Band of Thebes

"Aids Caused Gay Marriage": Positive Pictures, A History

Fran Lebowitz's remark, "Nobody ever says it, but AIDS caused gay marriage," got Paul Schulz wondering about the relationship between those two topics and he discovered he agreed with her. The result is his photography book about the fight against aids co-authored with Christians Lütjens, Positive Pictures - A Gay History. In their essay they endorse another famous quote, Larry Kramer's insistence that it is "the greatest sociocultural achievement of a minority in human history that gay men saved themselves -- that we did not all die."

Between the striking photos, the book also features essays by queer art curator Jonathan D. Katz, cultural critic Jan Kunemund, porn director Jorg Andreas, Deutsche Aids-Hilfe's Tino Henn and Carsten Schatz, as well as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence's Katharina Laetitiam Donans, among others.

The publisher says, "Aids changed everything about the way gay men live: how we love, how we make love, how we see ourselves and others. Schulz and Lütjens collect images from three decades of fighting, fucking and winning. Heartbreaking, moving, inspiring."

Why Is Obama Praising Bush on His Global HIV/AIDS Program?

Pathetic. Of all the half-straws to grasp at in his remarks at yesterday's dedication of the Bush Library in Dallas, why did Obama highlight Bush's global hiv/aids initiative? And why did NPR use this as their soundbyte? Bush's PEPFAR program took money away from NGOs and threw billions to antigay evangelical groups whose solution to the crisis is to promote "abstinence until marriage." Deaths from the disease are said to have decreased under the program but infection rates remain the same. Or new infections are rising. Some close observers have felt the faith-based approach was more about promoting religion and recruiting non-Christians than about teaching prevention to those most at risk. Cary Alan Johnson cites officials' "stunning disregard for the needs of men who have sex with men and other hiv-vulnerable groups." Read his 2007 report "Off the Map: How HIV Programs Are Failing Same-Sex Practicing People in Africa" or Scott Everertz' 2010 paper, "How Ideologogy Trumped Science: Why PEPFAR Has Failed To Meet Its Potential." 

Other point: It's time to end the nonsense of individual presidential libraries. A president's papers belong to nation and ought to be housed in the Library of Congress or the National Archives, not these expensive shrines to vanity.

How To Survive a Plague DVD, Miniseries

After losing the Spirit Award to Kirby Dick's important doc The Invisible War and losing the Oscar to feelgood fare Searching for Sugar Man, David France's really excellent film about aids and ACT UP, How to Survive a Plague, is now available on DVD or can be seen online instantly.

Last week, ABC optioned a scripted miniseries that will be more or less based on people in the documentary, covering the core years 1987 to 1996. David France is writing it and he said the cast "will be a tight ensemble. A handful of people with almost nothing in common but their shared battle against the epidemic."

EW had more:

"France, and his producing partner Howard Gertler will both serve as Executive Producers on the project, alongside former Focus Features president of production John Lyons (Boogie Nights, Pieces of April). "ABC is really the perfect match for this. ABC is the network that brought us Roots and so many other enormous and seminal miniseries. But Roots is such an important touchstone for me because it was really about the arrival of the African American people to full citizenship, and how that happened," France said. "That’s the same kind of trajectory that we see with the arrival of the gay and lesbian community to full involvement in public life. That happened in a much quicker timeline, but in a way I think that How To Survive A Plague the miniseries will tell that parallel story. And ABC knows how to do that. I was thrilled that they wanted to do this, and that they saw that it was part of their cultural tradition to tell these enormous stories that really changed the way generations of people think about a certain part of our history."

Born February 15: Bill T. Jones

The cruel vagaries of aids: In 1984, both Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, professional partners running their jointly named dance troupe and boyfriends for thirteen years, since college at SUNY Binghamton, were diagnosed with HIV. Zane died in 1988; last June, after twenty-six years of being HIV+, Jones added another Tony Award (for the smash hit Fela!, which he co-created, directed, and choreographed) to his many, many honors including a MacArthur 'genius' award in 1994 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2010. His more than one hundred maverick dance pieces, which frequently incorporate same-sex attraction, eroticism, anger, and nudity, have been seen worldwide and he often collaborates with the era's leading artists, from Toni Morrison and Max Roach on Degga to Jessye Norman for How! Do! We! Do! Confronting the perceived death sentence of aids, he traveled the country interviewing many kinds of terminally ill patients before creating his celebration of living, Still/Here, which many have loved and some have hated, like the New Yorker's former dance critic Arlene Croce, who refused to see "victim art." In 1995, Jones published his autobiography Last Night on Earth, happily misnamed. In 2010 he was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient alongside Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey. (photo: Lois Greenfield)

