It’s More Than Just “Two Boys Kissing”

David Wojnarowicz captured the chaos of living as a gay man in the 1980s and early 1990s with HIV overshadowing everything we did and felt.

The Met Gala is not an official Pride event, but it might as well be. Last year, to the theme of “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion,” Lil Nas X unveiled three different gold Versace outfits on the red carpet. Kristen Stewart imbued Chanel with virility, and Tessa Thompson paired an Iris van Herpen dress with a black cowboy hat and high-heeled boots. The queers always bring it.

As for Dan Levy, he appeared in an ensemble inspired head to toe by the work of the iconic activist, artist, and writer David Wojnarowicz, specifically his 1984 mixed-media piece Fuck You Faggot Fucker. Billowing sleeves filled most of the photo’s frame, the entire outfit surging with dynamic blue hues. Front and center, the clear outline of two men embracing, the lips of one adhered tight to the lips of the other. I hit the caps-lock key and screamed on Twitter, “DAN LEVY IS WEARING THE SUBJECT OF MY DISSERTATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

To be fair, in my study of the pedagogical uses of illness memoirs in the composition classroom, I only wrote one chapter about Wojnarowicz’s memoir, Close to the Knives. I consecrated it as scripture for anyone incensed and debilitated by the annihilation caused by HIV’s first decade of existence. In electric run-on sentences pulsing with ferocious details, Wojnarowicz captured the chaos of living as a gay man in the 1980s and early 1990s with HIV overshadowing everything we did and felt.

Never trying to feign objectivity or lessen his fury, Wojnarowicz documents so much in his work. There are the quack doctors injecting his dear friend, photographer Peter Hujar, with typhoid (the quack out on Long Island) and human shit (the quack in uptown Manhattan). There is the moment Wojnarowicz watches Hujar take his last slow, deliberate breath. There is his perpetual fear that each artwork he creates will be his last.

I started college in Houston in 1988, and I was terrified: first, of college itself—because I was the first in my family to go; and second, of my desires for men—because I believed they would cause my death. Whether on television or in my small-town Texas school, queers were jokes who reaped what they sowed. By the time I moved into the dorms, logical consensus provided a sliver of hope: Blocking semen from entering the body would block HIV from doing the same. Like the posters at gay bars said, “Come on me, not in me.”

Two years later, and I was submitting poems to the gay/lesbian student newsletter about going down on guys in adult bookstores. Edmund White and David B. Feinberg novels gave me the courage to walk into the places dotting the highway advertising video booths open twenty-four hours. Not that I swallowed. No one did. The terror surrounding HIV never dissipated for anyone. Reading Close to the Knives for the first time years later helped me learn to say it to myself and everyone else.

David Wojnarowicz died of complications from AIDS on July 22, 1992. He was thirty-seven years old. Just ten days before, my first partner, Blane, died of complications from AIDS on July 12, 1992. Blane was thirty-eight years old. I was twenty-two.

Ours was a significant age difference, but, to him and me, it was irrelevant. We talked about the future in fuzzy terms, and the past was fodder for intimate conversations. All the gay men we knew were fighting to live with purpose and—often too afraid to voice it—joy.

Two months before Blane died, we took part in a Rite of Blessing, which is what the Black woman from the queer church who was officiating called it. We could not have a commitment ceremony performed by a member of the church unless we had been together for a full year. It had only been seven months. She knew nothing about Blane’s HIV status, nor mine. She never suggested we wait, and the thought never crossed our minds.

Blane told me he was HIV+ soon after we started dating in the last couple of months of 1991. Nothing we had done could have put me at risk, and he had spent the year since his diagnosis in 1990 setting up medical care and monthly disability payments through social security. I drove him to the ER one night in April 1992, but it was thrush, just thrush. One round of antibiotics to knock it out. When anxiety roiled my stomach, I’d chant to myself, “He has a doctor. He has pills. He has a doctor. He has pills.”

By standards of acts performed, we did not have much of a sex life, but that’s for those who place importance on checking items off of a list. We had kissing, the entire range of kissing, with legs entwined, hands touching everything we wanted to touch, laughing, whispering. When Dan Levy showed up at the Met Gala, many in the press erroneously called the artwork upon which designer Jonathan Anderson based his design “Two Boys Kissing,” and there’s a logic to that.

It’s the men, mouths locked, shirtless and cemented together, that are emblazoned across Levy’s torso, their bodies turned out, demanding attention. Wojnarowicz used a stencil of those men across art pieces, including Fuck You Faggot Fucker from 1984, when Wojnarowicz was in the middle of mounting his first solo exhibitions.

It’s a sizable artwork, four feet by four feet of Masonite collaged with large faded maps of the entire world. Four black-and-white photographs—of friends in New York City’s abandoned piers and buildings—dot the corners. The title is taken from a found fragment Wojnarowicz collaged into the work’s bottom center: a scrap of brown paper bag with a crude line drawing of two figures engaged in anal sex, the receptive partner labeled faggot for confused viewers. Eats Shit and Fuck You Faggot Fucker are written around the fucking figures.

She never suggested we wait, and the thought never crossed our minds.

Alan Barrows, a gallery owner, objected to the explicit title when Wojnarowicz included the piece in his May 1984 one-person show at Civilian Warfare, a space that Barrows co-owned. Wojnarowicz refused any request or demand to change the title or remove the piece. It stayed in the show.

