The Lonely City (23 page)

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 make 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.

*

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:

I use images of sexuality . . . to deal with what I have experienced, and the fact that I think sexuality and the human body should not be a taboo subject this late in the 20th century. I also use images of sexuality to portray the diversity of people, and their sexual orientations, and one of the biggest reasons I feel uncomfortable about the idea of the human body being a taboo subject is that, had the human body not been a taboo subject in this
decade, I might have gotten the information from the Health Department, from elected representatives, that would have spared me having contracted this virus.

After the trial, after that gruelling and stressful brush with censorship, he made a book about sex.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline
combines fragments of memoir with watercolour drawings and sketches of people in porn cinemas. He wanted to celebrate the old wildness before it vanished altogether, though he was also adamant about the need for safer sex.

In fact, sometimes the recklessness of people in the cinemas appalled him. In one essay he talked about going in immediately after visiting a friend in hospital, and being shocked by the riskiness of the behaviour on display. He fantasised then about filming his friend’s face, covered in lesions, his newly blind eyes, dragging in a projector and hooking it up with copper cables to a car battery and projecting the film on to the dark wall above everybody’s heads. ‘I didn’t want to ruin their evening,’ he wrote, ‘just wanted maybe to keep their worlds from narrowing down too far.’ Denial was always David’s target, whether that meant right-wing preachers who couldn’t abide talk of sex or hedonists who didn’t want to admit to the possibility of death.

Memories
was packed tight with his own sexual experiences, among them the story of how he’d been violently raped as a boy. The memory of this terrifying afternoon had come back to him when he’d happened to pass the guy in a cinema. It was decades later, but he was still instantly recognisable, his skin somehow greyish, like something manufactured, something dead.The incident
had happened when he was hitching back from swimming in a lake in New Jersey, his clothes still drenched. The man had tied him up and raped him in the back of a red pick-up truck, shoving a wad of mud and sand in his mouth and battering him repeatedly. He thought he was going to die: saw in a flash his own body drenched in lighter fuel and seared like a side of beef, to be found by hikers tossed in a ditch. Seeing the man again, he was so overcome that he felt like he was being bled, like he’d been shrunk back to the size of a boy, like he’d lost the faculty of speech.