Fire in the Belly

by Cynthia Carr

  “I remember at one point, I asked David to swim underwater, and I saw images of his body drifting away, with all the deformations that water produces on a body. Now, when I see these images, I think that they express what has become of David, a shapeless form, a liquid, a blade of air, an element of nature. It’s not because David was going to die that we were filming, but because these metaphoric images could serve what he wanted to express of his approach to death. We went back home and looked at the footage. After a long silence, he thanked me for the beauty of the images.”

  The next day, David built a small white house from cardboard and filmed it in the backyard as he began another of his improvisations: “Inside this house, many things go on. Many people, many lives, many personalities. Some of them dream, some of them don’t. Some of them fall, some of them rise.” And one of them was a little girl whose dreams nobody understood. His final text for the 1990 photographic piece Inside This House would closely approximate this. Then he tried to set the house on fire. He couldn’t get it to burn. If he had, it might have resembled his early stencil of the burning house. When he could only get smoke to come out the windows, however, he decided that image was beautiful.

  One day while David worked outside in the garden, Marion was in her bedroom editing the audiotape they’d recorded during Silence = Death, the one where he said things like “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.” She said of listening to it at that moment, “The fact that he was angry made me laugh. So I went to the window with the tape recorder and I said, ‘David, listen, listen.’ “ She thought he would laugh too and began playing the tape. “But he didn’t laugh at all,” she said. “He was really angry. Then he said, ‘Why did you do that? I was feeling good.’ “

  She reflected later that this had been a stupid thing to do. They seemed to patch things up. But David never forgot this moment. A couple of years later, when he made notes about his relationship with Marion, that was on the list of grievances: “archives material I never wanted to see—she could deal with it after my death. She played tape loud in garden after I’d begun to unwind—tape of me angry or talking about death. Rejected her.”

  On July 31, they drove back to Manhattan, five tense hours in the car with no one saying a word except for driving directions. No one wanted to come back, Marion remembered. She went to the loft with David and they made another attempt to film her dancing to Patti Smith’s “Horses.” But Using My Sexual Energy as a Tool to Fight the State would remain unfinished, along with the two other films he began in the Adirondacks, Howdy Doody Goes for a Drive and Teaching a Frog to Dance.

  Marion returned to Paris two days later and did not hear from David. When she finally called him, he told her he did not want to be in touch with her anymore. The relationship did not actually end there, though it would be another year and a half before David and Marion saw each other again.

  David composed a long, rambling letter to Marion, probably late that summer or in the fall, but it’s undated and he did not send it. The salient line: “I had to make the break between us because of the point we reach over and over again that ends up feeling very confusing for me.” He was trying to figure it out for himself as well as explain it to her.

  Artist Manuela Filiaci remembered having David and Marion over for dinner, remembered how they fought. Since Filiaci lived on the ninth floor and the elevator was broken, she could hear them screaming at each other all the way down the stairs. That was earlier in the eighties, not on this visit, but the pattern didn’t change. “There was a deep attachment to each other,” Filiaci said, “but when some kind of love or attraction is not consummated, there is so much tension.” She observed that Marion would get too close; she had no boundaries. And David could be so touchy. “Unless he knew that you really were on his side, he would get so angry,” she said. “I think he really cared for Marion, but at the same time he wanted to tear her away. This strange relationship obviously that started with his mother. This love and hate.”

  Commenting on David’s long history of close relationships with women—not just Marion, but also Kiki Smith, Judy Glantzman, Karen Finley, Marguerite Van Cook, and others—Filiaci said, “I think he wanted a woman to love him.”

  David discussed his relationship with Marion in therapy and finally came up with a letter in January 1990 that he did send:

  Marion, I don’t understand everything that is there between us in terms of the place we go where I feel very confused and uncertain about both our needs. I thought at some point it was the intensity of our relationship and that somewhere emotional needs can’t connect because of our sexualities. We have talked about this before candidly and I know your feelings on the subject—I can and have accepted your feelings that it doesn’t exist with any seriousness in your feelings. I still get things from my [therapist] that there are issues of sexuality that we carry on some level maybe unconscious that end up in confrontations in order to resolve pressures. I don’t know what I feel about these interpretations but I also don’t know why we hit the same area over again—it is for me a place too confusing and painful to want to chance reliving again and again.… I am at a point mentally where I can’t take on certain things. I feel a serious and sometimes dark thing that I can’t explain to anyone. And I have been dealing with so many things that make that feeling grow larger. And I fear taking on anything more if it contains built-in confusion. So that is why I have stepped back.

  His mother had sent him a letter on July 4, 1989, which he probably did not receive until he returned from upstate. It was her first since writing in 1988 to say that she worried they would lose touch.

  Evidently he had told her in a letter that he’d started therapy, because she said that she was glad to hear it. And she wanted to tell him something she wasn’t sure he wanted to hear: “I am very sorry you have had to experience the terrible things in your childhood. I know how deeply it affected you and I wish with my whole heart and being that it could have been different for you.” She regretted not being stronger back then, better able to handle the difficulties she’d faced.

