He brings forth the issues of the “underground” and memorializes them with the value that would be given to a disease seen as mainstream enough and free of sin. His title assigns the same religious weight of sin that is associated with AIDS as a justification for countless deaths and presents them as a government document, undeniable, authoritative facts.
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The first time I learned about the AIDS crisis, was my first year at UCLA. I remember learning about homosexual propaganda. I watched videos that were shown to elementary students and middle school students and in the videos there would be a male at the park surrounded by young boys and he would coax one of them into following him into their car. The film would end and a policeman would walk into the screen saying that the kid was never found. Essentially the film portrayed homosexuals as pedophiles. I feel some of the other novels followed this belief, maybe unintentionally. “The Basketball Diaries” shares this idea with the whole coach molesting the young players or the priest molesting the school boy. Even in “The Last Exit to Brooklyn” when Harry hit his wife and is upset at her for his own sexuality and then ends up forcing himself on a young boy. Then after we read Wojnarowicz and see how he writes about the injustices and his own personal experiences. Wojnarowicz writes, “ What does it mean if what you desire is illegal? Fear fury yes but also a fertile paranoia” Wojnarowicz uses his platform to express and inform people of the rising epidemic, since no one else was talking about it. Not even president Regan admitted to a problem until 1981, and even then it was very clipped. While the literature in our class associated homosexuality with pedophilia it was interesting to see the way he promoted activism and helped educate the public with different essays relaying his life and the struggles that come with accepting his own sexuality.
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David Waojnarowicz’s memoir “Close to Knives” opens the conversation to gay activism through its intimate stories and sexual moments which stray from the normative heterosexual life. As Wajnarowicz cultivates an intense atmosphere of sexual intimacy he breaks apart the heteronormative life as only able to be publically initmate. Although he integrates these intimate events as moments of inclusion and a recognition of the AIDS movement, a closer examination reveals that through implementing these moments the author creates an open space for individuals to break a heteronormative relationship.
As Waojnarowicz explores love he engages in realism while simultaneously challenging the war behind being gay within America and the view of love as abnormal when as it strays from a heterosexual relationship. By implementing the way he views his love for the one he holds sexual relations with the author voices:” I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.” As he describes his love for the man as “freeing”, the author suggests that loving him leads him to liberation he had never held before. Despite the oppressions gay individuals experience within America, the author indicates that it becomes the love which frees him from the constraining society. Furthermore, his addition of “interior life” reveals his desires of being freed from not only the societal oppression of a heteronormative America yet freeing himself from his sentiments of displacement within his sexuality. In doing so, the author creates an open atmosphere which voices desires and refrains from remaining silent. Furthermore, by voicing these sexual scenes the author creates a conversation among individuals regarding AIDS and the necessity of speaking out instead of remaining in silence. By integrating the character breaking out of the silence through love the author encourages conversation behind issues which often became silenced within a heteronormative America.
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While David Wojnarowicz’s creative essays in “Close to the Knives” range over a variety of forms and tones, they are united in their laser-sharp focus on a singular cause: AIDS activism. (Even when they don’t directly address AIDS, like the collection’s first two vague, surreal essays.) To me, this is Wojnarowicz’s unique contribution to the narrative of the countercultural, “underground” tradition we’ve constructed over the course of this class. Some of the other writers we’ve investigated have felt, to me, like rebels without a cause. Their anti-establishment stances sometimes feel frustratingly directionless. Occasionally, I’ve felt like their countercultural tendencies arise less from strong beliefs that run counter to the mainstream, or identifying with a community that is given short shrift by the mainstream, and more from the compulsion that comes with drug addiction (not to oversimplify anything, or diminish the importance of that very real crisis/fixture of life and culture). Wojnarowicz’s writing stems from a space as deeply personal and autobiographical as Carroll’s and Burroughs’, but he unites the words from this space with a larger cause – as we’re taught to do in academic writing, he gives his experiences, ideas and thoughts a “so what?”
Another unique feature of his is also something makes him fit into the tradition we’ve constructed – he explicitly meditates on “selective cultural support and denial” (Wojnarowicz 119) and the “whitewash of personal histories” (164), a concern that I think to varying extents underlies the work of all the artists we’ve studied, and indeed, any underground cultural movement. It’s likely he gets to state outright his ideas because his mode of writing, essays, is formally more suited to disseminating theory than the novels, stories and autobiographies we’ve read so far are.
