Seeing much of Wojnarowicz’s best-known photographs, paintings, films, audio recordings and writings at David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night at the Whitney Museum of American Art feels like a punch in the gut in today’s political climate. It’s both a reckoning with what he called America’s ‘ONE-TRIBE NATION’, and a call to arms for society’s many wounded minority communities.
Deafen the Satellites: David Wojnarowicz at the Whitney
Lambda Literary / August 2018
In 2014, I began working on a screenplay for a film based on Cynthia Carr’s biography Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. In the four years that I’ve spent researching the life of David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992) for this project, I could not have predicted how much America would drastically revert back to the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, during which right-wing politicians and religious leaders often targeted and reviled Wojnarowicz’s work.
