Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 91

The Writings of David Wojnarowicz

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consequences of the disease, purposely choosing language that is explicit and shock
ing in detail. The strategy is predicated on the notion that knowledge and truth are
the most vigorous weapons to defeat ignorance. Wojnarowicz’s writings helped
the author shed the label of sexual deviant by confronting the reader with a relent
less outpouring of information that dispels the myth of the so-called “gay disease.”
In his stories and diary entries, Wojnarowicz described in excruciating
detail the constant nausea, head pains, fevers, and night sweats he experienced
during his battle with AIDS, as well as the humiliating tests and examinations by
perplexed physicians who ordered an endless stream of bone biopsies, intestinal
biopsies, blood work, and drugs. Wojnarowicz also sought to humanize the AIDS
experience by subjecting the reader to the utter sense of desperation and isolation
faced by those with AIDS. As Wojnarowicz wrote in a 1991 diary entry:
I’m sick of feeling like a fucking empty Xerox version of my
former self. Myself of last year is gone, is totally away in the
past, floating like a rag in the wind. I’m blank, I’m a copy of
my features, I look similar to a year ago but that sense of liv
ing, of fantasies, of hope, of purpose, of need, all of it’s gone.
(1999, 265)
Thus, by applying a narrative style that emphasized graphic information
and harrowing stories culled from personal experience, Wojnarowicz sought to cut
loose from the restraints of the label of sexual deviant. And his writings also sought
to humanize the AIDS experience by emphasizing not only the level of suffering
experienced, but by expressing, at times in furious exasperation, that AIDS victims
are human beings who should not be treated like lepers. Wojnarowicz reiterated this
theme in a 1991 interview, stating: “Some people have this idea that you’re diag
nosed with AIDS and all of a sudden you’re just a disease on two legs, or you’re just
waiting for death, or that your life goes into suspended animation. Or that you’re
facing some death skull down the road, and it’s just bullshit” (Goldin 60).
Throughout the 1980’s and ‘90’s, David Wojnarowicz waged an aesthetic
guerrilla war against the one-tribe nation of rich, white, male, heterosexual America
in his art and in his writings. His works relentlessly challenged the inhumanity of
the status quo and gave voice to the excluded, repressed, repulsive, despised, and
stigmatized of society. Wojnarowicz’s subversive critique, however, came at a price:
he was often labeled sexually deviant because of his homosexuality and his afflic
tion with AIDS (both major themes in his work), and politically deviant because of
his anti-establishment positions. His autobiographical writings particularly sought
to break free from the bonds of these labels, calling upon narrative resistance strat
egies designed to shock, inform, and confront readers, and ultimately to humanize