Original subtitles

Provided by explosiveskull https://twitter.com/kaboomskull

Testing one, two, three.

Testing one, two.

Testing, testing, testing,

testing, testing, test, test, test.

We rise to greet the State,

to confront the State.

When I was diagnosed with this virus,

it didn't take me long to realize

I'd contracted a diseased society as well.

It could be construed as critical,

but if you're doing a show of AIDS,

there's absolutely no way that you can separate

politics from AIDS.

For six years, what's happening

as we update our top stories.

East Germany today took down the Berlin Wall.

Bottom line is I may be dying of AIDS

in America in 1989.

Isn't that political?

I don't have health insurance and that I don't have

economic access to adequate healthcare.

Isn't that political?

And to try to pretend that the subject of AIDS

cannot have a political tinge to it is ridiculous.

Who was that?

John McKenzie is putting this up together

for Peter something of World News tonight.

- Peter Jennings? - Yeah.

- You mean like national news? - Yeah.

Oh, shit. I didn't... I should've had that recorded.

Are you recording all of this today?

- Yeah. - You're gonna make art

- out of it, huh? - Yup.

Tonight, a Manhattan art exhibit

about AIDS is losing a lot of federal money

because of what will be shown in the exhibit.

The chairman of the NEA states,

"We find that a large portion of the content

is political rather than artistic in nature."

Some of the content includes criticism

of Cardinal O'Connor, Senator William Dannemeyer

of California, and Senator Jesse Helms

for their support of the new restrictive law.

Thank you. This weather is certainly no work of art.

So are you gonna do Nightline tonight?

Uh, I somehow just can't see it. I mean, I...

Do you think you'd put on a shirt if you did?

Well, that's what I was thinking of already,

my wardrobe.

I mean, I... if I did, I might wear a ski mask

and I'll, you know,

carry a bucket of gasoline.

From Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with Fresh Air.

The art of David Wojnarowicz

has recently been at the center of controversy

because the subject matter deals with sexuality and AIDS.

Let's talk about how you started making art.

Now, you came from a really rough family background.

Your father abused your mother.

You ended up in an orphanage for a while.

Then your father kidnapped you from the orphanage.

And you've written that you later threw yourself

into sex and you became a hustler for a while.

How did you start making art?

Whatever work I've done, it's always been informed

by what I experienced as an American in this country,

as a homosexual in this country,

as a person who's legislated into silence in this country.

One, two, three, four, civil rights or civil war?

I'm not gonna be polite, and fuck these people

that want me to be courageous.

There's no expression in that other than silence.

As each T cell disappears from my body,

it's replaced by 10 pounds of pressure, 10 pounds of rage.

I tried very hard to be normal

and tried very hard to be accepted.

On some level, it's a terrific waste of time.

- Wojnarowicz? - Wojnarowicz.

- Wojnarowicz. - Wojnarowicz.

Fuck you faggot fucker.

David was two years younger

than me, and Pat was sort of the big girl.

I don't remember him ever aspiring to do art,

or to be a doctor, or a lawyer,

or anything else.

I think we were probably too consumed

with trying to survive in any given moment

than to be worried about what was going down the road.

Dave and I used to go out in the woods.

We'd get away from my father.

He was horrific when he was drunk.

I grew up in a tiny version of hell

called the suburbs.

I had a father who brutalized both his first and second wives

with physical violence.

Any signs of life in the family he supported

with his paycheck from his job as a sailor

was met with extreme violence.

In the universe of the forest,

I didn't think of what it felt like as a five or six-year-old

being dragged down a basement stair,

to have my head and body hit with a dog chain

or a sawed-off chunk of 2x4.

In my home, one cannot laugh, one cannot express boredom,

one cannot cry, one cannot play, one cannot explore,

one cannot engage in any activity

that showed development or growth that was independent.

This life on the streets

got really rough and David ended up in a halfway house.

He had not graduated from high school at that point.

When he finally went back to school

was when he discovered Rimbaud and Genet.

They both are outlaws and rebels.

and he always identified with outsiders his whole life

and these were the outsider writers.

Testing tape journal, one, two, three.

So, it looks like we ended up

in Jamestown, North Dakota.

That's the halfway mark between east and west.

Feels like something out of an old west picture,

dusty roads and old board buildings,

little family houses all around you,

great stretches of sky, long lines of trains.

The tracks, when you look at them, just shimmer.

It looks like thousands of little animals running across.

Then there's the constant flapping of bird wings

like.

Occasionally, you hear a train whistling miles away,

but the trains never seem to get here.

That was doggie French for, "Hi, pinheads."

I'm just sitting here in my sister's apartment

using her tape recorder, trying to figure out

what the hell to say.

As far as publishing, forget it.

The last woman that I sent the manuscript to,

this woman in Black Sun, Le Soleil Noir,

called me up like after a month and told me

she wanted to return my manuscript.

You know, she said that the people in the monologues

are wasted lives and it was a waste of time

to write about them.

I mean, everything she said

just reinforced my belief of its importance.

It's like that. I mean, it's like the galleries, too.

The stuff that I work on takes so long to do

that the price that I'd have to ask

if I was gonna make a living off is just too much

especially since her tastes gravitate

towards Woolworthian prints.

I've been having, like, just tons and tons

of dreams of America and American road and highways.

I really miss the energy in New York.

Paris gives you a sense of strange security,

which does make me happy.

So, I guess I'll say goodbye here.

Bye-bye.

I was doing a series of photographs

of Arthur Rimbaud in New York.

I got a job in an ad agency

for all of two and a half weeks,

operating a stat machine.

Then I ended up doing all my own work.

I statted this face of Arthur Rimbaud, blew it up,

and made a flat mask, I'm riding subways

wandering all through the warehouses,

hustling in Times Square.

David was taking Rimbaud

through what was his world in New York.

Come on, man. Come on.

I grew up as a hustler.

I grew up hustling in Times Square

and all sorts of places all around New York.

Men of all different descriptions.

By the time I got off the streets

when I was about 17 or 18, I had to turn to making things

because I basically could never find a place

to ever express what I had experienced.

I remember one of the most emotional experiences

was one day being picked up by this guy who was very creepy

and I remember lying on this dirty bed.

It was one of these cheap hotels.

And this guy was sucking my dick,

his mouth was sticky, and that he would kiss my leg

and there would be like this gummy

kind of stuff on my leg.

And it was all this stuff that I was really repulsed by

and not enough to not have a hard on.

I remember feeling all this

incredible emotion for this guy.

I just felt so sad for him.

At some point, I, like, reached under his arms,

and pulled him up to me, and kissed him on the mouth,

which is the thing that I least wanted to do.

He started weeping and just said,

"Nobody's ever done that." And ended up giving me

extra money, whatever, which I was quite happy with.

It's like a whole experience

living on the streets

when I ran away from home of feeling the world's setup

in such a way that it seems that I'm constantly working

against it rather than alongside.

Most guys that I meet,

their lives are just so completely different.

You know, there's no real communication

where I can feel totally free in expressing my ideas

or my desires or my experiences.

My experience as a hustler seems to be

one thing that sits on the back of my shoulder.

One thing that's incredibly hard to convey

to people is the level of promiscuity of that era.

This is something that's really hard

to describe to people who are younger.

We thought sex was good for you.

That what was bad for you is not having sex.

And then what was bad for you is repression of sexuality,

that was bad.

This is before AIDS or before we were aware of AIDS.

I grew up in North Carolina.

And when I first moved to the East Village...

Smoke, smoke.

...it was cliche things you see in the movies

of drug-dealing places, dealers standing around

selling coke and dope, coke and dope, C&D, C&D.

- real slow, brother. I said real slow.

- I'll sell that bullshit. - That is bullshit.

People forget how much the rest

of America hated New York.

We were a bunch of junkies and cocksuckers

as far as America was concerned, and, you know,

there's a real sense of culture decline.

There had been this huge shift

between the kind of idealisms of the '60s

and the first Civil Rights Movement,

the anti-war movement.

All these things had derailed by the mid-70s.

And so we were responding to that in different ways.

I walked up to the park, and the streets

were completely empty, and traffic was nonexistent.

I had opened up my pants

and I walked up and down the pathways,

and there's just, like, this really quiet

sort of loneliness there.

I mean, I felt like I was, like,

you know, back where I'd started from.

I've been filled with this sense

of, uh, of anxiousness,

and the fact that I'm 26, I'm thinking about myself

and my values, my actions, and thinking about the effect

of people on people, wondering if any

of it's meaningful, if it's futile,

trying to figure out what it is that my life is,

and where I've been going.

