Wojnarowicz created “A Fire in My Belly” in 1987 after the death from AIDS of his lover, the photographer Peter Hujar, and after learning he was HIV+ (d. 1992). It is a fierce, pain-filled montage. The images are layered with Diamanda Galas’ bone-jarring composition. Galas wrote the piece in 1986 after her brother’s death from AIDS.
I am a fan of both Wojnarowicz and Galas. Wojnarowicz’s art was intimate, revealing, vulnerable, beautiful, pictorial memoir. His paintings told stories about his life, literally and symbolically, always with poignancy no matter how disturbing the image. But that is beside the point.
Or maybe it is the point.
I came out as a femme queer in 1995. I had a life I might have dreamed of if I were heterosexual: married to a wonderful man, an artist, whom I loved; living in a loft in Soho; two young children, a boy and girl; straight couple friends, all creative, edgy, interesting people. When I became aware that I was a dysfunctional heterosexual, my plan was to come out when I was 50 so my children would be grown and I didn’t have to ruin my family so badly. I didn’t make it past 37. I would have imploded if I waited any longer. Living a double consciousness is painful.
Two things helped me understand my identity and gave me the courage to come out – education and art. Let me back up: I am not a lesbian in the usual sense, meaning my desire is not sisterly or woman-centric. I am the woman. I want a female husband. My first revelation was finding the identities of “femme” and “butch” in books. Even though I fit squarely in the standard definitions of “femme,” I didn’t feel a politic around it. The myth of femme identity is that it’s about as antifeminist as you can get with its focus on the feminine trappings of makeup and frilly frocks, sexual submission, desire for the masculine, gendered division of domestic labor, and eroticizing old-fashioned masculine chivalry. My “The Personal is Political” politic was to say that, yes, all that is true but butch/ femme is a constructed, consensual dynamic between two females with no inherent State-sanctioned power imbalance…and it’s subversive, mirroring the dominant paradigm queerly, exposing it as unstable, blah blah blah. That’s where the education part came in.
When I was younger, looking at the 19th c. Turkish bath paintings of Ingres and Gerome filled my loins with lust and my heart with shame. I thought it irreverent to look at these exquisite paintings and feel turned-on as if they were porn. But as I learned later, art has multiple interpretations and one can look at Robert Mapplethorpe’s well-hung men or Sally Mann’s children or Catherine Opie’s queers or the weirdness of Lisa Yuskavage or John Currin and be aroused by both the image and the craft. Art can evoke anguish, curiosity, identification, yearning, anger, etc. Art is commentary. It is related to time, history, geography, and technique. And that is what makes art so relevant to a society. When it’s not commentary, it’s not art; it’s decoration.
I’ll give it to Boehner and Donohue for recognizing art and its purpose, assuming they saw the piece. Their feelings were aroused, they understood it was a commentary on religion, and they knew it was important enough or they wouldn’t find it worthy of condemnation. However, they did not censor the piece because of its content. As Frank Rich wrote (following Blake Gopnik of the Washington Post), “Those [grisly] images are staples of all museums – even in Washington, where gory 17th-century sculptures of Christ were featured in a recent show of Spanish sacred art at the National Gallery.” They bullied the Smithsonian into removing it because the artist is a queer. This is not about imagery but about religious zealots and conservative lawmakers condemning queers and making AIDS their private penance.
Now this is where I come in again. I am a queer. David Wojnarovich is meaningful to my sense of who I am. Queer art did not tell me that I am a queer-- that was in the butch/femme books of Joan Nestle – rather it helped me understand, with beauty and pain and poignancy, that my queer world and my identity are multi-faceted, sometimes conflicting, and complex. And frankly, I feel fortunate to be who I am. If I believed in God I would believe I was blessed to be born a queer and to have lived the life I have. Being queer has made me a political person.
It took me a long time to figure this out. I spent the 70s not paying attention to lesbian feminism, and the 80s not paying enough attention to the AIDS epidemic. I feel badly about that now considering I was young and healthy and those were my queer people who died and I did nothing. I dropped deeply into my unstable heterosexuality, trying so hard to be a good wife and mother.
I came out of my stupor in the early 90s when I was a graduate student in Performance Studies at NYU studying performance and politics during the Bush administration. The Corcoran had recently cancelled Robert Mapplethorpe’s show; Senators Alphonse D’Amato and Jesse Helms condemned Andres Serrano’s photograph, “Piss Christ”; the NEA rescinded grants given to performance artists Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, Tim Miller and John Fleck; and Representative Rohrabacher told the House to end NEA support for David Wojnarowicz. I became an activist, a member of the Women's Action Coalition, a mighty group started by women artists, writers, and art dealers. We staged protests that were fabulous as performance pieces and always made me cry because of the spirit and strength behind what we did.
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When I first read of the censorship on December 1 (World AIDS Day) I felt sick. Not again. No no no … not the Christian right again; not homophobic Republican idiots condemning without any comprehension about the meaning and purpose of art – or without even seeing it. I thought we had come further than this.
AIDS is part of United States history. Curators, archivists, historians and the general public should be humbled and awed by the volume of brilliant creativity in all mediums that came out of this epidemic. AIDS is in the U.S. legacy of not caring what happens to citizens who are deemed marginal. The great tragedies – slavery, internment camps, AIDS -- in which the United States is at fault for human rights violations, are greatly underplayed in the retelling of U.S. history. Censorship is obscene and dangerous.
This time I can’t be silent. I refuse to let MY right to bear witness to the pain and fury of AIDS, and to view queer art, be censored by Republicans and the Christian right. We – everyone with a conscience -- have a responsibility to manage the creative legacy of AIDS victims. These works are of historical importance and a testament to the incredible talent that died with an underfunded epidemic.
I'm going to Washington to protest.
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“A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. Man, Gentlemen, does not improvise. The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion.” ~ Ernest Renan “What Is A Nation?” 1882 (trans. French)
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