In terms of writing style, I did find each of Wojnarowicz’s many tones similar to one we’d come across before in this class.
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David Wojnarowicz’s memoir “Close to the Knives” uniquely contributes to the ‘underground’ tradition by shedding light on gay rights and the AIDS epidemic. The author does this through not only excerpts of true-life accounts and experiences, but by incorporating facts, including a page full of statistics, that brings urgency to the AIDS epidemic.
The segment “Being Queer in America: a Journal of Disintegration” highlights the previously unexplored effects of the AIDS epidemic on the gay community. “You can’t shut out the sights and sounds of death…on the first day he found out he had this certain virus he bent down to pick up a letter, turned and said, ‘Even something so simple as getting a letter in the mail has an entirely different meaning,’” (pg 47). Indeed, learning of AIDS diagnoses often drove people to suicide, as Wojnarowicz describes.
The people of the gay community struggle without support. Wojnarowicz states, “I carry silence like a blood-filled egg, ready to drop it into someone’s hands,” (pg 54), to emphasize the bleak weight under which AIDS victims mutely suffer. This sentiment is furthered by an “Additional Statistics and Facts” section in which Wojnarowicz shares upsetting data and provides an explanation for the disappointing lack of action against this epidemic. “One in every four people in the Bronx is HIV positive” (pg 90) the author states, after listing a variety of misconceptions the American public held on AIDS, including the virus “has a sexual orientation and moral code.” We learn this is not the case. “It took almost eight years just to have a few public posters dealing with AIDS…one contracts AIDS through ignorance and the denial of pertinent information that could be used by people to safeguard their sexual activities.” The author indicts the church for interfering in the government’s policy-making decisions and journalists failing to report the extent of the epidemic because “newspaper owners have a conservative agenda in mind when dealing with news and its dissemination,” (pg 92). By uniquely including true accounts of an unspoken time and involving real statistics, Wojnarowicz argues for gay rights and fair treatment.
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Of all the writers we have read so far, Wojnarowicz’ style of writing seems to me the most evocative and angry. His contribution to the “underground” tradition, based off of this memoir, seems to be an artistically presented rage and sense of injustice unmatched by many of the other authors his writing style points to. Whereas authors like Burroughs and Selby present disturbing stories and realistic descriptions, Close to the Knives has a level of vulgar realism that goes even further than those authors and quite a few sentences that present succinctly his sense of intense rage towards everything around him. For example, he writes, “Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head” (7). Growing up incredibly poor and living as a gay man during the AIDS crisis in New York, this kind of sentiment is understandable to an extent. However, Wojnarowicz, unlike other writers we have read, seems to present this rage uncovered and unfiltered. In this way, his view of the world and presentation of it seems more akin to the punk song writers than his literary contemporaries, but still his artistic prowess is very much apparent (which cannot be said of all punk musicians). Furthermore, Wojnarowicz’s rage isn’t simply directed at a single thing, like the government, the president, or the economic system, like many other writers. Rather, it seems he’d like to get rid of practically everything (again, drawing another parallel with punk). He attacks, of course, the government, saying, “I feel that I’m caught in the invisible arms of government in a country slowly dying beyond our grasp” (28). About the AIDS crisis, he writes, “they simply don’t care- and they’re allocating just enough money so it looks good on paper; not good, but at least on paper their asses are covered so in the future when the finger of responsibility points in their direction they can say ‘But we did something.’”(107). However, he seems to want to get rid of more than just the government: money, every abusive father and killer of buffalos (which gets attention at the end of the memoir), rapists (which he discusses right at the opening), modern architecture, God, the mob, and even death itself. About the mob he writes, “You can never depend on mass media to reflect us or our needs or our state of mind” (123); about television and the church: “Television was what the church revealed itself to us as- nothing more than an experiment in mass hypnosis” (194). Throughout his memoir, Wojnarowicz present a rage directed at almost everything, a rage unmatched by previous authors in its honesty and in its pervasiveness across every realm of society.