This is a man whose time has come,

a man whose principles have been familiar to Americans

for 30 years, a man whose accomplishments

make him the natural choice

for president of the United States.

We will make America great again.

Thank you very much.

Reagan, as the president of this country now,

going through a time in my life that seems desperate,

surreal, awful, and slightly wondrous all simultaneously.

Met a fellow a month or so ago, Peter Hujar,

photographer who, in some interesting ways,

is like a mirror of scenes I'm entering.

He has the same desperate and at times confused outlook,

but minus the one seed of hope that I have in me.

The relationship between Peter and David

is one of the most interesting relationships

between artists in a very long time.

More interesting than van Gogh and Gauguin,

very, very special and unique.

When Peter started his career

as a photographer in the '50s,

it was not considered a real art form.

His photographs were mostly portraits,

mostly of people he knew, but he did know

some rather famous people, you know.

He's truly an artist, but Peter was very difficult,

and in terms of having a career,

he was not very good at it.

These works were very small.

The New York Art World fit in one restaurant.

One restaurant, okay?

I heard of Peter before I met him.

The number of people who would have heard of Peter,

you know, 12?

He may have been a saint on Avenue A,

but it was underground fame.

He did not have that standing in the quote,

"real art world." He was stranded.

Nothing was going nowhere.

Howdy-do, howdy-do.

This is Hujarino again.

I was wondering if David Steamed Vegetable was there?

This is Peter Fast Juice.

Peter last night in the bar when I told him

about doing a portfolio and throwing out

all the drawings that I thought were

aggressive or upsetting

told me not to throw out any drawings.

No matter what my taste is and what my ideas are,

if I feel it's good, there will be somebody

who will pick up on it,

I shouldn't start compromising

and trying to adapt to other people's taste.

And last night, I was standing around here 5:00,

6:00 in the morning, looking through the portfolio,

looking at my photographs.

I was really startled, it was like the first time

that I sat down and really looked at them

in ages since I did them.

And I realized that they are good.

And there's absolutely no reason for me

to deny them or throw them away, they're my life.

And I don't owe it to anybody to distort that

just for their comfort.

I think that everything David thought an artist could

and should be was embodied by Peter.

And Peter was the purest of the lot.

Peter had tremendous respect for anyone else

who had that same drive, called them "those people."

And "those people" were special.

He was a tough judge.

And when he discovered David, he realized he's one of them.

This guy is one of them.

He's talented in a chaotic way.

And Peter saw right away both the talent and the chaos.

When Peter first met David and talked about him,

I paid zero attention to Peter about this. Zero.

I don't pay that much attention to people I was sleeping with,

I don't know why I should pay attention

to people that Peter was sleeping with.

I was under the impression that he was a teenager

because he had that band called, like,

4 Teens Kill 3 or 3 Teens Kill 4,

which, of course, I've never heard of.

♪ Give me all your bibles ♪

♪ Give me all your money, give me all your bibles ♪

♪ Give me all your money ♪

The story about 3 Teens

playing for the first time, it has to do with Danceteria

being shut down for not having a liquor license.

David and I were busboys at Danceteria.

We worked together.

It was an interesting crowd of people.

Keith Haring was a busboy there too,

and Madonna was hanging out.

They advertised having a full bar

until 8:00 in the morning.

In the time, mind you, totally a mob operation.

♪ This is a hold up, hold up ♪

♪ hold up, hold up - ♪

We were raided, and a bunch of us went to jail.

David escaped.

And then he had concocted a Molotov cocktail,

somehow he was gonna blow up the police vehicle.

But he couldn't figure out how to do it

without, you know, hurting people.

We spent the night in jail

and then glamorized that event, you know, we put on a show.

Now, I don't know why we felt we needed a benefit

for funds because the mob paid for fucking lawyers

who got our cases dismissed.

Jerry?

A little more volume on the drums.

And anyway, we had a benefit

so we threw together a band, 3 Teens Kill 4.

Uno, dos, tres, quatro.

♪ Hear the man whisper, see the man twistin' ♪

♪ Louie, Louie, Louie, Louie, Louie ♪

♪ Louie, Louie, Louie, Louie ♪

Then after we played the first gig,

Jesse and I and David wanted to continue it.

I knew their drummer had fallen out.

I went and bought a rhythm machine

because I didn't know how to play anything.

I thought, "Well, I can push buttons,

so I did that."

I don't think any of us were very proficient,

but it wasn't really the point.

It was an effort to not really necessarily make music,

but to have a film almost for your ears.

We ended up calling it the Cacophonic Barrage.

As opposed to music.

We were really ahead of our time

with the use of samples, and that was David's instrument.

David would come up to a mic with his handheld

tape recorder and blast sounds.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yes. Because the guns and the grenade,

are great equalizers. It used to be said

that a revolver made all men six feet tall.

I heard a rumor that Frank Zappa

was in the audience one time when we played,

and he said that we used the tapes like lead guitar,

which I thought was a great comment.

There was a time in America,

that if a, "glory hole" appears,

the police would throw them

in jail on morals charges.

Limp-wristed sissies.

David wasn't really of the art world.

At that point in time, he was just an individual

that was doing his thing.

He used to come over to my house to make art

because there was more room in my house than in his house,

which is funny, because I had a tiny East Village apartment

with a bathtub in the kitchen, and a toilet in the hallway.

We would get on the floor and make stencils,

and posters for the band.

We made 12 posters, put them up in the street,

most of them are ripped down immediately.

So we started thinking about more permanent things,

so I started going out in the street.

I would put up images around Astor Place along 8th Street.

But I didn't have any intention

of being a street artist.

I was just being provocative.

Ready on the firing line.

One night, I went downtown,

did every gallery door I could find with images

of the burning house, the plane, and the figure.

It was an aggressive thing.

This idea of New York City streets filled with soldiers,

that kind of tense atmosphere.

Halt, left flank, halt.

I was just a rabid fan of David.

He was pretty obscure at that time.

But I knew about the piece him and Julie Hair did

on the Leo Castelli building,

the shrine to contemporary art at that time.

Julie and I wanted to do a series

of action installations, which were basically

uninvited installations.

We wanted to open up what culture was to us

as opposed to what was handled by rich white people.

I don't really remember any planning stages of this,

but we went to the west side

where all the butchers were.

The Meatpacking District, which used to be

a meat packing district, you would never wanna go there

because of the smell of blood

from the actually butchering and packing meat.

There were big cans outside of the butchers'

with giant cow bones in them.

So, we got a bunch of bones,

we put them in this little wagon.

We brought a couple hundred pounds

of bloody cow bones, dumped them into the staircase.

Did a stencil painting with spray paint of the empty plate,

a knife, and a fork.

Left, right, halt.

And then military bombers,

houses, and planes,

and figures recoiling on the wall,

and then left.

They stenciled the despair of New York

at that time, and then they poured gallons

and gallons of cow's blood down the stairs.

Nobody seemed to think anything was amiss.

They had thought it was just part of the art world.

Left, right, halt.

Six months later,

I was still doing stuff on the street.

That's when somebody approached me

from one of the galleries,

asked me if I wanted to put a painting

in one of the shows, so I said sure.

David ends up in a show with people

like Julian Schnabel and David Hockney,

and lots of people who were famous.

He was completely unknown.

A lot of artists were doing graffiti

in the East Village. Keith Haring and Basquiat,

and David was doing it.

There were no resources like now

where you can go down to the Lower East Side

and there's like a dozen young galleries

you've never heard of that are showing stuff.

There was nothing.

There was SoHo, and there was Uptown,

and there were these established galleries.

We didn't feel we had any entree into there

so we created space so we could show our work and have fun.

Dean Savard and I started the gallery

through a series of one-night parties.

There was no real intention of making any money.

We would put the art up for one night,

we'd invite friends, we'd sat around on the floor

drinking beer and smoking pot, talking about art.

When my gallery first started,

I had gotten I think $200 back from my taxes.

And I thought, oh, let's have a party.

I had photographs in my bathroom

and my bathroom was a toilet and three walls

because the bathtub was in the kitchen.

Never did I think that anybody would show up after the party.

Eventually, we decided that, oh,

we'll leave the art up for a little longer.

We were really drawn to David's militaristic imagery.

We decided that we would put him into a group show.

We put this really large painting that David did.

It was one of the most unusual things I had seen an artist do,

expressing what was going on around us at the time,

where mankind stood at that point

where self-annihilation could occur.

We were actually trying to sell the work.

