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