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David Wojnarowicz provides readers with a uniquely political perspective on the underground life in New York City. According to Wojnarowicz some aspects of suffering in the underground were because of the government -which was fueled by society’s hatred. Wojnarowicz lived a traumatic life from initial homelessness and sex work to enduring the loss of several friends due to AIDS. A major part of Wojnarowicz’s life was his sexuality and his initial hate for the government stemmed from the societal rejection of homosexuality. He explained that there was a “supreme court ruling which stated that homosexuals in America have no constitutional rights against the government’s invasion of their privacy” (81). In addition, if you murdered a man and said that the “victim was queer and that he tried to touch you the courts would set you free” (81). These rulings rightfully enraged Wojnarowicz. Through the AIDS epidemic after witnessing deaths of several friends and lovers he explained that the government is a “bunch of bigoted creeps in positions of power that determine where and when and for whom government funds are spent for research and medical care” (116). If the homophobic culture decreased, suffering would have paralleled that decrease. Wojnarowicz’s animosity toward the government was cemented in my mind when he described his fantasy that “each time a lover or friend or stranger died of AIDS their friends would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to washinton d.c and blast through the gates of the white house and dump their lifeless form on the front steps” (122). The government showed no compassion toward those suffering from AIDS, so Wojnarowicz wanted to mercilessly repay the favor.
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Like many of the books we read this quarter, Close to the Knives is a unique and unfailingly honest read. Wojnarowicz embodies both some of Carroll’s gritty and unflinching realness and unabashed announcement of his “guilty pleasures,” while maintaining an elegant, poetic style of prose throughout the memoir. Wojnarowicz shares his most personal thoughts with his reader, painting a clear picture of his desires and of his character. As he watches several construction workers build a patio, he admits that “for a moment I was afraid the intensity of my sexual fantasies would become strangely audible; the energy of the images would become so loud that all three guys would turn simultaneously like witnesses to a nearby car crash” (42-43). In his memoir, Wojnarowicz leaves little to the imagination when it comes to his thoughts. Just as Carroll and Burroughs reveal the gritty details of their drug addictions, Wojnarowicz eloquently and transparently details his thoughts in order to give his readers a complete picture of his character.
Wojnarowicz contributes to the “underground” tradition by writing about issues in the gay community during a time when little attention was paid to matters such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic. He writes, “I remember a friend of mine dying from AIDS, and while he was visiting his family on the coast for the last time, he was seated in the grass during a picnic to which dozens of family members were invited. He looked up from his fried chicken and said, ‘I just want to die with a big dick in my mouth’” (44). Besides the obvious shock value brought about by a dying man’s quote, Wojnarowicz’ retelling of the event sheds light on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in a way that demonstrates its victims’ humanity.
Wojnarowicz is unflinchingly honest, yet writes with elegant, almost poetic, prose. He has a way of capturing and expressing thoughts and emotions that others fail to put words to. His description of the desert conveys a feeling I have felt for years, but failed to put words to. “Out there I can feel buried under the dome of the sky and feel claustrophobic in the heat which is like a plastic cushion pressing unseen against all the surfaces of my exposed body…” (40). Wojnarowicz’ description of the claustrophobia-inducing desert landscape is both insightful and visceral, and perfectly demonstrates his ability to captivate his reader and completely transport them.
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David Wojnarowicz’ memoir Close to the Knives occupies an unusual space in the “New York school” of art. This work immediately stands out. Wojnarowicz’ weird yet poetic prose style is quite different from many of the works we’ve read so far. I would use a quote as an example, but flip to any page and you’ll find examples of these long, run-on sentences. His style seems to be characterized by a seamless blending of narrative with poetic description, which is different from the narrative-driven novels we’ve read so far. However, it isn’t just his style or form that sets Wojnarowicz apart. His other unique quality is his focus on gay culture, whether it’s his gritty (yet beautifully described) sexual encounters or his politics. Although other writers didn’t shy away from homosexual material (i.e. Burroughs in Junky), it often appears as a trope to show the desperation, hedonism, or apathy of a character. Close to the Knives simultaneously celebrates non-heterosexual engagements and advocates for those suffering from the AIDS crisis. Wojnarowicz achieves this through his writing: his character descriptions don’t objectify on women (as is typical for novels), but often give detailed descriptions of men and transgender people (10), inversing the lense of beauty on the sexual stereotype. His sexual encounters, which are in other works often portrayed as vile and desperate, are given poetic treatment (66). At the same time, Wojnarowicz advocates for gay rights in his work. For example, the chapter “The Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet” (124) calls out politicians who have failed their public duty in regards to the AIDS crisis. Although Close to the Knives is a very unique work, it is not without its tradition. Within the New York Underground tradition, Wojnarowicz seems to come closest to the “monstrous soul” that Rimbaud describes. His search for decadence among New York’s worst is truly portrayed as beautiful and poetic. Wojnarowicz was not only able to contribute his unique style and politics of the New York Underground, but his unique lense of beauty itself.