I'm trying to remember how much we were asking for it.

I think probably around $5,000.

Of course we didn't sell it because nobody was coming

into the gallery with that kind of money back then.

The interesting thing about the East Village though,

when there were artists that were really

kind of special, everybody knew about it

or there'd be this buzz about it.

So, there was a little bit of buzz about David.

He had that book, Sounds in the Distance,

which came out.

And I was so impressed because on the back

it had a blurb by William Burroughs.

And I was like, oh, my God, this artist

must be really incredible because William Burroughs

wrote something about it.

When we did the Famous Show, which was in '82,

we were looking for portraits of famous people

by famous and soon to be famous artists.

David brought in this painting, Peter Hujar

Dreaming about Yukio Mishima in Saint Sebastian

at the last minute after everything

was already up on the wall.

- Typical. - Typical.

There was like no space

because there were so many people

and he had a really big piece.

So, where are you gonna put a really big piece?

You hang it from the ceiling.

That's why I love this photograph

of the opening where you can't really see any of the art

but you can see David's piece because it's on the ceiling.

The early images were all very simple imagines.

But I just wanted to record things

that I didn't see people recording

and painting at that time.

You know, I wanted to record my own history

or different history.

And that's what painting originally was for me.

All the paintings are diaries that I always thought

as proof of my own existence.

Welcome 3 Teens Kill 4.

Official from the Reagan White House

confirmed a short time later

that the President had indeed been shot.

The President was shot once in the left chest.

The bullet entered from the left side.

He is in stable condition.

Mrs. Reagan rushed to the hospital

and the President jokingly told her,

"Honey, I forgot to duck."

It could be misconstrued

that one is celebrating Reagan's assassination attempt.

It's media critique.

He was wheeled into surgery and he quipped

to his doctors, "I hope you're all republicans."

♪ We are non-essential laborers ♪

♪ Laborers, laborers ♪

3 Teens Kill 4 had a song called Hunger

which was about the underclass and disparity

of wealth in this country.

♪ I see these things every day ♪

♪ Every day, every day ♪

♪ Television candidates with singular vision ♪

♪ Vision, vision, vision, vision ♪

♪ Grey images of freezing homes ♪

♪ Homes, homes, homes, homes ♪

♪ People combing through garbage reefs ♪

♪ Garbage reefs, garbage reefs ♪

♪ So we continue, so we consume ♪

♪ So we continue, so we consume ♪

♪ So we continue, so we consume ♪

♪ So we continue, so we consume ♪

Last night, I ran into Brian and Jesse,

discovered them to be in a big discussion

about the politics of clubs and politics of bands.

I just did not wanna hear it.

When you're trying to do a fucking job

and support yourself and be able to do things

that you feel are really important.

There were lots of different reasons

why he wanted to leave the band.

He wanted to do painting.

He wanted to have more control over what he was doing.

I remember having an argument with David.

He said to me, "I can't really be friends

with someone who doesn't like what I do artistically."

I said, "Well, David.

There's a lot of your art that I don't like

and there's a lot of that anger that I don't relate to

and don't necessarily wanna collaborate with."

Hi. This is Helen of Troy

calling from Poughkeepsie.

Oh, I got you on that one. Ha-ha. Good-bye.

Hi. This is Hujar.

- Bye. - David

came over to our place early one morning.

He said, "You guys got to come to this huge pier

with all these walls and there's nobody there."

We had to slip under a chain-link fence,

got into the building, and it was a really impressive,

remarkable space, for years had been abandoned

like a couple football fields in size.

The idea was for artists

to make work there surreptitiously.

It was very adventurous and illegal.

And that was very much connected

to David's knowledge of the piers

as a place for sexual tryst and that whole subculture

around it and in a way they kind of spoiled that spot.

And no one could go there for their acts anymore

because there were too many people traipsing through.

The ground floor was thousands of square feet

with very high ceilings.

And upstairs there were rooms.

David and I found

piles of discarded files

and psychological evaluations from Bellevue.

They had them draw pictures of men and women

and, yeah, most were very, very loose, you know.

It's like how you drew

in elementary school or something like that.

And then others were sort of more you would say like

in quote "sophisticated," or this or that.

But they were very emotional

and had a great deal of resonance in them.

Hi. David, this is Kiki.

I think you've got my squeegee

for silkscreening and I need it.

Okay. Bye-bye.

So, I was doing a lot of silkscreening then

and I taught him how to make silkscreens.

So we decided to use these images

and make a collaboration.

The first time I met David,

it wasn't physically.

It was more mind to mind, like vibration.

It was summer '83.

I wasn't involved in the art scene.

But one day, there's a French photographer

who came to visit New York and he said,

"Did you hear about the abandoned pier

where all these artists go

and paint on the walls and do things?"

And I said, "No."

He took me there.

I fell in love with that place, you know.

It was like so deathly romantic.

One day, somebody told me the story of this artist,

David Wojnarowicz, who opened the place.

And I remember right away I had a crush on this guy.

I thought this guy must really be great, you know,

to open a place like that,

to call people to come and collaborate and paint.

For me, he was already somebody special.

In the end, you know, hundreds of artists

were doing things there and French fashion magazines

were doing shoots in there.

It got so big that police came.

They closed it down.

The whole magic was lost.

They started tearing it down

and I have a picture of the Gagging Cow of David's

while the pier is being pulled down.

And then the pier disappeared into the river and was gone.

I think the East Village scene exploded at the same time.

It wasn't until David had

his first solo exhibition for us

that everything broke loose.

The first exhibition was very interesting

in a sense that it was something

nobody had really seen before,

painting things that weren't really intended

to be painted on.

He'd stencil images over supermarket posters,

trashcan lids, driftwood.

Everything was about something that was found

and didn't cost anything because, again,

nobody had any money.

It was that exhibition that Grace Glueck,

the New York Times art critic rode up on her bicycle,

started looking at the artwork,

asking us about the artist

and asked for a photograph of one of David's pieces.

Grace Glueck showed up, and it was really a joke to us

that she wanted to write something.

And so for us, it was very tongue-in-cheek,

you know, did the very serious interviews.

And she went around to other galleries

like Gracie's and suddenly boom.

An article appeared in the Sunday Lifestyle section

of the New York Times.

It talked about the galleries in the East Village,

David's artwork.

It was after that the collectors

really started coming down.

This limousine pulls up in front of our little gritty

drug-infested street.

Robert Pincus-Witten, who was an art critic in New York,

and a very elegant woman,

comes into the gallery.

They looked at each piece, examining.

Robert's whispering in her ear.

Soon after he said, "We'll take this one,

this one, this one, and this one.

We'll take that one over there."

And it was like, oh, my God.

I practically ran over to The Pyramid

and David and Dean were having a beer.

I said, "Oh, my God. We sold so much work."

It was such a euphoric feeling.

All of a sudden, the art worlds gave

this East Village scene its 15 minutes fame.

Our neighborhood now all of a sudden

had 60 galleries in it

and that people were coming by in limousines.

"Fuck You Faggot Fucker."

We were going around the gallery

putting the names on these little stickers on the wall.

"And what's the name of this one?"

And David said, "Fuck You Faggot Fucker."

It's a piece of torn paper that David found on the street

that somebody had written this homophobic slur on.

And I said, "David, that's so offensive.

Do we have to call it that?"

David was like, "That's the name, it's gonna stick."

"Fuck Faggot Fucker."

I walked in and the painting just riveted me.

It's two boys kissing over a map.

And then on the four corners,

there is Brian Butterick posing as Saint Sebastian

and there was David posing in the Christodora.

I said, "I'll give you $3,000."

And he said, "Sure."

Back then 1984, that was a lot of money.

But it's been a prized possession since then.

Hi, David. It's Marissa.

Prison Rape is back.

It just walked in the door from Montreal.

So could you come and pick it up as soon as possible?

Thank you. Bye-bye.

I think a lot of the reason David is important now

is because people recognized

emergent queer sensibility in David.

"I'm not gay as in I love you.

I'm queer as in fuck off."

Everything I did with David was collaboration.

But the concept of it has always been David.

He proposed to make a poster about being queer in America.

David knew a place under the Brooklyn Bridge.

We went there with a truck.

I put some blood on David's face.

We lit the scene with the lights of the truck

and we took the photo.

When I went to the darkroom

and I started printing the photo, it scared me.

It really scared me to see this image of David

beat up coming under the chemicals.

It looked so real.

A number of months ago,

I read in the newspaper that there was

a Supreme Court ruling

which states that homosexuals in America

have no constitutional rights

against the government's invasion of their privacy.