Born January 29: Greg Louganis

In 1988 when he was twenty-eight, at the Seoul Olympics, attempting to repeat his unprecedented double golds from 1984 (springboard and tower), Greg Louganis hit his head on the board during his second to last dive. Freshly stitched up, on his final dive he earned a perfect score. Again, he won both gold medals. Widely hailed as one of the great sports comebacks of all time, it earned him ABC Sports' Athlete of the Year. Three years earlier he had won the Sullivan Award as the nation's most outstanding amateur athlete, and he had been an American favorite ever since winning a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics when he was sixteen.

But what a difference one detail makes. Seven years later he published his autobiography, Breaking the Surface [Kindle], cowritten with Eric Marcus, in which he revealed he is HIV+. Suddenly he was no longer the hero of the comeback but the infected sneak whose bleeding might have put other divers at risk (not true, according to Anthony Fauci). The doctor who gave him stitches had not worn gloves. His book was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks, and all of his corporate sponsors except Speedo dropped him. (He had come out eight months earlier, at Gay Games in New York.) Remarkable for its candor, his book showed readers that performing after hitting his head was nothing compared to the stress of being closeted, HIV+, and in an abusive relationship. Even his website said, "the highs that came with winning never compensated for the lows."

Officially, he was a mentor to the US diving team at the London Olympics but these days his heart is really with his dogs. He has six canines, three of whom are named after characters in Harry Potter. Greg's most recent book is For the Life of Your Dog: A Complete Guide to Having a Dog From Adoption and Birth Through Sickness and Health.

Man Booker International Shortlist

    

Judges of the Man Booker International Prize have broken through from a parallel universe where these ten writers are their finalists for a newish lifetime achievement award given only every other year. You'll note the complete absence of authors who are Spanish, Latino, African, or Arab:

U R Ananthamurthy (India)

Aharon Appelfeld (Israel)

Lydia Davis (USA)

Intizar Husain (Pakistan)

Yan Lianke (China)

Marie NDiaye (France)

Josip Novakovich (Canada)

Marilynne Robinson (USA)

Vladimir Sorokin (Russia) 

Peter Stamm (Switzerland)

Unedited, expat judge Tim Parks said to the press, "Ten wonderful authors, nine of whom I didn't know before I started reading for this prize." Yikes, dude.

If you don't know Yan Lianke, his Dream of Ding Village [Kindle] is an aids novel that was shortlisted for the Asia Booker and his most recent Lenin's Kisses [Kindle] was named a best book of 2012 by The New Yorker, MacLeans, and Kirkus. I was as happy as you when a black woman won the Prix Goncourt in 2009, and last summer Knopf finally brought out the English translation of Marie NDiaye's Three Strong Women [Kindle]. Readers of a certain bent may be able to queer their experience of Lydia Davis's novel The End of the Story about an unnamed narrator's obsession with a much younger male ex-lover. And fans of northern wonders Tove Jansson, Gerbrand Bakker, and Per Petterson should certainly seek Peter Stamm's short novel Unformed Landscapes about Kathrine, a woman who has never been below the Arctic Circle until she abandons her husband and son.

The winner of the Man Booker International will be announced May 22.

Two Too Gay: Liberace, Larry Kramer Movies Won't Get Theatrical Release

Despite top stars (Michael Douglas, Matt Damon above / Julia Roberts, Mark Ruffalo) and big directors (Steven Soderbergh / Ryan Murphy), two long-gestating queer films, Behind the Candelabra and Larry Kramer's aids drama The Normal Heart, have failed to find studio backing and won't be released as features. The reason is they're "too gay."

Kramer's play debuted in 1985 and for years Barbra Streisand was going to make the movie version. In 2011 The Normal Heart was announced as a feature directed by out wiz Ryan Murphy, costarring Alec Baldwin and Jim Parsons, and co-produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B, but the funding fizzled.

