Fire in the Belly. A biography of David Wojnarowicz

Hell is a place on Earth. Heaven is a place in your head. David Wojnarowicz

The first book of David Wojnarowicz I encountered was the small art book, Memories that Smell like Gasoline, and what stood out were its contradictions. I recall being attracted to the title but not liking the cover for its striped border. Then there was the lurid and dangerous content that was beautifully rendered in words from the gutters, streets and porn shops that raised him from a tormented childhood. These stories then were illustrated in delicate, cloudy watercolors. Thumbing through this book unlike any I had held before I turned a page to see a painting of a man covered in Kaposi Sarcoma legions and was viscerally hit with fear.

This was when to get HIV was indeed very often a death sentence. I was in my early 20s living in one of the epicenters of the epidemic, San Francisco. In the early years of the Plague, the virus changed everything. It brought out the homophobia in our government, our churches and our families. Hate seethed and fear seeped. It felt like war. It was war, with real deaths everywhere.

I bought the book, and later his others. David was an artist working in several medias. He was a writer, a film maker, a painter and musician. His memoir, close to the Knives was his war cry. That book, like Memories, contained beautiful texts, black with sorrow and rage.

I have just finished Fire in the Belly, by Cynthia Carr, a great biography framing the cultural context in which David moved from an abused childhood, into the East Village scene, and on to become a very famous artist. It brought back those days to me. Days of a viable and thriving underground, where bands were not simply a weekend’s entertainment, but a form of activism that articulated our values, when art was not simply a decoration or investment, but stood up in anger for a youth with little hope for a future.

“He saw his death, the secret theme of Memories, as the logical outcome of a society that did not value him, that did not protect him, and never would” Fire in the Belly, page 531

Times have changed much. In my years of making art I have even met many of the people in this book. Some of the stories Cynthia Carr tells I have heard first hand. Fire in the Belly paints an accurate picture of those Viral Days.