Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 85

The Writings of David Wojnarowicz

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nate with narrative resistance strategies, as the artist defiantly refuses to accept
society’s characterization of him as a deviant because of his homosexuality, his
promiscuity, his anti-establishment political ideology, and his affliction with AIDS.
Indeed, Wojnarowicz felt alienated from mainstream culture throughout his life
and often referred to himself as a misfit, but he proved to be far too rebellious in
nature to wear the thorny crown of the deviant passively.

Homosexuality in the Pre-Invented World
A major theme emerging from the writings of Wojnarowicz focuses on
society’s assault on the author’s homosexuality, which spanned from his time as a
street hustler in his early teens in New York City, to his sexual experimentation
with a variety of men, to his committed relationship with photographer Peter Hujar.
In both his writings and art, Wojnarowicz was always abrasively frank about his
gayness, calling upon words and images that were graphic in detail and never apolo
getic in tone. For Wojnarowicz, his sexual orientation was as natural as his pen
chant for abstract artistic expression. He refused to hide his gayness, and instead
relished going public with the most intimate of details about his sexual preferences.
Beginning in his early teens, Wojnarowicz appeared almost obsessive about re
cording— in words, paintings, collages, and photographs—his lived experience in
an effort to make sense of the chaos that was occurring within and around him.
Bom in Red Bank, New Jersey, Wojnarowicz headed to New York City
as a runaway teenager in the late 1960’s in order to escape a dysfunctional family
and a violent alcoholic father. Upon arriving in New York, Wojnarowicz lived on
the streets and survived by working as an underage prostitute. By the late 1970’s,
Wojnarowicz’s father had committed suicide and David spent a number of years
traveling throughout the country and Mexico before finally returning to New York.
When he did return, in his twenties, he was impoverished, scared of ending up on
the streets again, and hyperconscious of being gay in a society that deemed homo
sexuality to be deviant. As of 1975, however, Wojnarowicz grew tired of not being
able to express what he was feeling and what he was experiencing, and began
utilizing free-fonn written narratives and abstract images to record the confusion
of living in what he termed “a pre-invented existence” (Rizk, 1999, 45). From
Wojnarowicz’s perspective, people are bom into the world with their role and place
in society predetermined by government, religion, and other societal institutions.
And those like himself who dare to break free from the chains of the pre-invented
world stand to pay a stark price. In his book Close to the Knives: A Memoir o f
Disintegration (1991), Wojnarowicz described the pre-invented world as:
...the world of the stoplight, the no-smoking signs, the rental
world, the split-rail fencing shielding hundreds of miles of bar-