Soderbergh, who is straight and retiring this year so less shy about burning his bridges, unloaded on Hollywood's homophobia in his efforts to finance the Liberace biopic: "Nobody would make it. We went to everybody in town. They all said it was too gay. And this is after ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ by the way, which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned. It made no sense to any of us." He added, "Studios were going, 'We don't know how to sell it.' They were scared."

For some thoughts on Soderbergh's indignation, see the following post.

Both movies have been picked up by HBO, where they will get a lot of attention, a lot of award nominations, and limited viewership. Behind the Candelabra airs this spring, The Normal Heart in 2014.

Born January 5: Alvin Ailey

Growing up in Texas, Alvin Ailey hid his dancing from his disapproving mother for two years and when she first saw him backstage in make-up, she slapped his face. His terror of her homophobia lasted decades, to his final days, so much so that when he was dying of aids at fifty-eight in 1989 he asked his doctor to lie about the cause on his death certificate. That fear outlives him. A CBS profile from August 2008 celebrates the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater's 50th anniversary with great dancing and an American success story of a black troupe thriving in a typically white corner of the arts. It omits any mention that he was gay, or gay people's contribution to dance, that he died of aids, or aids' toll on the arts. It also erases the more complicated aspects of Ailey's life, like his devastating arthritis, his addiction to cocaine, or his dependence on lithium. His private demons never obscured his public genius. One of the seventy-nine dances he choreographed, Revelations, set to spirituals and gospel music, is among the most popular and most seen ballets of the twentieth-century.

Born December 19: Cyril Collard, Jean Genet

Cyril Collard [above, right] adapted, directed, and starred in the vividly bisexual film Les Nuits Fauve (Savage Nights), based on his second novel. The autobiographical story examines the life of a thirtyish aspiring director, Jean, engaged in simultaneous affairs with an 18-year-old French girl and a young, "straight" Spanish rugby player, Samy, who develops a taste for S&M and moves in with him, while Jean still (compulsively?) enjoys frequent, rough anonymous hookups, all of which is further complicated by his being HIV+. Heralding the start of a dazzling career, the movie won four Cesar Awards in 1993, including Best Film, but Collard did not attend. Three days earlier he died of aids at 35.

Flashback to 1949: South Pacific opened on Broadway, James Gould Cozzens won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, All the King's Men won the Oscar for Best Picture, and in France, Jean Genet received his tenth criminal conviction, which meant he would be sent to prison for life. In the preceding seven years he had published his five groundbreaking novels -- Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites, Querelle, The Thief's Journal -- as well as three plays and dozens of poems, all of which were greatly esteemed by his European contemporaries despite his focus on petty thieves and his inclusion of gay sex. As news of his dire situation spread, rather than ostracizing Genet, the leading intellectuals rallied to his defense, and with a public push from Cocteau, Sartre, and Picasso, among others, Genet was pardoned by the French president. It is safe to say Harry Truman would not have done the same because at that point Genet's fiction was still banned in the United States. Genet never returned to prison after that, nor did he ever publish another novel, although he continued to write plays, poems, and a memoir, Un Captif Amoureux, published in 1986, the year after he died of throat cancer. For the full story, read Edmund White's definitive Genet: A Biography.

Born December 14: Hervé Guibert

In his teens Hervé Guibert lied about his age to work at the magazine 20 ans and in his very early 20s he got a job with Le Monde. He published several books and, at 28, won a César Award for his gay screenplay L'Homme blessé, co-written with its director Patrice Chéreau. It tells a Genet-like tale of young man's doomed first love for a manipulative thief/hustler/pimp whom he later kills. Open about his same-sex affairs since high school, Guibert avoided mainstream gay culture and had significant affairs with Michel Foucault, 29 years his senior, and Thierry Jouno, who was living with a woman, Christine, and their two children. In 1988, four years after Foucault's death, Guibert was diagnosed with aids and began to document his decline, giving rise to his most famous books, including the barely veiled novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life which describes/betrays secrets about Foucault's S&M and attacks former friend Isabelle Adjani for backing out of a purported promise to film one of his screenplays. Guibert married Christine, who was also HIV+, so that she and Thierry's children would inherit his royalties. Blind and ravaged by the disease, Guibert tried to kill himself the day before he turned 36. He died two weeks later. Thierry followed within six months.

