GLR July-August 2024

The accounts in Queer Newark were made possible in large part by the creation of the Queer Newark Oral History Project in 2011. Scores of interviews have been collected, some re counting events going back to the World War II era and the 1950s. They make the essays come alive with deeply personal accounts of individual lives across three-quarters of a century. Besides the many quotations contained in each essay, Strub also included more extended excerpts between the chapters. By the time I’d finished reading Queer Newark , I felt that I had not only absorbed some fascinating history but also had formed re lationships with many of its key characters.

Also of note, during the Obama presidency, the Department of Justice began an investigation of the Newark Police Depart ment. In addition to establishing an independent monitor to keep track of police behavior, the DOJ urged the department to “en gage with the LGBT community ... and develop training on policing related to sexual orientation and gender identity.” While this did not solve the entrenched problem of police ha rassment or eliminate the community’s deep distrust of the po lice, it was a dramatic step forward, an indication of how community activism—notably that of African-American women in this case—could make a difference.

Postcards to Paris

I T WAS at one of my first ACT UP meetings that I learned of both the ex istence and the death of artist, writer, and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954–1992), a central figure of the East Village scene in the 1980s. I had moved to New York only a few weeks earlier, but even I could see that his death had hit mem bers of ACT UP unusually hard. While I

the three years on display, written by co-cu rator Carr and based on her more extensive timeline for the catalogue of the Whitney’s 2018 retrospective, David Wojnarowicz: History Keeps Me Awake at Night . Without any editorial explanation, the correspondence is left to speak for itself, not only in words but in the images that ei ther were already part of the materials

S HANE B UTLER

DEAR JEAN PIERRE by David Wojnarowicz Edited by James Ho ff Primary Informa ti on. 605 pages, $40.

didn’t know it at the time, behind the scenes there was an un successful scramble to honor his request for his corpse to be dumped on the steps of either the FDA or the White House. I joined a boisterous march in his memory but peeled off before the planned civil disobedience, for which I had not yet been trained. A few months later, however, I co-organized ACT UP’s “Ashes Action,” in which the ashes of people who died of AIDS were thrown onto the White House lawn, one of several politi cal funerals that drew inspiration from texts by Wojnarowicz and others. Some of his ashes were used in the second Ashes Action, two years later.

(postcards, flyers, etc.) or were added by Wojnarowicz. To as sess what the material says, one has to begin with what it does n’t say. With the exception of a single letter from 1991 tacked on at the end, the material precedes the emergence of AIDS in Wojnarowicz’ circle of friends. Wojnarowicz and Delage cor responded throughout the 1980s, so the focus on the early ex changes is noteworthy but never explained. This sense that one is not being told the whole story is consistent with Wojnarow icz’ many omissions and evasions, which are richly documented in Carr’s biography. That he was less than candid with Delage about his other sexual activities and romantic attachments is

Wojnarowicz’ importance to my thinking about art, life, and death in the age of AIDS has only deepened over the years. But when I went to see “Dear Jean Pierre,” an exhibi tion of letters and postcards sent mostly be tween 1979 and ’82 to his on-again, off-again French lover Jean Pierre Delage, I confess I was looking for a different, more intimate connection. The exhibition, curated by An neliis Beadnell and Cynthia Carr for New York’s PPOW Gallery in spring 2022, didn’t entirely dash that hope. Most of the exhibited material is now available in Dear Jean Pierre , which reproduces the correspondence in full color and scale. Mirroring the exhibi tion, the book offers no introduction, ex planatory essays, or even captions. Indeed, its only text comes at the end, in the form of a timeline of Wojnarowicz’ life and work in Shane Butler is a professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University. 34

David Wojnarowicz. Jean Pierre D., Normandie, France (Male series) , 1980. Estate of David Wojnarowicz and PPOW.

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