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Compared to other works from the New York “underground,” David Wojnarowicz created pieces that demanded urgency in regards to political action. While others in the “underground” scene were contributing to defining culture, shaping aesthetics, and among other things, doing drugs and making music, Wojnarowicz deals with topics that are more pressing and tangible than mere “anti-establishment” tropes. When reading a lot of the material for this course, while the writing style and/or form was beautiful, I would often find the content coming up short, or merely being topically redundant, and myself still searching for meaning. So what if you’re lost in your life and you do a lot of drugs to cope? It’s an unoriginal narrative that isn’t charged with any deeper, essential meaning. Wojnarowicz deals with urgent, severe instances of necropolitics: in which the United States government neglected those with AIDS, notably its queer citizens, deciding what bodies are worth living and what bodies are not. There’s purpose apparent in Wojnarowicz’s words—something not present in all the works we studied—which is shown chapters like The Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet and Additional Statistics and Facts wherein Wojnarowicz outlines a series of information about the AIDS crisis. He isn’t ashamed or scared to call out members of the New York “aboveground” community like Edward Koch, Cardinal John O’Connor, and Rep. William Dannemeyer for slacking in solving the AIDS crisis. In this way, Wojnarowicz’s memoir has the potential to act as a field guide, handbook, or pamphlet of sorts to help deal with matters at hand. Wojnarowicz’s unique contribution to the “underground” tradition is that his work carries more direction, purpose, and responsibility than others’. The meaning extracted from Close to the Knives is beyond extrapolating romanticism from filthy New York or idealizing junkies—it sets the scene and demands urgent action.
“With the appearance of AIDS and the sense of mortality I now find everything revealing itself to me in this way. The sense that came about in moments of departure occurs, only now I don’t even have to go anywhere. It is the possibility of the departure in a final sense, a sense called death that is now opening up the gates. Where once I feel acutely alien, now it’s more like an immersion in a body of warm water and the water that surrounds me is air, is breathing, is life itself.”
This quote shows how brilliant it is to frame the narrative around creative writing stories of Wojnarowicz’s life because it makes the portions of the memoir about the AIDS crisis more accessible, tangible, and connected. Wojnarowicz must grapple with his mortality—something other writers and creatives were not crucially faced with.
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“Darkness has completely descended onto the landscape and I stood up and stretched my arms above my head and I wondered what it would be like if it were a perfect world. Only god knows. And he is dead.” This quote from “Close to the Knives,” Wojnarowicz gives authority to both darkness and comparing it with god, which gives it a personifying characteristic. In a world that is controlled by authority, whether it be political or social, he uses his art to create the noise that is necessary to overcome the silence. This unifies him with O’Hara or Baraka because he is creating a social commentary using the power of art that he has. Claiming “god” to be “dead,” he combines a human occurence of death with the divine to comment on the hard hitting reality of how the protection that every individual should feel from nature and the world is absent. This, to me, comments on how relationships and connections should be a human thing without the political, social, or religious interruptions. He also comments on fascism, violence, and freedom, questioning those subjects and how they place limitations on art, which is the driving force in generating the underground subculture that is present. Comparing him to Selby and Carroll, the vulgar realism combined with his stream-of-consciousness technique results in highlighting how the art and life on the streets was like. The anger evident in his writing, “I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder…” can be compared to the anger and violence present in punk music, where the bands used aggressive and electric music to create a sense of urgency for the audience, forcing them to think on the gritty commentary on political and social issues. Wojnarowicz was an integral part in studying the New York underground and its subculture because his own personal experiences, along with his vulgar and aggressive diction, underlined the effects of authority on a community – on an individual – then and carries on to the current time period.
