“What I feel is the momentary shock of realizing that most of the wood, metal and plastic fixtures, the sinks, lampshades, the shower stall, and even the drinking cups will all outlive me if my body follows the same progression that this tiny invisible-to-the-eye virus has initiated.”

David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992)

Artist, photographer, painter, performer, activist, author

“Put yourself, for a moment, inside the mind of Jesse Helms,” the novelist David Leavitt wrote in The New York Times two years before David Wojnarowicz died.

Imagine a scrubbed, manicured neighborhood, a pocket of decency in the heart of our sinful land. The music is by Wayne Newton, the paintings are by Norman Rockwell, and sex takes place only between married men and women in beds at night.

Then one day a church-reared boy or girl goes to a museum and sees a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph; or goes to a library and checks out a novel by Rita Mae Brown (neither action likely to be undertaken innocently). What does Jesse Helms think happens? Does the photograph or book emit something between a magic fragrance and a sales pitch, luring this high-minded but fallible child into the back alleyways of decadence and sin? The ''artist,'' in this story, is really nothing more than a street-corner beckoner, a wolf in smock and painters' pants, a wolf with a camera or a pen. What he or she creates, under the guise of art, is a ''promotion'' for sexual deviance, a tool for the ''recruitment'' of the young.

While the scenario I've just described may sound paranoid, even ludicrous, its dissemination has become the primary weapon in the current attack on the National Endowment for the Arts, an attack that, in fact, has little to do with the arts at all, and everything to do with the extreme right wing's determination to terrorize an already ambivalent American population by manipulating its entrenched fears of anything foreign, unfamiliar or explicitly sexual. People can argue as long as they want about the definitions of obscenity and art; in doing so, they become hopelessly sidetracked, trapped in a struggle to resolve unanswerable questions that neatly distracts them from the real crisis at hand, the way a computer can be distracted indefinitely by being asked to calculate the value of pi.

Senator Helms was a powerful man in those days, and he used his power to force out the chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts for “promoting” homosexuality. Jesse Helms was death on that topic- literally. He blocked funding for AIDS research. He hectored and slurred the good names of gay nominees to federal office. He tried to control to which artists the NEA gave grants, and the subject matter those artists would treat. Thirty years before Donald Trump, Jesse Helms got HIV-positive individuals banned from entering the United States without special permission, and only for short stays.

In a letter to a longtime friend whose son died of AIDS, Jesse Helms consoled her with the words, “He played Russian roulette with his life and lost.”

Senator Jesse Helms despised a New York artist, photographer, filmmaker, and writer called David Wojnarowicz. Perhaps only Robert Mapplethorpe got Helms angrier.

Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch) was born today in 1954. We were born fifteen months apart, and I am now twenty-four years past his death, of AIDS, at 37. I never met the man, but he changed my life and those of millions.

What drove Jesse Helms around the bend about Wojnarowicz was that the man was extraordinarily intelligent, articulate and incandescently angry. When the plague came at the beginning of the Reagan Era, the government turned its back on research and care for the sick and dying. The President’s press secretary laughed about AIDS in his briefings. When the president put a gay man on his advisory commission on the disease, his supporters tried to remove him and defund the study. Having one homosexual would legitimize a lifestyle that threatened civilization.

It was well-accepted that, although no one knew what caused the disease, or how to cure it, if one got it, it was his own fault and he deserved what he got. An industry sprang up to fund the astronomically expensive, darts-at-the-wall-medical treatments of the day: viatical companies would advance you money. When you died, they collected your life insurance proceeds.

All of which made Wojnarowicz and his like necessary. Most Americans didn’t want to talk, or think, about AIDS. Beyond them lay another circle of Americans afraid to speak up, fearing loss of work, home, family, friends and reputation.

I was one of those for fifteen years and it will shame me until I die- decades, it has turned out, after I expected to be dead already.

