Ethics & Memoir

[Anonymous]

#920

When thinking on these issues of ethics, what immediately comes to my mind is about my friend David Wojnarowicz’s mentor Peter Hujar, the late and brilliant photographer. I first saw Peter’s work long before I got to NYC; I was captivated and moved by his photography collection Portraits of Life and Death—-and Peter was very kind and supportive to me when David brought him to my first show in the city. After Peter passed away of AIDS, David told me that when asked for a bio, Peter would always provide something different depending on who was asking. For one show catalog, he would write an autobiographical blurb that claimed he had been the orphaned child victim of a plane crash who was raised by monks on a mountaintop. For another collection, he would fabricate another, completely divergent origin story, usually one so convoluted and imaginative that it felt worthy of great literature. These fabrications added to Peter’s cache, if anything.
David took Peter’s lead; when I was working on 7 Miles a Second with him, I came upon all sorts of wild tales of his childhood and teenage years…for instance, that he had in high school tried to join the Black Panthers and wore one black glove which he kept in permanently fisted and raised position. I thought these conflicting accounts were amusing; they were part of his created mythology and after his death, I saw in NYU’s Fales Library papers of his on exhibit that directly contradicted many things that he had told me with a perfectly straight face. It was pretty surprising to see comics David drew himself in a sort of R. Crumb style showing himself as a typical pothead “Dave” engaged in comparing the attributes of various “chicks”, and letters from his mother talking about her faith that he could become a great artist—given the person he became later who painted a picture of a homeless, rejected child and the currently common rejection of the idea of bisexuality. I do not hold any of David’s ambiguities and inventions against him, though, because the mythology he created was used to such effective and important ends, has so many echoes of truth and it resonates in such a meaningful way to so many people that it would be counterproductive and a disservice to his memory to pop the bubble, as it were.
Still, the preceding is not to say that I wouldn’t try to be scrupulous as possible if I myself was dealing with my own autobiographical material. I have done, and would do.

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