The paper stated only people who are heterosexual,

or married, or have families

can expect these constitutional rights.

And realizing I got nothing left to lose in my actions,

I let my hands become weapons, my teeth become weapons,

every bone, and muscle, and fiber,

and ounce of blood become weapons,

and I feel prepared for the rest of my life.

Hi, David, it's Gracie.

Can you give me a call at home?

About the Whitney.

'85 was a big year.

David had two major pieces in the Whitney Biennial.

I mean, that's amazing.

Everything happened really fast.

Hi, I want to make sure somebody told you

you made the front page of the Washington Post

on Sunday for the Biennial.

A big reproduction of your piece, bye-bye.

It was major for all of us to be accepted

in the bigger art world

but David wasn't, like,

"Oh, my God, I got into the Whitney Biennial."

- Not at all. - No.

No, I mean, he really thought about

whether he wanted to do it.

David has a certain kind

of political consciousness

that plays into his work, who owns it,

where it's shown, the whole thing.

He was not particularly thrilled

about a bunch of rich money capitalist people

in the Whitney thinking that he was great.

There's no gratification for that in him

and those people are very classist and judgmental.

He wanted to be recognized by people

that would appreciate his work,

but the right people for the right reasons.

You know, Peter Hujar had a lot of the same attitude.

Yeah, it's only been recently

that there's art stars, there's people

who make tremendous amounts of money overnight.

I agree.

That's it, I mean,

it's like they turned into little mini factories.

- There's... - Yeah, I got...

...nothing human about it.

There's no odor, there's no stink.

Hey, David, did you know you're in New York Magazine?

They did a review at the Biennial

and they reproduced your piece

but I also wanted to talk to you about the Mnuchin.

Okay, bye-bye.

Adrian and Robert Mnuchin were two collectors.

He was on Wall Street and she had a cashmere store

and her name was Adrian.

Now it's like Adriana or something.

But anyway, at that time she was Adrian.

They commissioned David and it was the most money

that David had ever gotten for anything to do

this big installation in their basement.

He needed the money so he was glad

that I had made this sale but a part of him

really was very unhappy about it.

David didn't really like rich people.

So he took all this garbage off of the street

and put it into the installation.

They were scouring all the vacant lots

to grab the nastiest shit they could.

You know, it looked like the plague had descended

upon their place, basically filled it with trash

and made a beautiful installation out of it

but so much of it just looked like tetanus.

And it had bugs.

Adrian was like freaked out

these bugs were being brought

into her pristine brownstone.

Of course David loved it, he brought in more.

David, hi, it's Gracie.

I'm just checking in, seeing how everything's

going with the installation,

if you need any help, and what's up?

Basically just a what's up call.

Um, okay.

I wanted to talk to you, okay, bye-bye.

So when you look at the photographs Peter Hujar

took of that installation, it was all garbage,

it was great like a lot of figures.

There was the burning child

and there was the big mural in the background,

there was a tree and a lot of cow skulls.

It was an incredible installation.

Well, in retrospect, that was Mnuchin.

The A-hole dealer whose son Steve Mnuchin

is part of Trump's cabinet.

I got really angry of that sudden attention,

- money being thrown at me. - Yeah.

I was starving for years earlier,

and then it suddenly crossed a line where what I make

is feeding me, is... it's giving me all this stuff

but then I have all this hate about the structure of that

- because it's so full of shit. - Yeah.

And this is something that rattled me.

I realized that I came out of a totally violent

fucked-up background growing up as a kid,

came to New York, went onto the streets,

almost died on the streets,

but once your economics are taken care of,

once you no longer have to struggle

to pay rent or eat, any shit that's underneath

goes to the surface.

Hi Dave, it's Pat.

I don't know if you're home or maybe you're sleeping,

well, the first thing I wanna say

is that your paintings are fantastic.

I'm so impressed, I'm so proud of you,

I tried to take pictures but they wouldn't

let me use the flash and I...

Patty was always close to David.

I love you a lot, bye.

Even after we grew up, we were completely split up.

So the first time I ever learned about his artwork,

I picked up some magazines

and there was David in Life Magazine.

I was so much in awe with... I was like,

"Wow, look where this guy is at," you know.

I finally found a way to get in touch with him,

it was an interesting thing to sit down with him,

I came to New York and he started spewing off

about he was a child prostitute, he's gay.

And I get the feeling that he was testing me.

I think he was afraid

that I would never accept him being gay.

I just was glad that he was okay.

David, this is Steve calling,

I don't know if you need maps for your artwork

but I just threw out about 5,000 of them today.

I worked for AAA so he had free maps

whenever he needed them, I'd make sure he got them.

Maybe I can save you some money.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Hey David, this is Richard, you know,

I just wanted to get together with you and talk about

making a movie or something like that.

I'm up, give me a buzz, bye.

It was one of those nights

David and I wanted to get high.

I said, "Hey, why don't we try shooting ecstasy?

I've got some of that."

David and I got into this deep, deep conversation, I said,

"Let's make a movie where we try to figure out

why young people are the way they are,

the punks and all that stuff," and just shot a quick movie.

I think we did it in a day.

David played the father, Karen Finley played the mother,

it ended up being a lot of things

from David's childhood and he definitely had

the most fucked-up stories.

- Don't get away... - Stop playing with your food.

Do you call this food?

Look, it isn't even fucking cooked, it's all bloody.

Shut up.

David said that when he was a kid,

they had a rabbit.

My father got us rabbits

and he said he gave away the rabbits

and then Patty found out somehow

that he had them butchered and we winded up

eating our pet rabbit which I think was horrific.

And it really bothered David too.

- You know what this is? - No.

See that?

That's my bunny, what are doing to it?

And you know what this is?

No, no, no.

David finally was starting to deal

with what had happened to him during his childhood.

He started using heroin.

It was almost a social drug in the East Village.

I got some junk that I had lying around,

so I did it in the bathroom.

The light and everything just started making me feel sick.

David took drugs in a way

that Peter was sure would destroy him.

And Peter knew too much about the way artists

can sabotage themselves to let that

go one step further.

At some point, Peter said,

"David, what are those marks on your arm?"

He said, "Oh, it's nothing."

He said, "Don't tell me it's nothing

and you're going to stop taking heroin today, right now.

You will never take it again as long as you live

and if you do, I will never speak to you again,

you will be dead to me."

David started crying and he'd stopped heroin.

He never took it again because Peter was the most

important relationship in his life.

They first had an affair

but I don't think that lasted that long.

And then they were friends but at a certain point,

I really thought of David as Peter's son.

Peter didn't think of him as Peter's son

and probably David didn't but to me,

that's what it seemed like.

I met David at the Bijou Theater

which was a gay porn theater.

Our eyes met and we went to the bathroom

and had a little bit of sex and I said,

"Why don't you come over to my apartment?"

Which I rarely did with people that I met there,

but I was just fascinated with this guy.

We left and I asked David what he did and he said

he was a painter and I said,

"What, of houses?" And he said,

"No, no, no, no, I paint things."

And apparently he was quite well-known

in the East Village and I didn't know who he was,

I had no idea.

So he came over and we had a really sweet night.

He left me a little painting

that he did for me that I really loved.

And we started seeing each other.

I felt my world was very different after I met David.

I was totally swept up with him.

So here I am, heading out into the cold winds

of the canyon streets, walking down and across

Avenue C towards my home,

with the smell and the taste of him

wrapped around my neck and jaw like some scarf.

And how it follows me in and out of restaurants

and past cops, and early morning children,

and past bakery windows filled with brides and grooms

on rows, and rows, and rows of endless wedding cakes.

Hey, juicy lips, are you there?

It's about 12:00...

David kept talking about this best friend of his

that he had in the East Village and we had to go see him,

and his name was Peter and then Peter,

and all of a sudden I said,

"Are you talking about Peter Hujar?"

And he said, "Well, how did you know that?"

Howdy-do, howdy-do?

I said, "Well, I had a little affair

in the '70s with Peter for a month,"

and I kept thinking, "Oh, great,

Peter's gonna tell him I'm an asshole."

But Peter thought actually that I was good for David,

you know, that I could help David,

I could be a settling kind of thing for him

which actually probably is true.

But they were so close that it was...

I couldn't even describe what that was,

much different than our relationship

and I was just trying to figure out

where I fit in his life.

He said, "I have three priorities,

in this order, Peter, my art, and you."

And I had to find that to be okay,

it was hard at first but as I looked at it,

I realized there was no threat there.