Fire in the Belly: The Life of David Wojnarowicz

 

I couldn't attend last night's event at the LGBT center for Cynthia Carr and her Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz [Kindle], but the book deserves another boost, both for its remarkable artist and how his story is told. [Above: works from 1988, 1989, and 1982]

The NYT calls it "thorough and sensitive...a smart match of author and subject...sympathetic and compendious; it’s also a many-angled account of the downtown art world of the 1980s...The author braids small, unlikely narratives among the large ones...Ms. Carr, by lining Wojnarowicz in her sights, has seized upon a vivid and peculiarly American story."

The New Yorker's Hilton Als says the biography is "outstanding...Carr analyzes those impulses, but never at the expense of conveying her subject’s spirit and the energies he applied to becoming himself, loving a few people, and making a difference."

Born December 11: John Preston

On Thursday, April 15, 1993, longtime activist John Preston delivered the Jon Pearson Perry Lecture at Harvard, which he titled My Life As a Pornographer. He was 47 and it had been ten years since the release of his classic gay SM novel Mr. Benson [Kindle], which he published under his real name. (In a great reversal, he used a pseudonym for his straight adventure books.) Preston said, "Pornography has made me be honest, about myself and some of the most intimate details of my life and my fantasies. ... Once I had exposed my own sexual fantasies, my most intimate desires, I feared little else about self-exposure as a writer." Among his other popular one-handers were In Search Of A Master, Entertainment for a Master, The Love of a Master, and I Once Had a Master. He edited many important anthologies including Flesh and the Word, Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront Aids and Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong. His most famous non-erotica novel is Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, which has been adapted for the stage. He died of aids at 48. Dozens of authors paid tribute to him in Looking for Mr. Preston.

Kergan Edwards-Stout Talks with Trebor Healey

Author of the award-winning Songs for the New Depression [Kindle] and ace interviewer, Kergan Edwards-Stout last week aimed his Q's at me and Thebes' annual poll. This week he gets A's from novelist Trebor Healey.

Trebor's first novel Through It Came Bright Colors [Kindle] won the Ferro-Grumley Award in 2004, yet he only published his second and third novels this fall. Faun [Kindle], about a high school boy who turns into a satyr, is his first book to be set in Los Angeles where he has lived for 12 years. A Horse Named Sorrow [Kindle], a late-80s aids novel leaves San Francisco for a cross-country bicycle trip:

Kergan: One of the key images in the book is a bicycle wrapped in different strings. How did that come to you?

Trebor: I actually rode a bicycle across the country in the summer of 1986. It was an amazing way to travel and felt to me like traveling by horse, which is how the whole horse/bike/sorrow metaphor first came together. The speed, the human scale, the way you had to maintain your vehicle and plot your trip. It's very meditative and seemed a perfect style of journey for a person in need of retreat and reflection. As for the strings, I think that came from how kids used to tie strings around each other's ankles and wrists, and the idea was that you'd make a wish, and when the string came off, the wish you'd made would come true. There is a lot about wishing in the book, both the good and the bad of it.

Read the full interview on Huffington Post or LGBTQ Nation.

Failing US Aids Goals Worse than Abroad + 5 Other Articles in Atlantic

MacArthur Fellow Mark Harrington writes in The Atlantic: "Not only is the U.S. [aids] plan not on track to achieve its goals, but they are themselves far less ambitious than what has already been achieved in the past decade in some of the world's poorest countries, such as Cambodia, Ethiopia, or Zambia." Look at this chart lists twenty-five nations -- including India, Thailand, Haiti, Zimbabwe, and Ghana -- where new hiv infections fell by more than 50%, while in the US new infection rates have "hovered around 50,000 per year for two decades." Harrington attended a White House event where the administration talked about commitment to ending the pandemic but no official mentioned drug users or reauthorizing Ryan White or PEPFAR. Harrington adds, "In the United States, only 25 percent of the 1.2 million HIV positive people are on effective ART with an undetectable viral load. Only 33 percent are retained in care...Each year Obama has been president, he's cut funding to the CDC and to the TB program."