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When reading Wojnarowicz, I definitely feel a sense of uniqueness. Indeed, there was much resemblance between his writing and that of Carroll’s in terms of both depicting raw and graphic images of truth. The first begins his writing with lines describing gay sex that is a repeating theme throughout his piece–the very beginning is a line in which he states his entire “heritage is a calculated fuck on some faraway sun-filled bed while the curtains are being sucked in and out of an open window by a passing breeze. The latter has its obvious depiction of the horrors that arise with drugs abuse. Yet with Wojnarowicz, there was something different. For me I believe that his contribution is truly one of a kind because this is a man who was born into a time where his beliefs and lifestyle choices directly contradicted with society in that his position as a gay man was fully vulnerable to the social structure in which he lived in. Not only that but he was fighting his own personal battle with aids. Essentially, his writing describes a stance held by such unique individuals within society that it perfectly fits with the “underground” tradition and rebellious punk nature we have been investigating. When reading his piece I almost feel as if I was living in his controversial shows. “Since my existence is essentially outlawed before I even come into knowledge of what my desires are or what my sensibility is, then I can only step back from the arms of government and organised religion to walk from there to here.” Lines like these where he claims his entire life on this Earth, which he often refers to as the location of Hell, with Heaven only existing in one’s “head”, give me a unique sense of thrill when reading. Lastly, I think his contribution is special because there are so many relationships to society today. When he writes on his thoughts of “neo-nazis being politicians”, I felt I was reading articles from our most recent presidential election.
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David Wajnarowicz’s relationship is akin to Plato’s allegory of the cave. He sees spectral figures the caricatures of which are more frightening than the reality. He is a guide; he voyeuristically views the streetscape and interprets it for the reader. In Losing the Form in Darkness, Wajnarowicz creates a sense of danger akin to a fairy tale by using simple rhymes and alliteration to juxtapose the seedy figures. The line “it swept down bringing with its strong waves and water, sending tiny people running for cars or shelter among the warehouse walls,” exaggerates the senselessness of inner-city life while also mythologizing it by presenting all of these figures who take obscure forms(18). The progression of the sing-song cadence of the essay changes when the narrator takes the pill at the dive bar. After that, many of the figures morph into monsters. For instance, the short fat man who is literally in the closet “undulating his hips, sweat rolling down the side of his face” represents two sides of the queer form (26). On one hand, his solitary yearning is sympathetic- he promises a good time and is simply seeking to satisfy his needs. The shadow he casts however, is lined with the defecation around feet. He is threatening, stabbing, leering with his barely contained manhood. There is an implicit threat of violence and desecration that edges his yearning. There is a certain timelessness Wajnarowicz recognizes in this man and others like him. The last man he meets, a burly man playing pool at the bar, is at once “of marble eyes and lips and the stone wind-blown hair of the rider’s horse” and “his shaved hair produced sensations that [Wajnarowicz] could feel” without even touching him(28-31). There is the constant back and forth between the fantasy of intimacy and the reality of distance that defines Wajnarowicz’s formal structure. The ellipses of narrative that the fantasies inhabit are in some ways more real for the narration than the dreamy descriptions of the city or police brutality.