Wojnarowicz’s art, his films and his writings, got in people’s faces in such an angry, visceral, provocative way, they had no choice but to respond, and they did in the most negative ways possible.

“We tried being nice,” the activists said. “You wouldn’t pay attention then, either.” When Donald Wildmon, founder of the antigay hate group The American Family Association, tried to turn Wojnarowicz's work against him, Wojnarowicz sued them and won a judgment of infringement of his rights to control his own work. It was a stunning rebuke, and a landmark decision for every artist who has come since.

When the NEA in 1989, "decided to rescind money for a catalogue to an exhibition about AIDS because of an essay in which he attacked various public figures, the endowment had to reverse itself. It also supported a 10-year retrospective of his work that was organized at the University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal, Ill., which included a catalogue that reproduced the essay,” The New York Times reported when he died.

Nothing is so annoying as the unsilenceable voice of a critic, especially an odd-looking one with perverse habits. Wojnarowiscz was “tall and bony, with buck teeth, a preternaturally deep speaking voice and a long face that tapered like a garden spade”. He was, as biographer Cynthia Carr observed in “Fire in the Belly,” “so ugly he was beautiful.”

Wojnarowicz's work covered more than just his activism: among his celebrated works is a U2 album cover depicting buffalo stampeding over a cliff.

David Leavitt ended his 1990 article with this:

Fear of change, fear of difference, fear of cultural erosion: all these fears of the extreme right mask, in fact, a deeper fear, a fear of the underground sexual desires every individual harbors (look at Jimmy Swaggart!) and for which homosexuals have traditionally been made into a catch-all symbol.

To say that gay men and lesbians are everywhere is only to say that sexuality is everywhere, that there are no rules other than the ones that we impose. Even in houses where Jesse Helms's picture hangs over the fireplace there are children who will grow up to be gay or lesbian, and some of them may become our greatest artists and writers. The influences that would supposedly seep into and corrupt the healthy American family landscape are in fact an integral part of that landscape already. What the N.E.A.'s opponents really seem to be fighting is the difference in themselves.

When Wojnarowiscz was dead eighteen years, Jesse Helms’ lieutenants and heirs came after him again, pressuring the Smithsonian Institution to remove a Wojnarowicz film from a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. The Catholic League of America, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, John Boehner, and his deputy, Eric Cantor threatened the nation’s crown of arts and sciences with defunding, and the Smithsonian’s secretary folded (he later said he would have made the same decision over, he just wished he had taken longer to make it, to seem more independent).

That was just five years ago.

This year, after presidential candidate Hillary Clinton- wrestling out loud with her own ambivalence about LGBT Americans- praised the late First Lady, Nancy Reagan, for being an early AIDS activist, the real activists rolled out another of Wojnarowicz’s in-your-face images in rebuttal.

The author Olivia Laing has published a far better appreciation of the significance of the life and work of David Wojnarowicz in The New Yorker. It is worth reading, in full. He was too transgressive to be popular, or even well known, alive; in death he remains a polemicist. Had he survived, he would have been 62 years old today.

North Carolina, which sent Jesse Helms to the Senate six times, continues to elect homophobic leaders who pass laws to make the old man gleeful (Governor Pat McCrory, who is making passage of HB2 his signature reason to win a second term, canceled a validly-booked use of a ballroom the Governor’s Mansion by an anti-HB2 group to make room for a reunion of former Helms aides earlier this year). His party’s more radical members call for recriminalizing homosexuality and legalizing expansive new forms of discrimination: after they repeal marriage and terminate the adoptions of thousands of children right to life advocates, inexplicably, do not adopt.

Felled by a stroke, Donald Wildmon turned over The American Family Association to his son and grandson.

One can only imagine the posters Wojnarowicz would have up in Raleigh this year. The Whitney Museum will mount a major exhibition of his work, History Keeps Me Awake At Night, in 2018.

Related sites:

Olivia Laing, “David Wojnarowicz: still fighting prejudice 24 years after his death,” The Guardian, May 12, 2016