The magazine has five other articles about aids:

Kenyon Farrow's "Young, Gay, Black -- and at Risk for HIV"

Rebecca Chao on China's Surprising Assault on HIV/AIDS—and a Cultural Taboo

Brian Fung's The Global Geography of HIV: 20 Years of Change—in 1 GIF

And two from John-Manuel Andriote, "Should Everyone HIV+ Be Required to Disclose That to Every Sexual Partner?" (45 states have made failure to disclose a criminal offense) and The Prospects for a 'Sterilizing' HIV Cure.

Born December 3: Patrick Angus

The artist Patrick Angus said he didn't have the happiest day of his life until he was on his deathbed, succumbing to aids at thirty-eight in 1992. It was then that he saw the proofs of Strip Show, a book of forty-seven color reproductions of his paintings, and could finally believe that his art would not be completely forgotten. He had worked in obscurity, defeated by early humiliations from galleries that caustically rejected his depictions of sexual loneliness and the "bad" gay culture of hustlers, tricks, and low clubs. Worn down by his failures, Angus gave up hope of exhibiting his paintings, until Robert Patrick wrote an essay about him in Christopher Street. David Hockney bought five of Angus's paintings, and in 1992 three galleries held solo shows, yet without new work the momentum was lost. He is included in overviews like Emmanuel Cooper's The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West and James Saslow's exceptional Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. Much credit is due Douglas Blair Turnbaugh for his steadfast dedication to securing Angus's legacy. Kudos also to film director Ira Sachs for including Angus in his prize-winning short about NYC artists lost to aids, Last Address.

Born October 30: Néstor Almendros

Like so many great artists, Néstor Almendros did not follow a straight path to his genius. Born in Barcelona in 1930, he became disgusted with Franco's Spain by age eighteen and followed his father to Cuba, then went to film school in Rome, tried and failed to work in New York, left for France, was ready to give up at thirty-four, and got an absurdly lucky break: He happened to be on set the day the director of photography quit a short project with Eric Rohmer. From there Almendros became one of the world's  greatest cinematographers, carefully composing each frame and using natural light like a painter on over fifty films, including, in order, Two English Girls, Chloé in the Afternoon, The Story of Adele H., The Marquise of O., Days of Heaven for which he won an Oscar, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Blue Lagoon, The Last Métro for which he won a Cesar, Sophie's Choice, Pauline at the Beach, Places in the Heart, Heartburn, Imagine: John Lennon, and Billy Bathgate.

For anyone seriously interested in cinema, his book A Man with a Camera is essential reading. Not only does he clarify how the director of photography differs from the cameraman but he devotes a brief chapter to each of forty films. He describes the challenges and innovations of working with directors (again and again it's Rohmer, Truffaut, or Robert Benton) to decide which colors they want the costume and set designers to use and how Almendros will light and shoot each scene. They usually start with fine art. Their initial inspiration for Kramer vs. Kramer, set on the Upper East Side of the 1970s, was Piero della Francesca, with a little Hockney and, for the child's bedroom, Magritte. For The Blue Lagoon, he concentrated on Gauguin. For the Meryl Streep - Robert DeNiro psycho-thriller Still of the Night, he looked to old Fritz Lang movies and Edward Hopper. Remarkably generous with the secrets of his working trade, his autobiography completely ignores his private life. And yet, even though he was closeted, when he had the opportunity to direct his own movie in 1984, he chose to make a documentary about Cuba's persecution of gay men, Mauvaise conduite [Improper Conduct], which won the audience award at Frameline. He also shot ads for Calvin Klein and Armani. He died of aids in 1992 at age sixty-one. Human Rights Watch gives an annual film award named in his honor.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

June Elbus, a 14 year-old in Westchester, grieves for her favorite uncle, Finn, a successful, reclusive artst in Manhattan, who dies of aids at the start of Carol Brunt's debut novel Tell the Wolves I'm Home [Kindle]. It's 1987 and the suburbs' reaction to the pandemic is ignorance, hostility, fear, and indifference. June's family says Finn's longtime partner, a wayward hiv+ Brit named Toby whom they've never met, murdered Finn by infecting him to inherit his apartment and expensive art, and they hound him away from the funeral. Finn has left June and Toby notes begging each to take care of the other and the bulk of the story is their wary then warm secret friendship. June's problem isn't hiding it from her clueless, accountant parents but from her suspicious, jealous sister Greta, who plays Bloody Mary in the school production of South Pacific and is offered a role in Annie on Broadway. Finn's final painting was a double portrait of June and Greta which is featured in the NYT then lands on the cover of Newsweek. Skeptics of these rosy plot points may balk at the novel's lite grasp of aids, whose side effects are mainly thinness and a little shivering before death, but the book is surer of its sense of teen girl confusion and drama.

