Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  A couple of nights later, David came back to the gallery with Marion and with photographer Andreas Sterzing, who had a large-format camera. They spent the whole night there, eating and drinking and documenting the show. When they left at five in the morning, David told Marion, “I don’t think we should split now. Come back to the loft.”

  “And so I laughed, and at that point I was really in love with him,” Marion said. “It was just magic. So we went to his loft, and at the moment we had to put ourselves in bed, he started getting nervous. I remember that, because he wouldn’t come to bed. So I understood that maybe he was scared that I would try to have sex with him. So I said, ‘Look, David. I feel you’re nervous. So don’t worry. I have some Valium. I’m going to take half a Valium and then you won’t be afraid I’ll jump on you.’ So he laughed and he said, ‘OK, I’ll take one too.’ Then in the morning, he woke up first.… He prepared breakfast for me. I think he was very relieved to see that we could sleep in the same bed and just be tender with each other.”

  Marion was about to go back to Paris and told him, “Do you know one thing that would make me happy? If you and Tom could see me off at the airport.” So David arranged this, despite knowing that Tom disliked her.

  As Marion remembered it, she came to the loft an hour before they were supposed to leave for the airport. David was giving her a stack of his photos in payment for all the help she’d given him. “So we looked at them together. We had fun,” Marion said, “and I was in love with this moment of him, with all these photos he was giving me. And I said—like not kidding but laughing, like playing, I said, ‘Oh, let’s go just you and me to the airport,’ because I wanted to continue this magic thing.” That made him so furious that he tore up one of the prints he’d given her and then, after she said no and begged him to stop, he threw the rest of the pictures up in the air. She went out to walk and cry for half an hour. Back at the loft, David picked up all the prints he’d thrown. They patched it up, but David did not forget this.

  He wrote about it later, when he was trying to analyze his relationship with Marion. As he remembered it, she had asked him the night before if they could go to the airport without Tom. Or as David put it, “Reject Tom in other words. I said no. She said: ‘I gave you so much and ask only one small favor and you reject my request.’ I went nuts. Uncontrollable. Ripped up the photos I packed for her. Was relieved that was all. Fear of all my life killing someone if out of control. Ended up going alone I think.… Hard to remember now.”

  Marion thought that Tom had come along in the end. Tom is certain that he did not.

  David usually left town immediately after a show opened. He always expected the worst and did not want to hear the reactions. This time he was in New York long enough to understand that the art world had embraced his new work. He felt confused. He was afraid his emotions would become apparent. “My buried rage could surface along with need for the embrace—who knows?”

  On February 22, David left for Albuquerque—a rare solo trip. He began a new journal on the flight. “What is it I want or need? … I want to create a myth that I can one day become. I want to adjust myself through my work.… I am what I do, but not really. I get angry at the pressure of strength. I get resistant to the idea that I should be clear and strong in this part of my life. I want to be raw, I want blood in my work. This is why I don’t revise my writings very much. Why I stop short of the ideal construction of painting or photos or whatever.”

  He spent about ten days in the Southwest, mostly in or near Albuquerque, but he also drove west through the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert, into the vicinity of the Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo reservations, and ultimately to Meteor Crater. He sent a postcard to Marion from Holbrook, Arizona. “Sitting in a motel room the swimming pool is filled with red dust …”

  Had it really been just three and a half years since he’d stayed at this same motel with Keith Davis, and the pool was filled with water?

  ACT UP decided to target the Koch administration’s miserable record in addressing the AIDS epidemic, and it prepared by conducting a series of four-hour teach-ins for its membership. New York had 22 percent of all reported cases in the country. The crisis was multipronged and included the city’s collapsing health care system, the thousands of homeless people with AIDS, and a mayor so fearful and ignorant about the disease that he immediately went and washed his hands after handing a PWA a cookie. To educate its membership, ACT UP created and distributed a hundred-page handbook filled with statistics, analyses of what had to change, and lists of who in city government was not doing what.

  On March 28, 1989, an estimated five thousand activists demonstrated at City Hall and blocked the Brooklyn Bridge. The face of Mayor Ed Koch—known for his glib catchphrase “How’m I doin’?”—now appeared on an ACT UP placard that read, “10,000 New York City AIDS Deaths. How’m I doin’?” David was one of more than two hundred people arrested that day. Tom participated early in the action, before work, but was not arrested.

  Zoe Leonard came to that demo with the Candelabras. David and Tom were no longer part of that affinity group, but she and David had begun talking on the phone again. Even when they were slightly estranged, she said, she and David could run into each other on the street and decide to have coffee or say, “I’m shooting something. Do you want to help?”

  He was the one she wanted to talk to about the questions her activism brought up in her. One day she asked him to come to her apartment to look at some prints. “I was taking all these aerial photographs,” Zoe said, “and I confided in him about this conflict I was having as an artist about the intensity of the activist work and the harshness of the reality of the crisis and—I was photographing clouds. There was just beginning to be a little bit of interest in my work. I had been offered a one-person show, and I remember being really confused. Like, what do I do? There’s this divide in my life. And I showed him all these prints. I used to just work en masse, and I had stacks and stacks of prints all over the floor, and he was so kind.”