After his diagnosis as HIV+ in 1988, Wojnarowicz continually challenged what he called the “one-tribe nation” who subsists in a “predetermined world” fabricated by political, commercial, and religious forces. Considering how those forces fought back, he did an outstanding job.

In 1989, Wojnarowicz wrote an essay for the exhibit catalog accompanying Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, a foundational group exhibition of work responding to AIDS at the gallery Artists Space. He titled the essay “Postcards from America: X-rays from Hell.” In it, he proclaimed in all caps: “WHEN I WAS TOLD I’D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN’T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I’D CONTRACTED A DISEASE SOCIETY AS WELL.” Wojnarowicz named those at fault: Senators Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato, New York City Mayor Ed Koch, the leaders of both the American Medical Association and the Food and Drug Administration, among others.

The National Endowment for the Arts pulled the funding it had awarded Artists Space, citing the catalog’s inclusion of work that, as the NEA chairman John E. Frohnmayer noted in his press release, “is political rather than artistic in nature.” Artists Space returned the NEA funding, but only because of the technicality that the awarded grant had been part of the agency’s previous fiscal year of funding.

In 1990, Wojnarowicz sued the American Family Association (AFA) and its executive director, Rev. Donald E. Wildmon, for defamation because they sent out a mailing that misrepresented artwork that had been included in the NEA-funded catalog for Tongues of Flame, the only retrospective held in Wojnarowicz’s lifetime, at Illinois State University and curated by Barry Blinderman. That mailing led to lawmakers in Congress denouncing the NEA’s involvement and demanding the federal General Accounting Office investigate “questionable activities” related to the grant.

Wojnarowicz won his case. The court determined Wojnarowicz deserved one dollar in damages, likely believing he had not suffered any real damages. Wildmon and the AFA did not appeal their loss and promptly sent Wojnarowicz a single check for the entire settlement. It was never cashed and sits in a folder at New York University’s Fales Library. Wildmon and the AFA continue to thrive in Mississippi.

At Houston’s Astrodome in August 1992, a month after Blane and Wojnarowicz died, the Republican National Convention met to nominate President George H. W. Bush for reelection. I had been working at a local nonprofit arts organization in the museum district as the curatorial assistant for about a year. Tim Miller, one of the NEA 4—four performance artists who’d had their NEA grants stripped the same year Wojnarowicz was suing Wildmon—performed at a rally held in the park next door to our gallery. Bullhorn in hand, Miller explained how he became a “queer point of light” to a packed crowd of artists, art lovers, and press. He demanded that artists maintain their vigilance in all attempts to limit freedom of expression.

On election night in November, Bill Clinton gave his victory speech from Little Rock, Arkansas, and included “AIDS” in a list of problems ignored for too long. I burst into tears hearing it. It was only a crumb of acknowledgement, but Reagan barely said it and Bush did so grudgingly. Clinton said it on his first night. The next day, I asked others if they’d heard it too.

Wojnarowicz demanded that artists maintain their vigilance in all attempts to limit freedom of expression.

At work, I painted walls between shows and wrote press releases for upcoming exhibitions. I organized the files of slides from artists and maintained the list of books sent to us for possible review in the quarterly magazine we published. The Tongues of Flame catalog that incited Wildmon’s rage was in a box from a regular distributor that arrived before Thanksgiving. I flipped through and saw sketches of men in a park with prominent erections, photographs of graffiti-covered piers, and ants crawling over detritus in the streets. Fuck You Faggot Fucker was on page twenty-nine. I took the catalog home, crawled into bed, and read it twice. That was my introduction to David Wojnarowicz.

The editor not only supported my pitch for a review but added a catalog from an independently curated group exhibition, From Media to Metaphor: Art about AIDS, that had traveled through the United States and Canada with work by Wojnarowicz, Félix González-Torres, Robert Mapplethorpe, and over twenty others. I spent a month printing drafts whenever I was at work, editing them by hand.

When he was alive, Blane had attended the gallery’s openings when he wasn’t too tired, and we had gone on dates to the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, but art was not something about which he expressed opinions. He would have been thrilled I had been assigned the review because he was supportive of me more than he believed in the content of my work. That said, he fueled my writing, of course. The last day I worked before the holidays, I left a disk with my final draft in the editor’s mailbox.

At the first staff meeting in January, the accountant who handled all finances said my review should not be published because it would hurt our prospects for grant funding. The NEA and the Texas Commission on the Arts would notice. He was a proud proponent of Southern decorum; he believed art should remain separate from politics. He was also a gay man proud no one knew he was gay for months after his hire. At that moment, I froze like I always do when encountering unexpected attention. My eyes started tearing up.

The executive director stood, squeezed my hand, and walked me out. I mumbled, struggling to say I was sorry for causing problems. She said there were no problems, and they were printing it. I cried, and she let me. Everyone was in their own workspaces when we returned, the accountant in his back office, me at the front desk.

A week after that meeting, I dropped off a new draft that addressed the editor’s sentence-level concerns. I added a new introduction they approved.

“When my lover, Blane, died of AIDS in July 1992, I went through the normal reactions: shock, anger. I did not really begin to deal with the situation and accept what had happened until I started to write about it.”

Now, I would add, fuck you, faggot fucker.