Bless You, Toxic Dwarf: An Appreciation of Gary Indiana
Gary at his best was being at his worst.
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Gary Indiana, who died on October 24 at 74 years old, was a brilliant and scathing critic of contemporary art and literature — and sometimes of those who thought they were his friends. His work at the Village Voice in the mid-to-late 1980s, when Jeff Weinstein edited him to perfect fever pitch, positioned him as the sharpest, most influential, and most feared art critic in New York of the time. It was a role that both defined and ruined him. He relied upon a persona that was about having come from nothing (not entirely the truth), knowing he wasn’t traditionally attractive to most men (he was short, skinny, and if he was ever a twink, those days were long past), was smart and used that to intimidate people, and eschewed money and fame (um, not really).
Not exactly the usual art-world type, he left it and retreated into fiction, where he could work out his issues with characteristically dark humor in ultracontemporary social satires. He was full of contradictions, and his explanations of them were always brilliant and self-focused — plaintive, often exasperated wails from the last bohemian standing about the injustices he faced. Gary’s East Village apartment was a sixth-floor walk-up with the toilet in the hallway he shared with other tenants. At various points, money came his way — from book deals, from an inheritance — but never gave up the flat. He could be a riot or a nightmare, a loving friend or vicious enemy; the outcome was usually determined by how much he drank. Gary could put it away. Sometimes there were drugs but mostly to enable him to keep drinking. And he was a terrible drunk.
We met through mutual friends in the mid-’80s — either novelist Lynne Tillman or BOMB magazine founder Betsy Sussler — before we ever worked together and began a long friendship. I’d see him at BOMB dinners; invite him to Grove Press launches — he was reviewing books for the Voice Literary Supplement and I was the publicity director. He’d come to those for his old friend Kathy Acker, who would be over from London, where she had moved earlier in the ’80s. Gary became enmeshed in the book and publishing culture, much preferring it to the art world. He was writing stellar essays on lost classics and European fiction — I might have never read Thomas Bernhard’s The Lime Works had it not been for Gary’s criticism. He could be a great guest at a dinner or become that person you promise yourself you’ll never ask over again. By the time we wound up working together, in 1989, on the publicity for his first novel, Horse Crazy, I knew enough to warn my somewhat younger, much taller, ’80s male-model-type assistant to, literally, watch his ass if he was going out late with Gary.
Narrated by an unnamed 35-year-old culture writer at a weekly magazine (Gary was 39 and had stepped away from the his column at the Voice) whose obsessive love for a beautiful, younger artist–waiter–heroin addict (Gary had a thing for David Wojnarowicz) got ugly, and set in the early days of the AIDS crisis (downtown was being depopulated) in the East Village (where heroin was easy to get; Gary and Wojnarowicz both lived there, and there was an emerging art scene blowing up), Horse Crazy was not just the quintessential novel of that time and place — it was gorgeously rendered, painfully accurate in depicting the malaise that took over our world with the arrival of AIDS, and, like Gary, it was very funny, at points intimidatingly smart, and subtly, perfectly, au courant. It showed Gary’s genius, humor, anger, and empathy. It heralded a new voice in a very New York type of social satire.
Horse Crazy was published in the same season as Closer, the first novel by our mutual friend, and Gary’s compatriot in art writing and alternative queerdom, Dennis Cooper. Closer was the first in a five-book cycle that would be come to known as the George Miles cycle. Modeled on Arthur Schnitzler’s Le Ronde, it was the book, especially published alongside Horse Crazy, that got the term transgressive fiction floating around. Having Gary, Dennis, and Kathy Acker on the Grove list — the home of William Burroughs, Jean Genet, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, and Samuel Beckett, among others — was dreamy. I was 26 when Gary’s and Dennis’s first novels were published. I felt as if I was a part of setting a new tone in letters, one born of protest, something uniquely queer, that would wind up defining the era. Gary, Dennis, Kathy, and William were the writers who I would be long associated with; the ones who, whatever my role was in publishing, I would champion. Or so I thought at the time.
