Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarowicz was an abused child, a teen runaway, and a former Times Square hustler who used art to re-create himself. He never went to art school, barely finished high school, but emerged as one of the most important voices of his generation. He was a romantic figure, nurtured in a more vivid, more dangerous New York and central to its last bohemia. He also developed a reputation as an agitator because he dealt so openly with his homosexuality, so angrily with his circumstances as a Person With AIDS, and so fiercely with his would-be censors.

Wojnarowicz found his tribe in New York’s East Village, a neighborhood noted in the 1970s and ’80s for both drugs and blight, as well as a burgeoning art scene. His creativity spilled out in paintings, photographs, films, texts, and installations, and in his life and its recounting – creating a sort of mythos around him, even among friends. First displayed in start-up storefront galleries, his art found greater notice – along with that of peers such as Nan Goldin, Kiki Smith, Keith Haring, and Jean-Michel Basquiat – as uptown art collectors started looking downtown for the next big thing.

These artists moved into the national spotlight just as the AIDS plague began its devastating advance through so many creative worlds. Wojnarowicz spent some of his last years fighting not just the virus but the right-wing cultural warriors who wanted to end federal funding for artists, especially those who were openly gay. Indeed, Wojnarowicz’s work was still provoking and inflaming them in 2010, when the Catholic League protested the inclusion of an excerpt from his film A Fire in My Belly in a show at the National Portrait Gallery and the museum removed the piece, causing counter-furor. By then, Wojnarowicz had been gone for some eighteen years, having lost his battle with AIDS in 1992 at the age of thirty-seven.

Twenty years later, Cynthia Carr has written the first biography of Wojnarowicz, exhaustively researched and drawing heavily on interviews with family, friends and contemporaries. It is the untold story of a seminal and polarizing figure at a pivotal moment in American culture.

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