Close to the Knives

by David Wojnarowicz

  In the last four years, homosexuals lost their constitutional right against the government’s invasion of their privacy. And unless one is homosexual and happened to read that piece of information in the daily newspaper, no one would know. There certainly hasn’t been any huge public outcry about this supreme court decision. But life goes on and any time I assert my individual right to explore my feelings of love or desire toward men, I do so at risk of jail. I wonder how many people understand what it is to grow up in a society where one is invisible. I wake up every day and if I turn on the television set or look through a magazine or look at billboards or look at political candidates or go to the movies, I see no representation of my sexuality. I see heterosexual plots and subtexts in every media form and it is enraging to feel homosexual longing toward another person in this context. A federal study of suicide shows that thirty percent of all suicides in the united states of america are gay and lesbian teenagers. TEENAGERS. And a congressman from california named William Dannemayer asked president Bush to denounce the results of this study in order to protect traditional family values. TEENAGERS! President Bush has not yet made a decision about this request. TEENAGERS!! Republican senators have tried to block the passing of an antiviolence bill because it contains the category “sexual orientation.” Given the climate and silence of a large percentage of citizens in this country, I can leave this room and step outside and be shot dead by a person who believes in the moral code as set down by politicians and the various organized religions in this country and all the person has to do is say I tried to touch them and the courts will probably set that person free. That act of murder could easily be applauded.

  I never have had what could be described as an ART EDUCATION. I am not even sure what an ART EDUCATION entails. As a kid, I loved the places where one could get lost while engaging in the act of creativity, the places inside one’s head. Even in the face of wrath that generally came from my father, I would experiment with tracing images out of science books or books about life under the sea, or trace one-liner comics from magazines I could barely read and then color them in and present them as my own. I discovered that making things meant leaving evidence of life behind when I moved on. Making things was like leaving historical records of my existence behind when I left the room, or building, or neighborhood, the state and possibly the earth … as in mortality, as in death. When I was a kid I discovered that making an object, whether it was a drawing or a story, meant making something that spoke even if I was silent. As an adult, I realize if I make something and leave it in public for any period of time, I can create an environment where that object or writing acts as a magnet and draws others with a similar frame of reference out of silence or invisibility. Or that object or piece of writing can give me comfort as well as others. To place an object or writing that contains what is invisible because of legislation or social taboo into an environment outside myself makes me feel not so alone; it keeps me company by virtue of its existence. It is kind of like a ventriloquist’s dummy—the only difference is that the work can speak by itself or act like that “magnet” to attract others who carried this enforced silence. It also could act as a magnet for those with opposing frames of reference, as in the recent case of the NEA and Artists Space.

  I remember reading Archie Comics when I was a kid and being bored because they dealt with a world that had no correlation with my own. I remember having curiosity about sex and wondering why there was no sex in the world of Archie—the world of Riverdale. I remember taking a razor and cutting apart some Archie comics and gluing pieces of their bodies in different places so that Archie and Veronica and Reggie and Betty were fucking each other. A close-up profile of Jughead’s nose on page five made a wild-looking penis when glued on Reggie’s pants on page seven. After hours of cutting and pasting I had a comic that reflected a whole range of human experience that was usually invisible to me. But at the first sound of the key in the front door I’d throw everything away. I was curious, but I wasn’t stupid.