This was a whole other thing.

Hi David, this is Carlo

wishing you a Happy New Year.

Hi David, this is Bridgette,

I wanted to wish you Happy New Year.

Howdy-do, howdy-do?

It's the nufter.

And the monks last night were great,

you would've actually loved them.

I think there were 10 of them

and they sang in voices that was like, "Whoa."

You know, deeper than that.

"Oh, uh." No, I can't do it.

"Oh, hmm, uh."

It was really nice,

they did a healing ceremony.

Well, anyway, that's all I have to say, goodbye.

I took Peter to the doctor.

I don't remember what was wrong with Peter

or how Peter felt that made him have that test.

They didn't tell you there.

It took two weeks for this test to come back.

And I remember very much that Peter called me,

and I can't describe to you.

I said, "What... how are you?" And he goes, "Fran,"

and then he made the sound like, um, like a...

not a scream but kind of a scream.

It more sounded to me like an animal sound,

not like a human.

He said his test came back positive.

When Peter was diagnosed with AIDS,

I came over 10 minutes later.

He went to meet me at the door

and there was some mail that had arrived

and it fell on the floor and I remember him picking it up

and turning and just saying,

"Even something like getting a piece of mail

has an entirely different meaning."

And from that, I constructed something

of what this man is facing.

And I felt very sad.

I felt angry. I felt fear.

I felt the possibility of my own diagnosis.

David was sitting at the table

and he was crying and I didn't know

what was going on and he told me

that Peter had been diagnosed with AIDS.

He was destroyed.

I mean, it was so emotional for him.

It was so upsetting.

When Peter was diagnosed,

David asked me if I could help him

because Peter really had no income.

He had no money. He had no... he had nothing

and he didn't wanna lose his apartment.

I worked as Director of New York City's AIDS Program.

And it was through Tom that I met David.

This was an epidemic of great proportions.

And the city ignored it for quite a while.

In fact, everyone ignored it.

People with AIDS who were getting sick

and losing their jobs, were coming to apply

for public assistance.

Because AIDS had a stigma already,

none of the traditional systems in place

wanted anything to do with them.

The staff wouldn't touch their paperwork.

They often died before they got any benefits at all.

Mayor Koch finally decided that something needed to be done.

He started a very little program and I have to say,

we probably broke every rule in the book

in order to get people what they needed.

So I went over like a good caseworker,

and I fell in love with him.

I mean, he was an amazing person.

I could certainly ease a lot of his fears,

he couldn't believe that he wouldn't lose his apartment

and he'd have some kind of income.

Hippity-hoppity happy Easter eggs.

This is Peter Cottontail.

This is the ex-Peter Cottontail.

Are you there?

Hello? Howdy-do?

Peter was prone to great depression,

I mean, he never took a photo after his diagnosis.

He gave it up entirely.

A couple of times, I did confront him

because I thought he was stuck.

And that was the only time I allowed myself

to confront him when I thought that he was just

shutting down and so full of rage

and not strong enough to express it.

And I remember him threatening to throw himself

in front of a car because he was mad.

But he didn't have the strength to walk to the curb

and throw himself in front of the car.

He talked about killing himself endlessly, brutally.

"I wanna go to that building across the street

and jump off the roof" and he would say,

"I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it."

And he would say it every day until one day we gave him

a number of a doctor who would give medicine

to kill himself.

And once I gave him the number,

he tucked it away and never spoke

about killing himself again.

David had like a huge career,

then when I did The Four Elements,

we didn't sell a thing. It was over.

The art world if very fickle like that.

Once you start getting a certain amount of something,

you have to keep it going, or it fizzles out.

I had this naive sense that once people supported work

then, that doesn't just disappear that, you know,

that they'll watch what you do

and they'll take interest and they'll follow it,

which isn't the case at all.

It was the end of the East Village scene

and the so-called East Village art

had just gone out of style.

Hi, this is Hujar.

I'm on my way to the horse pistol

to stay there for a while.

I guess you can find my number by calling Cabrini Hospital.

Goodbye.

He lost weight.

He had the beginnings of dementia.

He just was kind of fading away.

I'm sitting in his hospital room

so high up in the upper reaches of the building

and leaning against the glass to the window of his room

where I can see dizzily down into the street.

It's a gradual turn of the Earth outside the windows.

I wonder what it is to fall such distances.

I'm afraid he's really dying.

And he barely opens his eyes for more than a few seconds.

And his breath was coming

in rapid fire bursts like machine gun.

I turn from the silence in the window and look at him

and an iris appears beneath one half-lifted eyelid

and its strength bores right through me.

And I turn away almost embarrassed,

having as much life in me as he has.

- Stand up and fight. - Okay.

It was Thanksgiving and I met David

in Peter's room at the hospital.

Ethyl Eichelberger was there and Peter was in a coma.

I mean, he really wasn't responsive

in any kind of way.

We're all sitting there and Ethyl says very quietly,

"He's not breathing anymore.

His chest isn't going up and down."

We called the nurse in.

And the nurse said, "Yes, he had passed."

And then David says,

"Could you all leave me alone with him?"

If I could attach our blood vessels

so that we would become each other, I would.

If I could attach our blood vessels

in order to anchor you to the Earth,

to this present time, to me, I would.

It makes me weep to feel the history of you,

of your flesh beneath my hands,

in a time of so much loss.

It makes me weep, all these moments

will be lost in time like tears in rain.

Smell the flowers while you can.

When Peter died, I went out to dinner with Anita

and this nurse, he was talking about,

sometimes you could tell somebody was infected

because they'd get a string of pearls

along your neck which was glands that would swell up.

So while I'm sitting there,

I run the fingers down my neck and sure enough

I have a string of pearls, swollen glands.

I decided to get tested.

It came back positive.

I had pretty good T cell at that point.

I wasn't sick or anything.

David, he was very sympathetic and very supportive

but then at some point, I said,

"You know, you're being very supportive,

but you don't know your status."

The first time I saw David,

David had markers of infection,

oral candidiasis, thrush.

He didn't have a competent immune system.

I don't think this came as a shock to David.

Hi, I just woke up.

Waking up every hour

for the last,

I don't know, three or four hours.

So I was diagnosed with ARC

sometime in the summer.

Now near the end of November,

I'm living at Peter's house, Peter Hujar,

because I couldn't afford the other apartment that I had.

David came back positive

but his T cells were really ravaged.

David asked Dr. Friedman,

"Do I have so few that I can name them?"

Back then, the magic number

was 200 T cells.

If you could keep the patient at 200 T cells or higher,

there'd be less opportunistic infections.

He had less than a hundred when he was tested

so he was already in bad shape.

Peter, hi.

It's... oh, Peter, oh, my God.

I'm looking at the name, what a...

unbelievable psychological slur.

This is Gracie calling for David.

He came in to the gallery and told us.

He was very quiet about it.

I mean, he came in and he said that he'd just been tested

and he found out that he had it.

It was devastating for me.

I mean, I felt very protective of David.

When Keith Haring came out about having AIDS,

it just seemed like everybody had to run,

buy something of his because he was gonna die of AIDS.

He had AIDS and he was gonna die.

It was so gross how Keith was treated

and how everything around him, what that was all about,

and I didn't want that for David.

I mean, I knew how private David was

and so when he told me, my first reaction was

that we shouldn't tell anyone.

Which of course is the wrong response

to have with David.

That's when I picked up the phone

and called Barry Blinderman and said,

"You have to do this retrospective now,

like, now."

She was right and that this is what I do,

books and retrospectives and...

I was an avid fan of his work.

I bought the painting, Fuck You Faggot Fucker,

back in 1984.

There was an urgency to do the show

while he was alive.

I wrote a grant to the NEA,

got the grant worth $15,000

and started working with David planning the exhibition,

then the catalogue.

I thought the phrase "Tongues of Flame"

was very appropriate. It's a biblical reference.

It's a reference to a play. It's a reference

to a silent movie.

But mostly, Tongues of Flame,

I'm thinking what a... an amazing orator he was.

I was thinking about the Burning Child,

I was thinking about the Burning House,

the incendiary aspect of it, the passion.

And it just seemed like everything that was connected

with David was on fire.

One of the things that happened

after my diagnosis is this thing

of this may be the last work I do. So it's, like,

trying to focus everything and channel it into the square,

or into this photograph, or into this thing

that it's all got to go in, all the anger,

all the emotions, all the thoughts.

I'm working on a series of sex images

that take environments like the sky,

the ocean, an airplane,

train movements, a forest,

and I'll superimpose

a circle that has a very explicit sex act.