Dennis and I had met in 1984, when I threw a book party for him and Brad Gooch at the new nightclub Limelight, where I supplemented my entry-level publishing salary as a party promoter and doorman. A few years later, I brought him to the Grove list. Gary and Dennis had known each other for years and were both writing about art. Despite, or more likely because of, the perpetual gloom in our scene, it was a moment that our friends started to see some attention. The Lower East Side was picking up steam — Between C&D, the zip-locked lit mag made on a dot-matrix printer, had published an anthology with Penguin, and its editors, Joel Rose and Catherine Texier, had novels signed up by mainstream publishers, as did Lynne, Patrick McGrath, Mary Gaitskill, Darius James, and Susan Daitch. BOMB magazine became a showcase for cross-disciple interviews with emerging downtown and international writers, artists, filmmakers, and performance artists. There was a sense that these writers would be the antidote to the seemingly yuppier brat pack of Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Tama Janowitz, who were eschewed by this crowd for their alleged crime of commercialism. It was like the old idea that you either belonged at the Mudd Club or at Studio 54 — which stopped making sense when Studio started its “New Wave Nights.” But some type of battle lines were drawn, and I was representing the Downtown Fag faction.
I pitched my publisher on sending Dennis and Gary on tour together, intuiting that these erudite outsiders, separately and together, would get good ink. I asked William Burroughs, my literary maharishi and former mother-in-law (in the early 1980s, I was living with James Grauerholz, whom Burroughs had adopted), to blurb both books. He loved Gary’s, comparing his work to Genet’s. He politely gave a double-edged blurb to Dennis, “Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer” — those two wound up at odds in the ensuing years. Armed with praise from the Gay Godfather of Punk, with a small budget and large ambition for their ascendancy, the first All-Male, Alt-Gay, Downtown Fiction Roadshow began.
Gary and Dennis crossed the country doing readings in bookstores, art galleries, and nonprofit spaces. “Gay Fiction” sections were popping up everywhere featuring titles from large commercial publishers whose books were oriented toward what they assumed was the bourgeois predisposition of gay readers. Publishers were hyping David Leavitt and Armistead Maupin and the mysteries of Joseph Hansen as representing gay male America. Gary and Dennis brought balance with radical points of view in their brutal, dark depictions of gay male sexuality in the age of AIDS. That said, the critical response, from the glossies to the gay zines, the art magazines to the NPR affiliates, was formidable and mostly positive, if not effusive. I checked in with Dennis at some point to see how the tour was going. Gary was performing in a wig — Check, he’s an attention seeker and was once an actor. Great, great. But Dennis was getting fed up with something else. Travel with Gary was tricky; they were getting delayed at airports. Gary had an enormous black dildo in his carry-on and was making a spectacle at security when asked him to take it out of his bag after the X-ray machines would go off.
The publication of both Horse Crazy and Closer set them up for continued critical success and chronic commercial questionability in the corridors of corporate publishing. Gary followed his Grove editor Fred Jordan to Pantheon, where his novel Gone Tomorrow, a Fassbinder-ish fantasia on a film set, was published in 1993. Fred left Pantheon. I left Grove in 1990 to open a PR business and eventually co-founded High Risk Books. William Burroughs was one of my clients. Gary was reverent of his work and grateful for the blurb he’d given Horse Crazy. I wanted to keep them in each other’s orbits. William got a kick out of the little imp, and Gary was in awe of William. They could talk books for hours. I arranged for them to visit each other in New York; in the relative seclusion of Lawrence, Kansas, where William had moved in 1981; and on the set of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch in Toronto, which Gary would write about for the Voice and for a film book I was putting together for Grove.
Gary and I made that trip together. At immigration, he announced he was a journalist on assignment to cover a big film being shoot in Toronto. I had suggested earlier in the day to simply say, as I would, “I’m visiting friends.” Never tell them you’re working. The officer got uptight wanting to know why he didn’t have a work permit, to explain how he wasn’t taking work away from a Canadian journalist, and so on. Gary went all prima donna on the guy. I had a cache of copies of his Village Voice articles to give to Cronenberg in advance of their interview. I gave them to the officer and explained that Gary was unique as Burroughs; this was all very gay and New York; that no one else could do this or something along those lines, and off we went to the set.
