In the Shadow of the American Dream

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 mass 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.