  Her voice broke as she recounted what David told her: “Zoe, these are so beautiful, and that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.”

  20 “LIKE A BLOOD-FILLED EGG”

  Rosa von Praunheim came to New York in April 1989 to make Silence = Death, a documentary about artists dealing with AIDS. He filmed a ritual unfolding of the NAMES Project quilt. He filmed an exhibit by the activist-artist collective Gran Fury. He interviewed artist Peter Kunz, who died two weeks after recording his segment. He caught Emilio Cubiero performing his horrific suicide piece, “Death of an Asshole”—jamming a pistol into said orifice and pulling the trigger. Allen Ginsberg read his “Sphincter” poem, and Keith Haring paused in the midst of painting a large erotic mural to say, “This is about nostalgia. It’s not about anything that could happen now.” But it was David who became the moral and political center of this film.

  He was about to become one of the major voices to emerge from the AIDS crisis. Silence = Death returns to him repeatedly for monologues, rants, and interviews, and he used this as a forum to deliver key points he’d been working out in his writing:

  “When I was told that I had this virus, it didn’t take me too long to realize that I had contracted a diseased society as well …

  “… and I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg …

  “… if I die of AIDS, I don’t want a fucking memorial.… Drop my fucking body right on the front steps of the White House …

  “I don’t think having AIDS is something heavy; it is the use of AIDS as a weapon to enforce the conservative agenda that’s heavy.”

  He delivered the monologue with that last line while wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with the handwritten slogan “Fuck Me Safe.” He gave Rosa footage from A Fire in My Belly and from the unfinished film about Hujar. He provided a wolf mask and costume
in which someone came creeping toward him during the “blood-filled egg” voice-over. (David chased the “wolf” off with a flaming pole.) He talked about Hujar’s death and what that loss meant. He talked about his own death, betraying no fear of it. “You become fly food, and somehow that’s comforting.”

  Norman Frisch, then working for the Wooster Group as administrator and dramaturge, met David at a panel discussion organized by Gran Fury. Frisch had been acquainted with Rosa von Praunheim for years and also knew Phil Zwickler, who was acting as line producer on Silence = Death. Frisch observed, “David had a lot more control over his sequences than any of the other artists did. Somehow he and Rosa had agreed that David’s sequences were really David’s film, and that he could do what he wanted.”

  David asked Marion Scemama to be there too, and to bring her video camera. (At that time, she was coming to New York four or five times a year.) “We had started thinking about a film we could do together,” Marion said. “But it would be his film. About death. About AIDS. About the world and sexuality.”

  One day, while he was still filming Silence = Death, he became very angry at Marion. She’d been in New York for a week and they hadn’t shot anything for their own film. “He was saying all these bad things about me,” she said. “That I was disturbing his life, that I was fucked up—like he used to do sometimes when he was too nervous.” She told him she was going to turn on a tape recorder and he should just talk.

  What then poured out was all his ambivalence about doing their film. “It makes me very self-conscious to sit in front of a tape recorder and talk about this kind of shit,” he began. “The thing about my death, about Peter, about whatever—I mean, I can sit there and do this for Rosa’s movie on a certain level because I hadn’t really talked about it on tape recorder that much except privately.” He meant his taped journals.

  “The thing that occurs to me is, so what? We have a documentation of David with rage, we have a documentation of David angry, we have a documentation of David scared, so—all this stuff that I can only imagine is for after my death. And again, it’s like, so what? How many thousands of people died of AIDS now? How many documentations do you have to have of this sick, dying faggot sitting in a room, going through whatever shit that he’s going through and oh look, he has rage; and oh yes, he has fear; and oh yes, he has a mind; and oh yes, he created these things and some people think they’re beautiful, other people think they’re full of shit. To be a participant in recording myself for after my death just seems pretty fucked-up.”

  He addressed Marion at some point: “What is important about this to you? I’m asking you. What do you think comes from looking at images of somebody who’s angry because they’re dying? What is it about the sound of their voice or the information that they have about panic or fear that’s important? Like, what can it do?” She did not reply.

  David kept going for another thirty minutes or so. The gist of the subsequent rant was that he didn’t want to be pinned down “like a bug on paper” in some film that would claim to be the definitive David. “I get afraid,” he said, “that—OK, I’m documenting this stuff, but what about the billions and billions of things that are taking place inside my head and body that I can’t document because there’s no language for it?”

  Marion helped him prepare for each scene he filmed with Rosa. They hadn’t decided what form their own video would take. But one thing David talked about, said Marion, was his nostalgia for cruising. One night, he took her to a gay porn theater. She bound up her breasts and wore a hat so she could pass as a man. Once inside the theater, David immediately walked over to some guy and left her hiding behind a pillar. When a man approached her, David came right back. She asked if they could leave. “He wanted me to see how it worked. He wanted to try and make me feel the beauty of two men meeting through anonymous sex. They were closing the theaters, so for him it was an entire culture that was collapsing. That’s why he did all those drawings of guys having sex in theaters [later published in Memories That Smell like Gasoline]. He wanted to record it before everybody died.”

