Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 86

82 Popular Culture Review ren wilderness from the human step. A place where by virtue of having been bom centuries late one is denied access to earth or space, choice or movement. The bought-up world; the owned world. The world of coded sounds: the world of language, the world of lies. The packaged world; the world of speed in me tallic motion. The Other World where I’ve always felt like an alien. (87-88) To escape the tyranny of social conditioning, Wojnarowicz called upon his imagination to stretch the boundaries of the pre-invented world. His earliest attempts at creative rebellion involved street graffiti art, reminiscent of the street art of Wojnarowicz’s contemporary Jean-Michel Basquiat. They also included his abstract murals on the walls of the abandoned and run-down Hudson River piers, including one depicting an entrapped, screeching pterodactyl. The mural has been interpreted as representing being homosexual in the public realm. Rather than cow ering to societal pressure to “conform” to heterosexual hegemony, Wojnarowicz underscored the importance of freeing oneself from the restraints of a hostile world by harboring no deceptions about one’s needs and desires. Metaphorically, Wojnarowicz longed to soar without the limits set by an intolerant, judgmental society—to soar as freely as the pterodactyl traversing the primeval sky (Rizk, 1999, 48-49). It was during the Reagan-Bush years of the 1980’s that Wojnarowicz truly developed his art in opposition to the pre-invented world. Calling upon paintings, collages, photography, popular culture artifacts, and, of particular interest for this article, memoiristic narrative, Wojnarowicz not only recorded the particularities o f his own experience, but constructed histories that would otherwise go unre corded in mainstream art. Indeed, Wojnarowicz was labeled a deviant because he was overtly gay, but his autobiographical writings employed various narrative resistance strategies to reject such a societal characterization. An outcast or misfit—those were labels he applied to himself. But to be viewed as deviant by others because of his sexual preference was more than Wojnarowicz could bear. The major strategy implemented in a number of Wojnarowicz’s stories involved underscoring how heterosexual intolerance drove him underground in fulfilling his sexual needs, even though he believed homosexuality to be normal and a vital aspect o f himself and his life. His stories are replete with incidents of clandestine sexual encounters with men—in public restrooms, behind bushes in parks, in parked cars, in the darkness of porno movie houses, and in New York City alleys and abandoned buildings. For ex ample, in the story “Into the Drift and Sway,” Wojnarowicz recounts a chance meeting with a truck driver in a rest stop bathroom. After it becomes clear they are