  What I’m trying to say here is that all of my life I’ve made things that are like fragmented mirrors of what I perceive to be the world. As far as I’m concerned the fact that in 1990 the human body is still a taboo subject is unbelievably ridiculous. What exactly is frightening about the human body? What is it about this society which supports the premature death of so many of us solely because of the fact that we are denied information about our own bodies in the time of an AIDS epidemic. Why can’t every woman who wants an abortion get one in this country? If a woman who desires an abortion has to travel miles away to get one because of restrictions imposed by the state, can we assume this woman can afford to make that trip? Why is it men who make the decisions that affect these women’s bodies? Why is it any other person but myself can make a determination that affects the health or safety of my body? Why are so many people silent in the face of this? Is it because the sky is blue that most people feel safe from this disease called AIDS? To be quite frank, most heterosexuals I know do not use condoms when fucking. Is this because they believe this virus has a sexual orientation and a moral code? Do they think that because they sleep in a comfortable place that this disease will stop outside their walls? Do they think that because the person they make love to is kind and sweet and sexy that he or she could not have this virus? Do they believe that the virus stays within the boundaries of large urban centers even though this is a country of trains and planes and automobiles and this virus travels wherever people travel? Did you know that the New England Journal of Medicine recently reported eleven women—middle class and well educated who didn’t think they were in a high-risk category because they limited themselves to just one or two sexual partners who were neither bisexual nor intravenous drug-users—contracted HIV from the same guy who didn’t know he had the virus and recently died from AIDS? One doesn’t have to adopt the stupid line invented by those bozos in the government or media or churches—the JUST SAY NO TO SEXUALITY CAMPAIGN—you can fuck in a healthy and safe way with the right information. Does everyone have access to the right information? How many people understand how to use a condom in the correct way so that it doesn’t break or tear? How many people know that lubricants that are oil or grease based can cause ninety percent of all condoms to have microscopic tears and that one must use water-based lubricants in order to avoid this? Or that just because a lubricant washes off with water doesn’t mean it’s a water-based lubricant? How many people know how to negotiate the use of condoms with their lover? Why isn’t this information provided on television or in all newspapers? And how many know that penicillin-resistant venereal diseases are reported nationwide as being on the rise again? That this is prevalent among heterosexuals? How often has anyone heard the fact that people with AIDS can and do have sex without spreading the disease? Who has heard the story of the woman in Reno, Nevada, who, right this moment, is serving a twenty-years-to-life prison sentence because she is HIV positive and agreed to have sex with an undercover cop, even though it was on the condition that he wear two condoms, one on top of the other? I believe this woman was incredibly responsible in her actions but the courts decided that she should be charged with attempted murder. Should she be charged with any crime at all? How are one’s responses to this formed? If there were a disease that appeared to strike only politicians and religious leaders, would the president hesitate for more than twenty-four hours to allocate more funds for research and health care? Would the president hesitate to shift the entire $350 billion defense budget toward research and health care? How many people believe those who give you information on the evening news? What is the economic class of the people who speak to us every night on the evening news? Do some politicians have a direct communication with god? Do those people on the evening news really believe the version of the world they report on? Should one person’s interpretation of god determine whether another person lives or dies? How many members of minorities are afraid to speak? How many are afraid to speak if they think they are t
he only ones who feel the way they do? If the president’s god said that one couldn’t feed his or her brother daughter sister mother father aunt uncle grandparents or good friends when they were starving, who would sit by and allow that? Does the denial of information that causes people to become ill and die a permissible thing? What if that denial of information ended up killing hundreds of thousands, even millions—is that still okay? Would it be a crime if that denial of information only killed people that you didn’t feel comfortable with? Would it be a crime if that denial of information only killed people of color? If that denial of information only killed people who frightened you? People with strange ideas? Strange because they didn’t show these ideas on the tv or the evening news? What does one make of government policies if those policies let people die by saying those people die because they want to? What if those people are screaming for help as they die? Is the government telling the truth in the face of massive deaths that are caused in this fashion? Even if one essentially trusts the government, who would dispute publicly this thing they call truth? Would you? Who knows that the vatican and the catholic archdiocese have issued statements that “it is a more terrible think to use a condom than to contract AIDS.” Should people pick up guns to stop the casual murder of other people? If that casual murder is only of one other person? Ten other people? A thousand others? A million? More? Do laws reflect the diversity in our society? Or do they only enforce the “morality” of a select few? How many people stop to get to know the person he or she sits or walks next to? Does he or she make it comfortable for that person to express ideas that might change his or her ideas? Who cares about these things? Does the fact that one cares or does not care reflect a feeling or position of power?