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David Wojnarowicz has an interesting prose style. He doesn’t seem to have much care for commas, and let’s his sentences run on and on. It directly affects you when reading through his passages, and makes it all feel a bit more conversational, if the man making the conversation was on some sort of drug. It all just kind of falls out of him, and inside these run on sentences he provides commentary on social issues concerning the government, homosexuality and AIDS. I found this passage of his, commenting on the conflict of ideals in American soceity to be quite illuminating, “Then there are other tribes which work hand in hand with the government, offering slices of meat in the form of doubletalk; or hope- hope as a chain of submission”(37). It’s a big criticism, basically saying that most people are zombies and are unable to make decsions on their own, so they listen to the greater “tribes” who make they’re decisions for them. I think mostly what Wojnarowicz offers the reader is a look inside the mind of someone who, again, is on the outskirts of normal society. He offers insights into his own sex life, and the mistreatment of those who have contracted AIDs. He travels, in the begning of the book, explaining the helplessness of the human condition in American life, to the hopeless condition of those aflicted with the disease of AIDS, taking aim at those in religious circles. One example he cites is one of Cardinal O’Connor, who though says he will “shower them with love and compassion as they lie dying”. This part of the book, he starts to be a little bit more grammatical, not using long run on sentences, almost as if trying to settle himself down, and letting the reader know that what is at stake is important and must be taken seriously. David Wojnarowicz’s major contributions the underground movement, don’t seem to be that much different than many of our other writers and artists we have studied. He, like Carroll and Burroughs, doesn’t leave much to the imagination when descrbing his sex life. He offered another look from an artist living on the outskirts of “civilized” New York society.
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Wojnarowicz’s “Close to the Knives” is unique in its way that it portrays the world and desolate and hopeless while also as a place of potential hope and life. He claims that “hell is a place on earth.” and “heaven is a place in your head.” (29) So, although this place that he is living in has been muddied by the various unaccepting and harmful members of society that he encounters, with his words and his actions he has the power to create his own happiness and potential happiness and protection for people in the future. He repeatedly mentions a “tidal motion” (5) of the world that alludes to a flow of everything like “the ocean’s movement.” (27) While he describes this flow as a means for some people’s avoidance, such as how his father “depended on the motions of the sea to escape,” (267) he claims that the revelation of “boundaries in the course of [these] movements” will be the means of exposing the “inherent lie” in society’s use of the word freedom. (261) These images of the flow illuminate the way that people get stuck in the repetitive, constant nature of life and understanding that is expected within “the invisible arms of government” (28) without questioning if it is wrong or could be improved. By “giving words to this life of sensations,” (273) Wojnarowicz is “ris[ing] to great the State, to confront the State.” (276) It is through his unique perspective and poetic like storytelling style that he is able to illustrate the potential for beauty in the world that he describes as so dark. Although these scenes seem hopeless, the beautiful writing style, I believe, is symbolic for the beauty that is possible in the world. His unique position as an oppressed gay member of society with a gift for writing allows him to explain his position in a way that acts as a political message for change. He is not just objectively showing the world he is living in but is proving that this negativity isn’t the only way society needs to be.
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David Wojnarowicz was known for his contributions to Queer literature and an active voice for gays during the AIDS epidemic. In his collection of essays Close to the Knives, he explores sexuality and its role in the life of a gay individual. Unlike other novels throughout our course, he did not want to merely value sexuality for its appeal, but for its capacity to signal freedom. The author associates the ability to express his sexuality in the modern world with a sense of ease, as he is able to use art to open up about the struggle with HIV. Regardless, he goes about topics in a very “Punk” manner, as a result of his previous experience in a band. Throughout the essays he presents a critical attitude towards “establishments” and provides insight into the common sentiment or feeling of the era. Wojnarowicz states, “I want to throw up because we’re supposed to quietly and politely make house in this killing machine called America and pay taxes to support our own slow murder and I’m amazed we’re not running amok in the streets, and that we can still be capable of gestures of loving after lifetimes of all this” (165). In this quote, the author expresses his literal distaste towards the society that keeps him oppressed. He is disheartened by the state of the country in the midst of the AIDS crisis and their passiveness towards helping the cause to fight the disease. Around him, the world seems to fall into disarray and he is overwhelmed by the casualties in the metaphorical war against HIV/AIDS. In many ways, he began the conversation regarding gay rights and the toll that the epidemic took on the community. Wojnarowicz was dead-set on spreading the word regarding gay rights and the institutions/systems that kept the gay community segregated from heteronormative relationships. He came from the “underground” scene that queers were categorically placed into, and sought to redefine a generation, which he does quite effectively through his various art forms.
