"One day this boy..."

How David Wojnarowicz gave me life

- By Khashayar J. Khabushani

Several summers ago, when I first met David – our introduction made through Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City (2017), David being one of four male artists Laing chose to hover her loneliness around – I didn’t know it then but two years later he’d become my closest friend. We’d even travel together, David and I – his memoir, Close to the Knives (1991), clutched in my hands – through Vienna, then Frankfurt, then back to New York City.

But I couldn’t have anticipated how much time we’d end up spending together. He is dead, after all; died the year I was born, 1992.

David was thirty-seven years old, was killed by a diseased society, as he called it, that failed to recognise, failed to treat the virus that was killing him and his friends and lovers, his fellow artists and activists.

In 2018, my first summer living in New York City, I encountered David again, this time at the Whitney Museum, where his stunning and devastating body of work ran for a short nine weeks. I went several times; I should have gone every day. It was David Wojnarowicz, on the fifth floor at the Whitney, who summoned buried memories of a queer boyhood – mine – where fear burned within the walls of my past; up until then, up until encountering David’s paintings and films and photography and writing, I never had the chance, as an adult, to live inside my own queerness. But by showing me his, David invited me back inside, and I haven’t left since, and I never will again.