  At this point David was at work on the Biographical Dateline for his retrospective’s catalog. He regarded it as “a heavy document,” knew it probably had mistakes “in terms of timing”—and what if his mother saw it? Apart from writing that she’d encouraged him to paint and draw and that she’d been friends with a woman who had a mentally handicapped son, he had rendered her invisible during the Hell’s Kitchen years, “because I can’t begin to touch that stuff,” he told me. “And if she made it through something and is actually healthier now, I wouldn’t want to contribute to unhinging that.”

  He worried about her. “That’s the crux of the problem I have, something that’s never been resolved and that I’ve always carried,” he said. “Even through all the weird brutal stuff and the disconnectedness and her lack of care. I’ve never fully given her the responsibility for what she did because of everything in her background. From what I witnessed, it was an extraordinary amount of pain that she lived with. Also, I can feel the anger after years of blocking it. It’s one of the reasons I can’t see her. It’s too loaded. It’s embarrassing to have such a mixture of feelings. I love her somewhere. She did wonderful things despite all the horror in various shades. She really, really encouraged anything creative out of me. Went out on very little money and bought supplies early on. She recently got a license to teach. Did she change? Did she get healthy? I have no idea, yet I don’t want to get close enough to find out.”

  He also knew that he had to tell her soon about his AIDS diagnosis. By the end of 1989, he figured he probably had a year to live, maybe two. He drafted a letter to her that fall:

  Mom, I have a lot of mixed feelings towards my relationship with you—I am caught between the understanding of what problems you carried from your experiences with your family and with Ed and also with dealing with thre
e kids, and the experiences of what I carried as a kid. There is no immediate answer for any of those things; I just have so much buried inside me that is scary to touch and at the same time I’m trying to reach it when I am in therapy. I don’t feel very healthy mentally although given what my life has been I am doing okay. I’ve hesitated telling you about this diagnosis because I need the privacy and distance right now. I’m not sure when I will feel ready to get together with you because it feels so loaded with things I haven’t been able to resolve. I do think of you and always hope for the best for your life and whatever things you are trying to do.

  He did not send this letter.

  His community continued to disintegrate. His old friend Luis Frangella—who’d worked alongside him at the Ward Line Pier, who taught him so much about how to paint, who took him to Argentina, who got him a show in Madrid—was ill with AIDS by sometime in ’89. The musician and painter Keiko Bonk, who was close to Frangella, remembered seeing David at the hospital. “Luis wanted to die in Argentina,” Bonk said, “but the family [let us know] that he couldn’t come back because there were no facilities at that time. Nobody was treating AIDS patients. It was really heart-wrenching.” By the end of ’89, Frangella’s former boyfriend Russell Sharon had returned to New York to care for him at home.

  David never wanted to be identified as an “AIDS artist” but felt compelled to respond to the devastation around him. After returning from the month upstate, he began to collaborate on a project with Phil Zwickler, the line producer on Silence = Death. Zwickler, a writer, an activist, and a filmmaker, was probably best known for his documentary Rights and Reactions, about the struggle in 1986 to pass a gay rights bill in New York City. David and Zwickler had met during ACT UP’s City Hall demonstration. Zwickler also had AIDS.

  They decided to make a series of short videotapes titled Fear of Disclosure: The Psycho-Sexual Implications of HIV Revelation. They planned to make five of them, exploring the ramifications of admitting to HIV-positive status in five different situations.

  In the first, probably made in August ’89, a man tells a potential sexual partner. Zwickler relates a story about someone calling him in response to a personal ad. He works the conversation around to asking, “Would you have sex with someone who was HIV positive?” That was done as a voice-over against images of two men dancing shirtless in gold lamé shorts intercut with David’s imagery of a spinning globe lit from within and a brain with a clock embedded in it. David and Zwickler described this segment as “Go-Go boys from New York’s Pyramid Club bump and grind while sizing up each other’s mortality.” It’s about five minutes long, and they finished it in time for the Gay and Lesbian Experimental Film Festival in mid-September.

  The other tapes in the series would cover telling yourself, telling your family, telling your boss, and telling the world. They completed a script for “Telling Yourself,” a dialogue between them about the various emotions they felt upon learning they had the virus, their medications, their confusion. They recorded one of the sessions in which they worked on this script, and David sounds very testy. “You had me cross that out on my master copy. Now you say you want it,” he complains. “Man, you gotta learn how to fuckin’ communicate.”

  “It didn’t take much for them to fight,” said Norman Frisch, who occasionally went to dinner or to some event with the two of them. “They were both hotheads, and they pushed each other’s buttons. One time out of three, our get-togethers ended in some fight between them, and then a week later, they would have made up.”

