Gary Indiana

Rent Boy

Follows the experiences of downtown New Yorkers at crossroads in their lives, from a gay couple who find themselves growing distant, to an interracial couple lapsing into heroin addiction, to a formerly successful playwright struggling with writer's block. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

A Novel

Do Everything in the Dark

Danny is a rent boy, an architecture student, a waiter, and hot! Working his way through school seemed pretty easy: he serves ego-obsessed writers their cocktails at the Salamagundi Club; he has his toes and other appendages sucked by horny businessmen; and he escorts anyone - male, female, or otherwise - who can afford him. But then his liaison with another rent boy gets him involved with an organ theft ring centering around a crazy old doctor and a crackpot nurse. A relentless stream of social commentary, careening between sex, comedy, and murder. Rent Boy is a hysterical romp through the worlds of contemporary culture and crime.

"It was suddenly chic to be 'targeted' by Andrew...It also became chic to claim a deep personal friendship with Versace, to infer that one might, but for a trick of fate, have been with Versace at the very moment of his 'assassination,' as it had once been chic to reveal one's invitation to Cielo Drive in the evening of the Tate slayings, an invitation only declined because of car trouble or a previuos engagement. Versace's friends no less than Andrew's friends were helpless not to make hay off the carcass, for the narrative itself excluded from existence all relevant persons who failed to appear, to put their two cents in...and because the narrative had the force of a psychic avalanche it provided the seque ferom the previous marrivtie, extricated the public eye form the previous keyhole, the Andrew narrative, in effect, solved the JonBenét Ramsey murder case, as that case had finally wrapped up the O. J. Simpson case, which in turn had closed the Menendez case, the Andrew mystery would ultimately be solved by the death of Princess Di..." -- from Three Month Fever In Three Month Fever, his first book-length work of nonfiction, Gary Indiana presents the 1997 killing spree of Andrew Cunanan as a peculiarly contemporary artifact, an alloy in which reality and myth have been inseparably combined. The case generated an astonishing sequence of news reports in which the suspect became a "monster," "serial killer," "high-priced homosexual prostitute," "pervert," "master of disguise," "chameleon," and so forth. In reality, this figure of dread bore little resemblance to the scary sociopath of legend. In following Cunanan's "trail of death," Indiana presents a riveting, fully realized portrait of a very bright, even brilliant young man whom people liked. He had charisma, great looks, and money that he spent very freely on others. He was a sympathetic listener with a phenomenal memory for names, faces, and virtually anything he read or saw. But he didn't fit in anywhere, and he couldn't solve the problem of how to live. He was trying to do better, to come from a better place, to have a better background. He made up stories about himself that made him feel more like other people or made him seem more interesting than he thought he was. He wanted to be loved for himself. The two people he thought might love him for himself didn't, and he ended up killing them. This was probably the last thing he wanted to do. Andrew was compulsively social, and as long as he could establish some intercourse with the outside world he could function, even if he had to conceal the ugly secrets he was accumulating. He could hang out in gay bars in Chicago while on the run, come to New York and live in a bathhouse, go to movies, pick people up. Even after the killing in New Jersey, his crimes were below the threshold of most people's awareness. But in Miami he found himself trapped, the very places where he expected to "blend in" were informed about who he was and what he looked like. It was isolation he could not deal with--and that led to his total disintegration and the death of Gianni Versace. Three Month Fever is a tour de force in which Indiana reveals how Andrew Cunanan fell apart over time and what he might have sounded like in his own mind. Rarely has a writer immersed himself in the mind of a killer with such startling effect. Gary Indiana has created a new form of true crime that is as insightful as it is riveting.

The Andrew Cunanan Story

Three Month Fever

A black comedy of a novel follows a tabloid writer through the haunts of Hollywood's talent agents, actors, and hangers-on as he covers the story of two privileged young men accused of murdering their parents.

A Comedy

Resentment

Horse Crazy

The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. ﻿Described by the London Review of Books as one of “the most brilliant critics writing in America today,” Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments. With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work—from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post–summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in this—his most personal book yet—the same mixture of humor and realism, philosophy and immediacy, that have long confused the definitions of genre applied to his writing. Vivid, atmospheric, revealing, and entertaining, this is an engrossing read and a serious contribution to the genres of gay and literary memoir.

I Can Give You Anything But Love

"This story, if it is one, deserves the closure of a suicide, perhaps even the magisterial finality of what is usually called a novel, but the remnants of that faraway time offer nothing more than a taste of damp ashes, a feeling of indeterminacy, and the obdurate inconclusiveness of passing time." So writes the unnamed narrator of Horse Crazy, looking back on a season of madness and desire. The first novel from the brilliant, protean Gary Indiana, Horse Crazy tells the story of a thirty-five-year-old writer for a New York arts and culture magazine whose life melts into a fever dream when he falls in love with the handsome, charming, possibly heroin-addicted, and almost certainly insane Gregory Burgess. In the derelict brownstones of the Lower East Side in the late eighties, among the coked out restauranteurs and art world impresarios of the supposed "downtown scene," the narrator wanders through the fog of passion. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic is spreading through the city, and New York friendships sputter to an end. Here is a novel where the only moral is that thwarted passion is the truest passion, where love is a hallucination and the gravest illness is desire.