And most of them are homosexual acts.

Outside of the sex series,

I placed these circular images inside the field of painting

and so for me the circles are like cells

and they contain information.

And I see them as microscopic views

so it's like looking into the interior of something,

like looking at a spot of blood and seeing the cells.

And I also see them as telescopic views

so that you could be looking through a telescope

and then that says something to me about surveillance,

seeing something from a distance.

I like the suggestions of all those things.

It's about discovery.

And I use dreams in my work.

Dreams are very important to me.

I usually write them down all the time.

The dreams are an example of how the imagination

can break all boundaries.

His iconography is based off

this profound sense he had that he could try

to look at the universe.

Everything organic,

and everything manmade,

all the delights, and all the horrors,

and trying to put them together.

But every aspect of it would be deeply personal.

When Peter died,

David took photographs of the head,

the hands, and the feet.

There's a tradition of taking death masks

of someone important.

Hands are important because they're how

you physically interact with the world.

And then the feet, I think are very important.

And that goes back to the Old Testament

and the New Testament.

How do you read people, you watch their hands

but it's more important you watch their feet

because that's what's anchoring you to the world.

And you find that all the way through

classic spiritual literature.

That iconic letting out of those images,

incorporating them into Peter Hujar Dead

with that text is really a call to arms.

I was diagnosed with ARC recently

and this was after the last few years

of losing count of the friends and neighbors

who've been dying slow, vicious, unnecessary deaths

because fags, and dykes, and junkies

are expendable in this country. And at the moment,

at the moment I'm a 37-foot tall,

1,172-pound man inside this six-foot body,

and all I could feel is the pressure.

All I can feel is the pressure and the need for relief.

David? It's Pat.

It's been too long and I want you to know

that I think of you and I love you a lot,

and I hope all is well.

Last night I talked to my sister

for the first time in seven months I think.

I told her about my diagnosis and...

it was rough for me anyway.

I thought she handled it pretty well.

But then who knows.

I remember Pat once saying to me,

she will never get AIDS or something like that because,

"I'm not one of those people that run around

to have sex with everybody."

Then I remember I didn't correct her.

I mean, how do you begin?

Dave, you home?

It's Steve calling again.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

After he had AIDS, we were fine

but there came that day when I called him on the phone

when I told him our Aunt Helen was coming to visit.

Boy, that set him off.

Look, if it comes up whether about my girlfriend

or we have girlfriends,

I'm gonna tell him I'm homosexual.

And if it comes up, I'll tell him

that I have this virus.

If it goes far enough, I'll fucking confront him

and ask him why the fuck they let the psychotic

do this damage to us all these fucking years

and-and not do a fucking thing about it,

and like talk about their God and all this other shit

when they watched this guy, what he did to us.

I'm tired of living these lies with these people

and I'm tired of hiding from these people

because I'm afraid of who I am

or because I have problems with who I am.

And I'm not gonna go through it anymore.

"This is not the place," I said,

"if you wanna confront Aunt Helen,

then go to Detroit and confront her.

But you're not coming here."

He went into a rage that frightened me.

Don't insult me by inviting me to come

after the relatives leave.

That's right. Out of sight, okay?

Get the fuck out of our sight until it's comfortable,

until we can deal with you sitting here

with your homosexuality, with your AIDS.

Yeah, right, sorry for myself.

I'm the one who's fucking dying, asshole.

I'm the one who's got to fucking confront things

before I go, and that's what I wanna do.

I wanna clear the fear out of my head.

It was so painful to me,

the way that he and I interacted.

If I could do it all over again,

I-I'd tried to do it a little differently.

So, are you afraid to tell your children I have AIDS?

And then he starts saying, "Oh, your kids know

that you have a faggot for a brother?"

That's not what I said. I said, "Are you afraid

to tell your kids I have AIDS?"

And I said, "David, they're young."

One's three years old, the other one's six.

It's too messy for me to be in your fucking life,

so save it. Save it, Steven.

I don't need this from you.

I don't need this kind of insult.

I fucking face this every day

and I don't need it from "family."

You understand?

Well, let the conversation end, Steve.

We never see each other again. Goodbye.

And then, I never saw him again.

I'm just feeling pretty crazy recently,

lot of anxiety.

At some point I realize I was just afraid of dying.

Throughout all my life I've tried to maintain

some kind of complete control of myself

and where I've come from.

All the scenes as a kid hustling

and all the scenes in the streets.

Sometimes I came close to death,

and the times that I nearly starved,

maybe a need for self-control, this... to mask,

this enormous rage that I carry or may carry

from all those experiences.

I guess I fear loss of control, let that rage,

It'll spill and become indiscriminate

in terms of what it attacks.

But really and truly I think I'm afraid of losing my mind

at some point to some degenerative disease

like meningitis, or seizures, or whatever.

I don't wanna lose touch with words.

I wanna be able to provoke some change

in whatever limited fashion

in people, in a person.

And I always had this fantasy

that if I were to ever become ill

and if I were to become so weak that I couldn't leave the house

which is another fear for me,

or at least be able to tap at a fucking keyboard

even if it's with a pencil held between my teeth

touching each key letter for letter,

despite rage, despite illness,

despite pain, I hope that my mind...

...continues.

AIDS was revealing exactly

what society was about.

That was already there in his work,

he knew already what the world was about.

He knew the structure that sustained power.

He knew in the manipulation of people

who would like to live differently.

So the illness became a weapon

against politics of the society.

When I was diagnosed with this virus,

it didn't take me long to realize

I contracted a diseased society as well.

Stand tough, stand tall,

it's time to march on city hall.

Thousands of demonstrators demand

that New York City do more to help

those suffering from AIDS.

Healthcare is a right. Healthcare is a right.

The scene evoked memories of the '60s.

Civil rights or civil war?

David and I went to Act Up meetings.

We marched with Act Up.

The city is dying.

In some level, the most interesting thing

that they have is information

of what was happening in the hospitals.

They were strapping minority babies to beds

and giving half of them placebos.

Basically, they're stealing these babies

from their parents saying,

"This is the only way your baby can get treatment.

Sign this form,"

killing half of them purposely with placebos.

That alone I thought was so outrageous.

And all these information packages

were given to the media, I thought,

"Well, Jesus, this will change everything."

I mean, how naive I was.

Forty something death per day.

Where was the help?

♪ Don't treat me like a science toy ♪

We went down to Washington when Act Up demonstrated

at the FDA.

Hundreds of angry demonstrators

effectively shut down the FDA today.

First in his land.

Demonstrators say the AIDS crisis and the anger over it

continue to grow every day.

Charging that the government response to the AIDS disease

is woefully inadequate,

they say the demonstrations will continue.

Until I die.

Our group made these tombstones

and then laid down like we were dying.

Fight until we die.

Behind the barricade.

Behind the barricade.

And so they arrested us.

But it got headlines.

Photographs of the tombstones came up many times.

One, two, three, four.

Civil rights or civil war.

David got arrested a couple more times.

Civil rights or civil war.

For my own taste, I wish they

would get a little bit more violent,

express it a little stronger.

That was one of the few things that people will respond to.

And I'm waking up more and more from daydreams

of tipping Amazonian blowdarts in 'infected blood'

and spitting them at the exposed necklines

of certain politicians.

I'm not gonna be polite, and fuck these people

that want me to be courageous.

You know, I resent that, "Oh, how great he was,

how courageous he was."

All the way up to the end.

There's no expression in that other than silence.

Somebody once said to me that if you spit

a piece of gum on the sidewalk, it's nothing,

but if ten people or a hundred people,

or a thousand people spit their gum

onto the same sidewalk people have to deal with it,

they become stuck in it when they walk through it.

And I see that as part of a relationship

with art.

When people put themselves on the line in their work,

whether it's music, writing, photography, painting,

or whatever in terms of Culture with a capital C,

they apply a tiny amount of pressure

against the system of control

that would willingly jump into fascism

if there wasn't enough pressure on its throat.

We are born into a pre-invented existence

within a tribal nation of zombies.

The government has a day-to-day job,

maintaining an illusion of a one-tribe nation.

And inside of that one-tribe nation,

there's actually millions of tribes.

Historically, minorities have always been expendable

in this country.

Historically, art was made

by certain classes of people

for certain classes of people.

What I make in my work is a record of things

that challenges the record that we're given daily,

whether it's in the newspapers, through the television,

or through the politicians.

I've chosen to stay and fight.

I've chosen to stay and fight.

