David Wojnarowicz

Autobiographical stories and drawings by the artist and AIDS activist featured in the new documentary by Chris McKim. For most of his life, David Wojnarowicz considered himself the ultimate outsider and a true invisible man. “I’m a blank spot in a hectic civilization,” he writes in this fierce and unforgettable collection of four blistering autobiographical pieces, illustrated with his own arresting ink drawings. Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in New York City at the age of thirty-seven, left behind a body of work that was staggering in its variety and originality. Painter, writer, photographer, performance artist, and filmmaker, he made an indelible mark on virtually every stage of the national arts scene. Yet nowhere does his anger, love, or compassion show itself as strongly as in his writing, which earned a Lambda Literary Award and prompted critics to call him the Jack Kerouac of his generation. The horrors of Wojnarowicz’s past inform his literature—his years spent as a child prostitute and living homeless on the New York streets, his outspoken, very public battle against the disease that would eventually take his life, and the entrenched government bureaucracy that sat by and did nothing. The world as seen through Wojnarowicz’s eyes in these four masterful short works is stark, cruel, and cold—and yet gloriously alive, ennobled by surprising acts of heartrending humanity. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a celebration of sorts: of sex, of love, of art, and of having truly lived.

Memories That Smell Like Gasoline

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Sometimes I come to hate people because they can’t see where I am. I’ve gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form; my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat. But I’m fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists; drifts spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there. I’m a xerox of my former self. I can’t abstract my own dying any longer. I am a stranger to others and to myself and I refuse to pretend that I am familiar or that I have history attached to my heels. I am glass, clear empty glass. I see the world spinning behind and through me. I see casualness and mundane effects of gesture made by constant populations. I look familiar but I am a complete stranger being mistaken for my former selves. I am a stranger and I am moving. I am moving on two legs soon to be on all fours. I am no longer animal vegetable or mineral. I am no longer made of circuits or disks. I am no longer coded and deciphered. I am all emptiness and futility. I am an empty stranger, a carbon copy of my form. I can no longer find what I’m looking for outside of myself. It doesn’t exist out there.

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