A novel

Tiny fish that only want to kiss

Patrick McGrath

Gary Indiana, a 'huge satirical talent' (The New York Times), presents a darkly comic novel fueled by the virtuoso con artist Evangeline Slote and her extravagant life of chicanery and petty crime. Inspired by the case of Sante and Ken Kimes, the real-life mother/son grifters, the novel is a dissection of the mind of a charismatic sociopath and a satire of the society that appeases and abets her.

Depraved Indifference

selected essays

Utopia's debris

“One of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche.” —The Guardian The novelist, cultural critic, and indie icon serves up sometimes bitchy, always generous, erudite, and joyful assessments from the last thirty-five years of cutting edge film, art, and literature. Whether he’s describing Tracy Emin or Warhol, the films of Barbet Schroeder (“Schroeder is well aware that life is not a narrative; that we impose form on the movements of chance, contingency, and impulse....”) or the installations of Barbara Kruger (“Kruger compresses the telling exchanges of lived experience that betray how skewed our lives are…”), Indiana is never just describing. His writing is refreshing, erudite, joyful. Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath—in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way—about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it’s also political, plus it’s a riot of fun on the page. Here is Gary Indiana on Euro Disney resort park in Marne-la-Valée outside of Paris: John Berger compares the art of Disney to that of Francis Bacon. He says that the same essential horror lurks in both, and that it springs from the viewer’s imagining: There is nothing else. Even as a child, I understood how unbearable it would be to be trapped inside a cartoon frame. "Since 1987, Indiana has published novels, nonfiction, plays, short stories — all with an unmistakable, sardonic voice embedded in the text …” —Los Angeles Times

Selected Essays 1984–2021

Fire Season

Gone Tomorrow is a passionate chronicle of death and obsession told before the full onslaught of AIDS. A disfigured, jaded young actor narrates the story of a seductive and monstrous film director who has convened his international cast and crew in Colombia, where a serial killer is on the loose. The making of his film of vast, if vague, ambition, brings together a group of people whose implosive relationship - fired by narcissism, sex, alcohol and drugs - are fiercely dissected by the narrator against an ominous backdrop of cultural dissolution, social anarchy and political violence.

Gone Tomorrow

A dark yet compassionate comedy of art aspirations and friendships come to naught. First published in 2003, Gary Indiana’s turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene. During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends—many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds—who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell. Arguably Indiana’s most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do Everything in the Dark is a chilling chronicle of madness and failure, success and disappointment, and the many ways love dies in a world people find increasingly unlivable.

Gary Indiana is one of America's leading cultural critics—a public intellectual who has written key essays on every aspect of American culture. Utopia's Debris comprises selections of his very best work, revealing him to be an enormously acute, frequently scabrous, and always brilliant observer of the best and worst America has to offer. His writings range from popular culture—trash novels, architectural wonders and horrors—to appreciations of the best of modern literature, art, and cinema. They include his convincing (and highly entertaining) debunking of fashionable conspiracy theories, a spirited and contrarian defense of Bill Clinton's autobiography, a Mencken-like examination of the rise of Arnold Schwarzenegger and the politics of celebrity in what Indiana calls the Age of Contempt. A postmodern Emerson, Indiana wields scalpel-sharp wit and a fealty to logic on issues in which, all too often, irrationalism and emotionalism hold sway. At times rigorously serious, at other times whimsical, Indiana's most conspicuous feature is skepticism—his wildly satirical contempt for conventional wisdom.

Selected Essays

Utopia's Debris

Louise Bourgeois

ToWhom It May Concern is one of the final projects Louise Bourgeois completed, and is an apt demonstration of the enduring power of her work. Rich pinks, purples, reds and blues describe bodies comprising swollen bellies, heavy breasts, engorged phalluses and stooped torsos are presented in a series of pairings on facing pages. Deceptively simple in design, the varying intensity and range of colour within each figure reveals a dynamism in each repeated coupling of these headless, limbless bodies: male and female at their essential, and the relationship between the two, changing but the same. Indianas short, visceral but lyrical texts are interspersed throughout and form a conversation with these images, an unconventional non-narrative, part of a broader dialogue about the barrier of flesh, about desire and intimacy. This Violette Editions publication, developed in collaboration with The Easton Foundation, faithfully reproduces in reduced size the original large-format artists book, made in fabric in an edition of seven.

Gary Indiana

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