If I were a violent person,

I would go into the nation's capital

and start annihilating the people that I believe

responsible for this pre-invented existence,

but the originators are long dead.

The way things are set in motion

in terms of society,

it's like a machine that runs itself

that can't stop. It can run by itself,

think by itself, police enforce it,

schools enforce it.

Government officials enforce it.

Even the stupidity of large populations

enforce it.

Raise all the glory while we do it to them again.

Cardinal O'Connor has helped tens of thousands

of people to their unnecessary deaths

through the denial of pertinent safe sex information.

He obviously prefers coffins to condoms.

- Safe sex information. - Find out why we're here today.

This is Jesus Christ.

I am in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral on Sunday.

We're here reporting on a major AIDS activist

and abortion rights activist demonstration.

Inside, Cardinal O'Connor

is busy spreading his lies and rumors

about the position of lesbians and gays.

They act as if... because there's this

abstract idea of what religion is,

of what God is,

that this man is untouchable and he's not.

And this church can be shut down

the same way he shuts down abortion clinics,

the same way he prevents people getting information

or making personal decisions about their life,

he can be shut down.

Is the green light on?

Green light's not on but, uh...

- Let's see this. - Yeah.

- The green light's on. - Yeah. So it's on.

- It's rolling? - Yeah.

East Germany today took down the Berlin Wall.

Back at that time, David had a big body of work

and it was really strong stuff but his career,

kind of, flattened out.

The publicity from his contribution to the catalogue

for Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing.

And Artists Space was what brought him

to the national stage,

and it wasn't for an artwork, it was for an essay

that he wrote in the catalogue.

I...

I wouldn't say derogatory, you know,

I don't think I'm-I'm being that critical.

I asked David to write for the catalogue.

There aren't such intense people

in the world anymore. But he was a genius

which I don't use for anyone else I can think of.

David's essay was talking about

how the imagination was the last frontier

for creative freedom,

that in his imagination

he can douse Jesse Helms with gasoline

and set his putrid ass on fire, I quote,

or throw William Dannemeyer off the Empire State Building

and made a reference to Cardinal O'Connor,

total enemy of the state,

called him that fat cannibal in skirts

in the house of walking swastikas.

Now, this didn't play well

with the establishment.

Tonight, a Manhattan art exhibit about AIDS

is losing a lot of federal money

because of what will be shown in the exhibit.

The chairman of the NEA states,

"We find that a large portion of the content

is political rather than artistic in nature."

It's a fact that I maybe dying of AIDS in 1989.

Is that not political?

It's a fact that I don't have health insurance

and I don't have access to adequate healthcare.

Is that not political?

And I, you know, I think that says it clearly.

This is Washington and Helms was on a rampage.

He'd already racked up Mapplethorpe,

gotten the Corcoran to cancel their show.

He'd already racked up Piss Christ.

I mean, this was the time

and they were looking for the trifecta,

the third thing, and David Wojnarowicz

was perfect for this.

This senator is unwilling to spend one penny.

I'm saddened to see that, um,

Congress might not feel that this show

should be supported by the American taxpayer.

Is this about homophobia or what is it about?

I... I'm confused by it.

What are you thinking about?

I mean, no. Just that, uh, you know,

I'm talking to this journalist from the Times,

you know, he said that the NEA is claiming

that what I said was horrible, monstrous,

you know, inflammatory, this, that.

The most terrible things that they can't even repeat them.

And I said like, "A study done on violence

in America found that there was increasing numbers

of homosexual teenagers that were murdered

or beaten up.

And that Dannemeyer tried to suppress

that part of the study

because it contained the word homosexual.

Therefore, William Dannemeyer condones the murder

and terrorizing of homosexual teenagers

and no gesture I could make could

even approximate the violence of what these people have done.

I'm not gonna sit still and be silent about it.

How heroic.

To the barricades!

But what's happening now?

Uh, Susan called up,

and it turns out that, uh,

the NEA approached Susan

and now they're doing a joint press conference

issuing statements and Susan does this paltry

liberal motherfucking stance of here,

"I think there are certain issues

that are not resolved here."

And I said, "What the fuck are you doing?"

I said, "These assholes have themselves against the wall

over all these issues, over homophobia,

legislative silence of homosexuals

and lesbians in this country.

What you're doing is you're avoiding the whole fucking thing

for your funding. I said, "You're a collaborator.

You and your board and it's indicative

of the whole fucking art world."

David was more skeptical

and more negative about the art world

than he was about Jesse Helms

because he thought that curators of the art world

hid art with queer ideas

and just anything that was out of the White one-tribe nation

as he said was being censored by the museums.

You didn't need Jesse Helms and people like that

because the museums were already doing the job for you.

Okay, thanks.

Okay.

Okay.

What happened?

She's fine. She's, like, uh...

She said that she could say in her statement

that this is a failure of the government

to confront homophobia in the society,

it's the legislation into silence of homosexuals.

And it's the failure to provide safe sex information

to people with AIDS so that... uh,

so they can make informed decisions.

Did she say that to the press?

This is her statement.

She's... and that she's gonna thank me, uh,

from the bottom of her heart,

uh, for what she's learned.

I feel, you know, I feel pretty emotional about it.

Oh, man.

This show does contain 10 years of work

starting with David's early street stencil pieces

to work that was just made yesterday

especially for this gallery.

So without further ado,

I like to introduce David Wojnarowicz.

Thanks a lot for coming tonight.

I don't think anybody expected a crowd this big.

This is kind of strange and emotional for me

to be standing in a room

filled with artifacts of my life.

Each painting, photograph, and sculpture

has built into it a particular frame of mind

that only I can know

given that I've always felt alien

in this country we call America.

If I say I'm homosexual, is that something new to you?

Does that make you nervous?

Do you think it would be a crime,

the denial of information only killed people

that you didn't feel comfortable with?

Do you stop to get to know the person

you sit or walk next to in this school?

Do you make it comfortable for that person

to express ideas that might change your ideas?

And I wake up every morning.

I wake up every morning

to this killing machine called America.

And I'm carrying this rage like a blood-filled egg

as each T cell disappears from my body

and is replaced by 10 pounds of pressure,

10 pounds of rage.

And I focus that rage into non-violent resistance

but the focus is starting to slip

and the egg is starting to crack.

Thank you.

David became the local hero

in a town that needed a voice like this so badly.

When I first went out there,

I knew that it was like a fairly conservative town.

I mean, I had fantasies of people with pitchforks

storming the gallery.

In the days that followed,

people would come running over to talk to me

when they spotted me.

It was an extremely emotional positive response.

I should probably tell you

how the controversy happened

about a month into the show.

There was one page in the book. It was a black and white,

homage to Jean Genet who is one of David's heroes.

I didn't know it was in color.

He just gave us the black and white

when we put it in the book.

Jean Genet has a plate over his head that looks like a halo.

There's angels with Tommy Guns,

and in the right-hand corner,

there's a picture of Jesus Christ

with a hypodermic in his arm.

It didn't make no never mind to me,

but one of the people that got a hold of the book

was Dana Rohrabacher,

the right wing politician

from Orange County, California.

Rohrabacher put together a screed

with a Xerox image of Christ with the injectable

talking about,

"Do you know what your NEA money is going for?

15,000 went to a show

that has anal and oral homosexual sex,

it's like a circus.

This exhibition, Tongues of Flame,

is an orgy of degenerate depravity."

Then I started getting letters and threats

from people to the university saying,

"We hear you have this exhibition

that is morally unacceptable."

People would come to the show.

And I'd end up having contests with them

about who can quote the Bible better,

me or them.

I'm trying to explain to them

that Jesus was the man of sorrows

and he was here to cleanse us of our sins.

And if that meant taking on the pain of a junky,

then that's what Christ would have to do.

Then all of a sudden,

I get a copy of a two-page pamphlet

that has excerpts of David's greatest hits

from Donald Wildmon

and the American Family Association.

Donald Wildmon got Pepsi to stop using Madonna

as a spokesperson because of cones that she was wearing

and she was being anti-religious

and evidently that had been sent

to thousands of church-goers

and any senator or congressman

who hadn't gotten it from Rohrabacher.

I sent that to David and I said,

"Look at this."

And that's when the shit hit the fan.

Coming up, Wojnarowicz explains

why he's suing a group that's trying to cut off

government funding of the arts.

Donald Wildmon went through a catalogue,

went through it with a pair of scissors.

He searched out what he perceived to be

tiny details of paintings or photographs

that involved in the portrayal of sexual activity.

Sometimes, using less than two percent of a single painting.