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Of all the texts so far, Wojnarowicz’s novel has been my absolute favorite. I believe it is due to the encapsulating effect of the previous writers. One difference that I have found that adds momentous gratitude towards the set of short stories is his ability to depict the notions of true love and vulnerability despite the harshness of the city setting. Within “Last Exit to Brooklyn”, there are definitely parallels between Georgette and David, however, readers must infer her necessity for love through her actions towards the men within the novel. We also don’t get the first-person narration that we have from Wojnarowicz. There is one passage within the story, “Losing the Form in Darkness”, where he describes his feelings towards a young man who he’s just had sex with. He states, “In loving him, I saw a cigarette between the fingers of a hand, smoke blowing backwards into the room, and sputtering planes diving low through the clouds. In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill” (17). The beauty and sentiment of this passage creates another fully-fledged dimension to the genre of NYC underground literature that was solely touched upon within the other works. The closest we have gotten towards this passage is that of “Having a Coke With You”. I wonder if it is due to the common sexuality of O’Hara and Wojnarowicz that allows them to feel more comfortable highlighting certain vulnerabilities within their writing. Even though the content is just as gruesome or decrepit than previous works, there is a lower sense of harshness supplied than in works like “The Dutchman”. Whether or not these previous writers had the capability to encapsulate these feelings and chose not to, or whether they just didn’t ascertain these feelings at all, will forever be unknown. However, this inclusion within Wojnarowicz’s work highly accentuates the moral and emotional takeaway, more so than previous assigned readings.
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Wojnarowicz’s style is interesting because he seems to utilize what I would call creative nonfiction in his memoir. Close to the Knives is similar to Basketball diaries in its autobiographical content, but because it’s presented as a series of essays rather than diary entries, the result is more planned and curated, and allows for both more stylistic experimentation and for overt political arguments. Obviously Wojnarowicz has his own writing style, which I personally enjoyed very much; take this quote from page 17 (according to the ebook): “It’s the simple sense of turning slowly, feeling the breath of another body in a quiet room, the stillness shattered by the scraping of a fingernail against a collar line.” Here his prose is poetic and reverent. I noticed that when Wojnarowicz tells stories about his own life, such as in “Living Close to the Knives,” when he’s talking about Peter in the hospital. He writes, “He was limp and his eyes were closed and his mouth against my arm breathing wet sounds. I felt my body thrumming with the sounds of vessels and blood and muscles contracting the sounds of aging and of disintegration…” (93). Wojnarowicz is speaking autobiographically, but he does so in a style that reads like a novel, rather than the letters to himself that Carroll wrote. He recalls events as if he remembers them perfectly, even if he doesn’t (and is perhaps embellishing his memory). In fact, if it were a novel, Wojnarowicz’s style would still be unique among what we’ve read, because it’s more traditional than Selby’s prose, but less so than McInerny; and he’s much more reverent and emotional than Burroughs, for example. I think he toes these lines of genre very well, because the end result reads to me like a mixture between autobiography, prose, and political essay, while addressing issues of people in the underground and on the liminal edges of society, those with HIV/AIDS.
The inclusion of politics is what I found really punk about the book. It’s countercultural as punk is in that Wojnarowicz is unashamed of his homosexuality and open about the heartbreaking realities of living with HIV/AIDS. But beyond that, he’s actively questioning and lambasting mainstream society, religious figures, and government. He talks about the “preinvented world” (a concept I found hard to grasp) and about the “fascism” of cardinal O’Connor, who he calls a fat cannibal from that house of walking swastikas,” an obviously controversial stance on the Catholic church (122). But he also addresses specific people in government, like Mayor Koch and Rep. Dannemeyer, going so far as to use bullet-pointed lists in his “Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet” to point out the sins of these public figures. He’s not afraid to take on powerful people, and he doesn’t mince words at all. In fact, I got the sense that Wojnarowicz may have been using purposefully inflammatory language to get attention, which seems to be very much in the punk style (E.G. the attention-grabbing of safety pins through the cheeks, huge mohawks, and “God save the Queen / the fascist regime”). However, that’s not to say his anger wasn’t genuine and wholehearted. He had a lot of reasons to be angry, and I know that there were groups, such as ACT UP, that had the same ethos and pathos, because it seemed like the people in power were not only abandoning people with AIDS, but actively condemning an entire community to death. That’s the tradition I was reminded of while reading, and it was very emotionally impactful as a result of Wojnarowicz’s style compounded with the truth and authenticity (even mixing in statistics!) of his memoir.
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