Perks & Plague: Support Queer Film This Weekend

After We Were Here and United in Anger, today's aids doc How To Survive a Plague has an average rating of 90 on Metacritic, meaning "universal acclaim." The San Francisco Chronicle says it "lingers as a testament to extraordinary human bravery. It stands as one of the most heartbreaking and suspenseful sagas of the year." It opens in NYC, LA, SF, and Chicago; next week: DC, Atlanta, and Cambridge.

Stephen Chbosky's million-copy-selling first novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower is now a movie that he adapted and directed. Most critics have singled out its gay character, Patrick, played by Ezra Miller. EW gave the movie an A, citing Patrick as "a kind of teenage Oscar Wilde played by the mesmerizing Ezra Miller... The movie is tough-minded: It zeroes in on Patrick's anger at dating a closeted football star." (The quarterback is played by Johnny Simmons, right in OUT's moody photo.) Salon's Andrew O'Hehir writes:

"Here he takes one of the most hackneyed central-casting roles in the lexicon – the wisecracking gay sidekick, who covers his pain with laughter – and fills every moment with awkward significance... Patrick is trying on semi-adult masks to see if they fit. He’s doing so in that confusing post-Harvey Milk, pre-gay marriage era when LGBT rights was emerging as a national issue but options for real-life gay kids in suburbia were pretty limited."

On the lasting importance of pop entertainment, Daniel Mendelsohn's new essay revisits landmark gay TV moments, from Paul Lynde to Dynasty to Brideshead to Will & Grace to the Glee kiss that made him cry.

Marco Roth's Memoir of Closeted Dad Dying of Aids and Its Aftermath

The only child of Central Park West intellectuals, Marco Roth grew up with La Fontaine's fables and Norse myths and a family lie. The story went that his scientist father didn't wear latex gloves in the lab and from a stray needle prick he contracted aids. Not so. Typical for such a literary family, Marco found the truth, that his father dated men, by reading a galley of his paternal aunt Anne Roiphe's memoir 1185 Park Avenue. Thirteen years later, Marco says he started his book The Scientists: A Family Romance [Kindle], out this week from FSG, as an act of revenge against her but it grew into something far more complicated. One review explains, "As part of his puzzling-out project, or as a literary conceit, Roth starts reading and rereading the books his father gave him, including Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Goncharov's Oblomov, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Revisiting the classics and a father's secret gay life ought to call to mind Alison Bechdel's brilliant Fun Home. If he's lucky.

David Wojnarowicz Biography: Fire in the Belly

Just out from Bloomsbury, Cynthia Carr's bio of essential artist / writer David Wojnarowicz takes its name from his work censored at the Hide/Seek exhibit, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz [Kindle]. PW chose it as a Pick of the Week, writing "In this lucidly composed, skillfully contextualized first complete biography of David Wojnarowicz, former Village Voice reporter Carr reveals how the controversial artist’s life experience shaped his art and politics. Tracing his early life as a withdrawn, unstable student, sometime hustler, and store clerk in the troubled New York of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Carr reveals the artist’s struggle to express his emerging gay identity and the violent intensity of his family life."

The NYT says, "Ms. Carr’s biography is both sympathetic and compendious; it’s also a many-angled account of the downtown art world of the 1980s... The author braids small, unlikely narratives among the large ones. There’s an account of the art store clerk who gave away free supplies to poor artists he admired, and one of Redden’s, the sole funeral home in Manhattan that would accept AIDS patients in the early days of the crisis, winning the loyalty of many gay men. Ms. Carr, by lining Wojnarowicz in her sights, has seized upon a vivid and peculiarly American story."

The knowing cover photo is by friend and mentor Peter Hujar, whom David called "the parent I never had," except they did sleep together. See Peter's nsfw portrait of David's nude handwork.

If you haven't already, read David's journals and diaries.