  “If I had a dollar for health care I’d rather spend it on a baby or innocent person with some defect or illness not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS” says the health-care official on national television and this is in the middle of an hour-long video of people dying on camera because they can’t afford the limited drugs available that might extend their lives and I can’t even remember what this official looked like because I reached in through the tv screen and ripped his face in half and I was diagnosed with AIDS recently and this was after the last few years of losing count of the friends and neighbors who have been dying slow vicious and unnecessary deaths because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country. “If you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers …” says a politician in Texas on the radio and his press secretary later claims that the politician was only joking and didn’t know the microphone was turned on and besides they didn’t think it would hurt his chances for reelection anyways and I wake up every morning in this killing machine called america and I’m carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg and there’s a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone and I’m waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping amazonian blow darts in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government health-care officials or those thinly disguised walking swastikas that wear religious garments over their murderous intentions or those rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in the nightly news suburbs there’s a thin line a very thin line between the inside and the outside and I’ve been looking all my life at the signs surrounding us in the media or on peoples’ lips; the religious types outside st. Patrick’s cathedral shouting to the men and women in the gay parade, “You won’t be here next year—you’ll get AIDS and die ha ha …” and the areas of the u.s.a. where it is possible to murder a man and when brought to trial one only has to say that the victim was a queer and that he tried to touch you and the courts will set you free and the difficulties that a bunch of republican senators have in albany with supporting an antiviolence bill that includes “sexual orientation” as a category of crime victims there’s a thin line a very thin line and as each T-cell disappears from my body it’s replaced by ten pounds of pressure ten pounds of rage and I focus that rage into nonviolent resistance but that focus is starting to slip my hands are beginning to move independent of self-restraint and the egg is starting to crack america america america seems to understand and accept murder as a self-defense against those who would murder other people and it’s been murder on a daily basis for nine count then nine long years and we’re expected to pay taxes to support this public and social murder and we’re expected to quietly and politely make house in this windstorm of murder but I say there’s certain politicians that had better increase their security forces and there’s religious leaders and health-care officials that had better get bigger fucking dogs and higher fucking fences and more complex security alarms for their homes and queer-bashers better start doing their work from inside howitzer tanks because the thin line between the inside and the outside is beginning to erode and at the moment I’m a thirty-seven-foot-tall one-thousand-one-hundred-and-seventy-two-pound man inside this six-foot body and all I can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In the following pages, I originally included segments of letters I’d received over the years from the guy named Dakota. They were letters filled with a terrible beauty outlining in words a fierce attempt to experience freedom and that elusive thing we call life in all its diversity and variousness. They were letters pertaining to his sexuality in early morning dreams, his desires for a structure of his own choosing, descriptions of standing in tornado winds and rain on the texas plains, baring his body to the elements, scenes of pushing the gas pedal to the floor along abandoned roads in the gulf coast countryside in order to experience the closest thing to flight the human body might possible attain outside of death, and sweet descriptions of melancholy interactions with a dying parent, as well as notes from an asylum that he’d checked himself into in order to detox. The notes from the asylum were chilling stories of families that psychically killed their children in the name of God and Society and Morality. I chose these letters because they were the only surviving pieces of evidence that allowed Dakota to speak on his own behalf about his humanity, his animal grace, his own spirituality. An interpretation of the copyright law brought about by a case (among others) involving J. D. Salinger prevents me from using any of these letters, despite the fact that the last letter I received from Dakota says that I was the only person who ever found use for his creative gestures. In tracking down a member of his family in order to see if I could get permission to use these letters from the legal owners of his estate (in this case, since he died in texas, texas law states that in the absence of a legal will, Dakota’s belongings and estate, including the contents of his letters written to others, belong to his surviving parents), I spoke to his brother, who told me that Dakota’s life work—his writing, screenplays, drawings, paintings, collages, photographs, and musical recordings—were destroyed by the parents. I was told there was absolutely no chance to get permission from them to publish the letters Dakota had written to me.

  I believe that the copyright permissions law is valuable in terms of protection for living people who desire the type of privacy afforded by this law. But I also believe the law is terrible in the event of the death of the letter writer, because it creates a whitewash of personal histories. In the case of Dakota, his entire identity has been murdered by his folks. What fragments of his existence survive, in letters received by friends, are made invisible by the State in the form of this law. Dakota’s surviving brother understood something essential about Dakota’s life. He offered to write a letter of permission for me, but Texas law makes that letter useless. I would hope that in my recollections of Dakota, as well as the recollections of his friends, some sense of the guy comes through in a benevolent way, as it is very emotional for me to have to participate in the process of denying him a voice by editing from this manuscript his personal words to me.

  Names have been changed and i
n certain instances some composite identities were formed in order to protect the people involved in the following story. Given the hysterical nature of the times we live in, I have taken this precaution.

  —D. W. 1991

  THE SUICIDE OF A GUY WHO ONCE BUILT AN ELABORATE SHRINE OVER A MOUSE HOLE

  Death comes in small doses. Some days this room becomes an architecture of fear when the sun goes down. The night comes down between the buildings and presses itself around the moldings of the windowframes, spreading itself across and through the glass. It becomes thick and textural. What I feel is the momentary shock of realizing that most of the wood, metal and plastic fixtures, the sinks, lampshades, the shower stall, and even the drinking cups will all outlive me if my body follows the progression that this tiny, invisible-to-the-eye virus has initiated. Time reveals itself to be a childlike notion of false structure. The social landscape I have grown to be comforted by is being exploded and is disappearing. There are dozens of faces I hardly know but who have become familiar over time; I have been reassured by the fact that those people are somewhere walking the face of the earth, pushing air around and thinking. Each one of them is a receptable for some belief or projection of beliefs and each one of them carries a piece of myself; and in the last month each time I pick up the phone it is to learn that another of them has died. Piece by piece the landscape is eroding and in its place I am building a monument made of fragments of love and hate, sadness and feelings of murder. This monument serves as a shrine where innocence is slowly having its belly slit open, its heart removed, its eyes plucked out, its tongue severed, its fingers broken, its legs torn off. At the base of this shrine I place the various elements that define each person who has died or is dying.