He represented these mutilated fragments as my work.

This week, Wojnarowicz took Wildmon to court

for violating his copyright

and distorting his work by taking it out of context.

What I remember was the whole courtroom

completely full of artists and friends of David,

and Reverend Wildmon sitting there

like he was in hell, like in his mind

in the most awful place

that the Lord could have possibly put him

there was... full of sinners and Sodomites

and blasphemers all around him.

And people dressed in black.

And everyone's dressed in black

and he looked tortured.

This is something that I argued with David about

numerous times. And David was sick.

I said to him, "You know, you don't have this time to waste.

You're not gonna change their minds.

They don't have minds.

The so-called ideas of these people like Wildmon,

they're not ideas.

They are aspects of bigotry.

There are always people like this.

Sometimes they're more powerful than others."

That was a moment of power for those kind of churches

and those kind of people. We're in one now, again.

But in between, they lost power.

And in the end, they never have the power as an artist.

David Wojnarowicz is more valuable

than every one of these preachers that ever lived

as a person and as what he put into the world.

David was being cast as that angry young man

who was just screaming all the time.

And people had told him that he was not a good painter.

So, he was challenging himself

to make beautiful paintings of flowers.

But within that, of course, he put his writing.

And he did it in a way that melded with the pictures.

But as you read the works,

you realized he was telling stories

of death and politics.

I mean, it's just a really sad, beautiful show.

I wonder what this little bug does in the world,

what his job is.

And if this little bug dies,

if the world feels it,

I mean, does the Earth feel it?

Does the world get a little lighter in the rotation?

There's another one here.

So, you think they're married?

Or are they homosexuals on vacation?

David was HIV-positive in '88.

I went to New York a lot, a lot of the time,

to work with him until 1991.

I mean, for me, he wasn't sick.

You couldn't see on his face, on his body he was sick.

Until the last trip we did,

there's one moment where I felt this virus took his mind.

May 1991, we did this trip in the Southwest.

We were in Death Valley driving

and I said to David, "Let's stop here.

I would like to take photos."

David said, "Look, I'm not really feeling good.

I stay in the car. Go on.

I just want to stay here."

I don't know. Maybe I left half hour.

Then I came back to the car

and David was laying down with the seat down.

He was, like...

white, completely white.

I said, "David." And he didn't answer to me.

He wasn't sleeping.

His eyes were open.

And then he looked at me

and he wasn't there.

He was somewhere. I don't know where.

I started getting scared.

I touched his face saying, "David, David, David, David."

And then he came back slowly to consciousness

and then he started laughing like nothing happened,

like he was nowhere, like he has been here.

That's the moment I felt that, uh,

something was shifting in his mind.

Actually, I blanked and I,

you know, my memory seems to come and go.

I... I forget so many things, uh, these days

where it just seems huge blocks of time

are suddenly gone and then...

- David. - ...they come back.

The same trip David took his camera and he said,

"I would like you to take a photo of me,

like, if I was buried."

So, we silently start digging

and I cover him with sand and earth.

I took different photos. I took photos from behind.

It was very strong, very strong.

And that was the last trip we did together.

We never met again.

We spoke over the phone, but we never met again.

I guess it was about September of '91.

He called me in the middle of the night,

probably around 2:00 in the morning.

He said that he had a fever and he was shaking.

And so, I came over.

I put him under a quilt

and he was just really shivering,

like, he couldn't stop.

And that was the beginning of it.

That was the start of it.

From then on, things started to slowly

but surely go downhill.

He was hospitalized for eight to ten days.

They did tests, but then he went home.

And literally, from then on,

he was never really much out of bed.

Hi, David, Penny Arcade.

I have a friend who's on the board of directors

for The Museum of Modern Art.

He's interested in getting Peter into the museum.

Call me so I can talk to you, okay?

Bye.

When U2 did a concert out at the Meadowlands

in New Jersey, they sent a limousine for us.

And before the concert, we met with them.

Bono wanted to know if we wanted to pray with them.

We said, "No. I think we'll pass on that.

Thank you."

But it was just so special.

I mean, he was thrilled.

He was really, truly thrilled.

Hi, David. It's Kiki.

Siobhan says that you went back in the hospital.

So, I hope you're okay.

He was in and out of Cabrini

a number of times.

And after one of them, he said,

"I'm never going back again."

Homecare was established in that loft

of the movie theater for him.

That became a hospital room.

And most patients didn't have that at that time.

David was one of the first people

to have that level of homecare.

And probably that was the force of his personality

and Tom's organizational skills.

If not for Tom, that wouldn't have happened.

David? Dave?

Hello?

It's Pat.

I just want to let you know, I talked to Tom

and I told him when I'm coming in.

I'm worried about you. I hope...

I just hope that you have someone around you

and, uh, well, I'll talk to you tomorrow, okay?

Big kiss. Bye-bye.

His decline was speeding up.

Dementia was setting in.

It was in and out.

It was getting more and more difficult

and he was more and more tired.

Things were happening for David.

And you could tell David that MoMA had just bought Fire

and he was just kind of like,

"That's wonderful."

And you could tell him five minutes later

and he would not remember. It was like Groundhog Day,

you could just absolutely tell him the same thing over.

And he had absolute happiness.

It was a very beautiful wide-eyed David.

It wasn't like it wasn't him.

But he was joyous.

Dr. Bob said, "A real person comes out

when they get into dementia.

If they're nasty at core, they'll be nasty."

But David was as sweet as he could be.

It was heartbreaking for me.

He didn't think anybody would stick around

if he got sick or he was dying.

He was very much afraid of that

and I think as a result of how badly he was treated as a kid.

You know, there was a tremendous sadness and fear

for me worrying about him

and knowing he was just getting worse and worse.

But at the same time, I felt grateful

that I could be there for him.

Looking out the windows, I can place myself

somewhere out in that sky,

lie down in that texture

and dream of years and years of sleep.

And I... and I talk.

And I talk inside my head of change

and of peace for this body beside me.

Smell the flowers while you can.

July 22nd, he died at the apartment.

And there were like 12 of us there,

all of his friends, his sister.

The nurse said to Tom, "I think he's gone."

And, um...

that was it.

It's no one thing that took David's life,

it was the burden of carrying

all those illnesses in that one body

that was just too much for one body to bear.

There were a lot of tears during that time.

There were a lot of tears then.

But I've gained a great deal of distance now, of course.

And you know, in some ways, it's even hard to remember him

which I don't like.

It's what time does to you.

But he's always here.

You know, he's always here no matter what.

I know he's here.

Oh, my God. Here we are.

I said I wasn't going to cry and I'm already tearing up.

It has been so long coming.

Here it is.

It's a little overwhelming, isn't it?

Wow.

Look at all of this.

All the Peter Hujar dreaming photos.

- Yeah. - Peter was quite

an extraordinary character and they were so connected.

Yeah.

Anita, there's your monkey.

There's your monkey, sweetie.

Oh. Yes, it is.

David painted it for Peter.

And it was over his bed while he was sick.

- Yes. - And when he died,

they... he gave it to Anita.

- Kept it for 20 years. - Yeah.

And I'm so sorry I needed to sell it.

If I could buy it back from that woman, I would.

Peter would always say that the monkey was carrying

the weight of the world on his shoulders

the way David did it.

This has always been a favorite.

When I first saw it,

it really kind of moved me a lot.

At that point, David was not feeling very well

and I just kept thinking of extinction and Wojnarowicz.

He's so clever. He really was.

He had such a great childish imagination.

Imagination is the key to breaking through

the borders of countries.

We can break through existing structures of government.

The work that anybody does as an artist,

if it doesn't reflect resistance

then they're helping

a system of control become more perfect.

We rise to greet the state,

to confront the state.

♪ And you thought I was just no strength ♪

♪ You thought I was just photos ♪

♪ You thought I was just words and pictures ♪

♪ You've seen a thousand times ♪

♪ Lies they tell us, lies they live ♪

♪ What is it that lies can give? ♪

♪ Peace or hatred, love or fear? ♪

♪ Who will lie the most this year? ♪

♪ Lies they tell us, lies they live ♪

♪ What is it that lies can give? ♪

♪ Peace or hatred, love or fear? ♪

♪ Who will lie the most this year? ♪

This is Hujar at noon on Sunday,

you wanna hear some Italian?

Listen.

Did you like that?

Oh, she's been imitating an American.

How about that? Anyway, goodbye.

See you later, gator.

♪ ...your heart ♪

Provided by explosiveskull https://twitter.com/kaboomskull