  David and Zwickler planned to each create their own images for “Telling Yourself.” As they explained in a memo, “One narrator looks to nature to project and dispel many of the fears he experiences. The other is angry and looks at the streets of NYC as the metaphor for the expression of these feelings.” The “angry” one wrote an “image script” for himself that included Times Square, “medicine bottles superimposed on kissing faces,” ants crawling on money, Bowery life, gears, and so on. Some of these images he already had from A Fire in My Belly and other films. The rest were never shot.

  Zwickler may have filmed his part, though “Telling Yourself” was never completed. He was already in poor health. In February 1990, Zwickler developed Pneumocystis on his retina. (It usually manifested, of course, in the lungs.) He gradually began to go blind. He then made a six-and-a-half-minute film called Needle Nightmare—his monologue about subsequent symptoms, infections, and excruciating treatments paired with the bucolic nature footage that he found so comforting.

  They never got started on the other sections of Fear of Disclosure. In autumn ’89, right after finishing the first videotape, David began writing an essay about the epidemic. Photographer Nan Goldin was curating a show at Artists Space and asked him to contribute a piece to the modest catalog. Artists Space, a major nonprofit arts organization, characterized the exhibition as “a personal reflection on the influence AIDS has had on aesthetics, culture and sexuality among Goldin’s peers in the Lower East Side community.” Goldin decided to call it “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.” David’s catalog essay “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell” would turn him into a public figure.

  21 WITNESSES

  The politicians who opposed arts funding were often the same people who opposed AIDS funding.

  Senator Jesse Helms and the California Republican congressman William Dannemeyer were both virulently, self-righteously homophobic. Both fought bitterly against spending a single government dollar on AIDS research, AIDS prevention, or AIDS treatment. Helms masterminded the law that banned people with HIV from entering the country. Dannemeyer backed a California ballot initiative to quarantine people with AIDS—it failed—and he once declared that PWAs emitted spores “known to cause birth defects.” In the summer of 1989, Dannemeyer outraged many when he read graphic descriptions of gay sex into the Congressional Record, an effort to alert his colleagues to “what homosexuality really is.” He was about to publish A Shadow in the Land, his book attacking the gay rights movement. In 1987, the Senate had adopted a Helms amendment (pushed through the House of Representatives by Dannemeyer) that prohibited the use of federal funds for any AIDS education materials that could “promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities.” Donald Francis, a pioneer in AIDS research who was later AIDS adviser to the state of California, called their efforts “truly damaging” in preventing the spread of the virus.

  Dannemeyer supported all efforts to defund the NEA, after failing in his bid to rewrite its authorizing legislation so that Congress would have “oversight” of choices made by grantees. He was not leading the House effort to kill the agency, though, leaving that to a fellow Orange County, California, conservative—Representative Dana Rohrabacher. Helms, however, spearheaded the anti-NEA charge in the Senate. That September, he cooked up an amendment aimed at preventing the likes of Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe from ever getting another grant. Attached to the 1990 appropriations bill, his amendment outlawed the use of federal money to “promote, disseminate or produce obscene or indecent materials, including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sexual acts; or material which denigrates the objects or beliefs of the adherents of a particular religion or nonreligion.” Helms got this passed in the Senate by calling for a voice vote when only a few senators were present. But it did not pass in the House.

  In late September, the Senate and House conference committee met to work out a compromise. Helms threatened his Senate colleagues with a roll call vote if they dropped his amendment, to get them on the record “as favoring taxpayer funding for pornography.” He made good on his threat that very evening, attaching his original amendment to a military spending bill, then directing all pages (who are high school juniors) and all “ladies” to leave the room. He whipped out the Mapplethorpe photos and distributed them around the Senate chamber. Other senators didn’t seem cowed. One Republican e
ven pointed out that both Mark Twain and Chaucer would be unacceptable under the Helms amendment.

  But content restrictions were on the table to stay. The conference committee simply came up with a modified version of the Helms amendment. Funds could not be used for anything the NEA thought obscene, “including but not limited to depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts which do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.” The NEA added this language—known in the arts community as “the loyalty oath”—to its terms and conditions for grant winners. The culture war was just beginning.

  “Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing” was a landmark show, among the first to focus solely on artists’ personal responses to the AIDS crisis. It had been scheduled to coincide with the first-ever Day Without Art, on December 1, 1989, a day of action and mourning over the epidemic that would be observed in arts institutions all over the country.

  In her statement for the catalog, photographer Nan Goldin wrote that when she got out of rehab in 1988, she wanted to reconnect with friends she’d lost touch with during what she called “my last few years of isolation and destruction.” Goldin had been so wrapped up in her addictions that she’d paid little attention to the advancing plague. Once she was clean, though, she felt overwhelmed by how many of the people she loved or admired were now sick, grieving, or dead. When Artists Space invited her to curate a show, she saw a chance to give these friends a forum. Certainly by 1989, everyone who’d been part of the downtown scene knew someone who was dead or dying or both. This was a traumatized community.