  David told her he wanted to do a scene with a guy for Silence = Death, “to show how it is between guys—not a sex scene but a sensual scene.” When he said he didn’t know who he could get to do this, Marion suggested Paul Smith.

  Smith was an artist and occasional critic. (He had reviewed David’s “Mexican Diaries” show, for example.) They’d been acquainted for years. David had asked Smith to pose the year before for the photos of lips sewn, hands sewing bread, and hands bandaged that he used in Silence Through Economics. According to Marion, David had always been attracted to Smith. This was news to Smith, who said, “He never gave me any clue that he was attracted to me.”

  He said that David asked him, “Would you be willing to kiss me for this film?” And that David was shy about kissing him. Their encounter in Silence = Death is very short in duration and very short on chemistry. David took Marion to see the rushes and they were both disappointed. As Marion put it, “The mystery of sensuality and eroticism was gone.” She thought the cinematographer should have done more close-ups.

  She and David decided they would do it over—for themselves—with Marion shooting video. She had once had a short affair with Smith, who described himself as “more bisexual than David was.” Marion described the subsequent shoot as “hot.”

  “I was so excited,” she said. “Because I had this desire for Paul. I had this desire for David. I love men’s bodies. And it was like David giving me something to see about his sexuality.

  “There was this intense complicity between David and me,” she said, “because I had this camera that wasn’t just an object but an extension of David’s mind through my eye and my arm. That’s when I really understood what my work with David could be.… David used to say we were from the same brain.… After this, we were not scared anymore of trying to put together this video he wanted to make about him[self]. We started playing with the camera, creating more and more images without knowing yet what we would do with it.… The camera literally became a ‘desiring machine,’ a belt of transmission between our respective fantasies, a way of pushing away the growing feeling of death surrounding us.”

  That April, letters from outraged members of the American Family Association (AFA) began to inundate Congress.

  Andres Serrano’s photograph Piss Christ had been part of a juried group show, “Awards in the Visual Arts,” sponsored by the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. After traveling unremarked through Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, the exhibition landed at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond and closed at the end of January 1989. Nearly two months later, on Palm Sunday, the Richmond Times-Dispatch printed a letter complaining about Serrano’s piece.

  A local member of the AFA clipped the letter and sent it to the group’s leader, the Reverend Donald Wildmon, who then used the AFA newsletter to mobilize a protest. The exhibit had been funded by the Equitable Life Assurance Society, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Equitable reported getting forty thousand letters. Wildmon himself wrote to every member of Congress, enclosing a reproduction of Piss Christ.

  This Cibachrome print of a wood and plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine was one of a series the artist made with bodily fluids. I’ve always thought the intention was to make something beautiful from what’s usually hidden or repellant. Without his titles, the fluids would not even be noticed. Milk, Blood (1986), for example, looks like a minimalist painting, a red rectangle next to a white one. Is it possible to challenge the meaning of such loaded symbols? To see them as abstractions? Had the crucifix in Piss Christ really been defiled? Or had the urine been sanctified? These are an artist’s questions. Wildmon saw only sacrilege.

  He would target David within the year.

  Before 1989, however, Wildmon had devoted himself to policing pop culture. He began organizing advertiser boycotts in the late 1970
s, going after television programs he considered morally reprehensible—Three’s Company and Charlie’s Angels, for example. In 1988, he organized the attacks on Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, from picket lines in front of theaters to a massive letter-writing campaign. (He claimed he sent some three million letters to his Christian supporters.) Pepsi canceled a commercial featuring Madonna after Wildmon took offense at her “Like a Prayer” video and threatened a boycott. Now, in the art world, he was about to uncover a rich new mother lode of sinners, not to mention fundraising possibilities for the AFA. I don’t mean to suggest that Wildmon went at his work cynically, however. He sincerely believed that the country was teeming with anti-Christian bias. He concluded his letter about Serrano with the words: “Maybe, before the physical persecution of Christians begins, we will gain the courage to stand against such bigotry. I hope so.”

  On May 18, Senator Alfonse D’Amato, a Republican from New York, rose to announce to the Senate that for several weeks he’d been getting letters, phone calls, and postcards about an artwork by Andres Serrano. D’Amato then dramatically ripped up the catalog for the “Awards in the Visual Arts” exhibit and made what would soon become the central conservative argument in the culture war: “If this is what contemporary art has sunk to, this level, this outrage, this indignity—some may want to sanction that, and that is fine. But not with the use of taxpayer’s money. This is not a question of free speech. This is a question of abuse of taxpayers’ money.” He and twenty-two other senators sent a letter to the NEA demanding changes in procedure “to prevent such abuses from recurring.” One of the signatories, North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms, also addressed the Senate that day to denounce Serrano. “He is not an artist. He is a jerk. And he is taunting the American people.”