I put Gary on the launch list of High Risk Books with Rent Boy. His short, funny novel brings back the hustler high jinks/escorts engaged in organ theft and takes successful downtowners down, specifically in a swipe at Kathy Acker, his former friend, lampooning her well-crafted persona in the guise of a tattooed writer named Sandy Miller. “I bought the new Sandy Miller novel, The Devil’s Panties, which has a quote from some minor cheese on the back that says reading Sandy Miller is like playing Scrabble with the Marquis de Sade, which I guess is a compliment, even though they didn’t have Scrabble during the French Revolution.” Rent Boy is Gary at his best, being at his worst — in taking down a friend so publicly. It was a riot.
Acker was pissed — at him for writing it, at me for publishing it, and at the circle of close friends who knew before she did that she’d be the brunt of his joke. Historically, they’d had a complicated relationship — a surreal Punch and Judy, sibling-rivalry sitcom starring misfit orphans. Acker became a media darling in London but returned with her tail between her legs, having lost stature after Harold Robbins won a ridiculous plagiarism suit against her. When Horse Crazy was signed by her editor at Grove, with me doing his PR, she wasn’t happy. She returned at the beginning of the new decade as other old friends like Lynne and Patrick McGrath were reveling in newfound success publishing at Poseidon Press. She left New York for San Francisco. High Risk Books went on to reissue Gone Tomorrow and publish his first essay collection, Let It Bleed. High Risk Books died around that time when my U.K. business partner effectively shut us down.
I returned to Grove Press in early 1997 as editor-in-chief, where I was working, again, with Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, and I brought William Burroughs back to the list. Both William and Kathy would die later that year. I kept Gary apprised of what I was up to, thinking, at some point, I’d see some new work from him, from whomever his agent was at that time. He was starting to go through them (I can think of four), and publishers (at least six), and friends — Susan Sontag (with whom he had a similarly complicated relationship as with Acker, gets the same fate — taken down as a nasty, pretentious, public intellectual in his novel Do Everything in the Dark) and Kathy Acker being notable ones. Then there were the tussles with writer and artist friends (who’d rather not talk about them); pissed-off magazine editors; etc. There is nothing new here — the brutally talented, drunk, underserved writer cuts off the people who can help him, only fueling the flames of resentment. It’s standard fare for some of us, but while many of us were exhausted from the wave of deaths we were all dealing with, Gary stormed through the dark days, drink in hand, and got more volatile. There were moments when I thought he might have had the right idea. The drinking, not the volatility. Though it became a nuisance.
In April of that year, I attended BOMB magazine’s 15th anniversary benefit at the then-chic Bowery Bar. I was teary seeing Betsy, whom I’d met when I was 18, sitting with Gary and Lynne — my old friends, great writers whom I’d published during the bright, brief life of High Risk Books. In BOMB’s first 15 years, the masthead sustained losses — Cookie Mueller, Carl Apfelschnitt, and Craig Gholson, to name a few friends who died of AIDS. But things were getting better on that front with antiretrovirals, and my heart swelled as I knew how lucky I was to be alive at all given that not many gay former IV drug users are around to tell the tale (I quit heroin and all IV drug use the year that Horse Crazy and Closer were published.) But before I could finish saying “Happy An …,” to Betsy, Gary jumped out of the booth and started screaming at me. “You fucking piece of shit. You haven’t done a thing for me since you went back to Grove. It’s all William this, and Dennis that, and that fucking cunt Kathy. Fuck you, Ira. I don’t need you. You haven’t done any good for me ever. You and that fucking Barbie-obsessed poet you live with (David Trinidad, my lover in the ’90s) and your dog. You can all go to hell.” It went on for a while longer. I was stunned.Everyone was silent. Gary was very drunk. Blackout drunk. I walked away.
Everyone was silent. Gary was very drunk. Blackout drunk. I walked away.
I’ve been thrilled to see a younger generation of writers and critics carry the torch for Gary. He is an icon of a demimonde now mythologized by a generation who lives their version of bohemia in a far more bourgeois, less dangerous city, even if they do so out in Ridgewood and not on Avenue C. He’s being reissued by some of the best independent presses — McNally Editions, Seven Stories, and Semiotext(e), where co-editors Hedi El-Khoti and Chris Kraus have also published Gary’s friends Cookie Mueller, Lynne Tillman, William Burroughs, and Anne Rower — and enemies Kathy Acker and David Wojnarowicz, leaving his work and his legacy ready to be discovered by the new readers who admire the old times and the settling of old scores that he renders acutely and brilliantly.
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