GLR May-June 2026

FILM

Hujar Was a Great Talker, Too

P ETER HUJAR’S DAY is the filmic equivalent of a gossip col umn and, with a running time of 76 minutes, a one-act play about the gay demimonde of Manhattan in the 1970s. Watch it three times in a row, as I did, and you’ll spend roughly the time it takes to watch the latest Avatar installment.

film’s Rosenkrantz tersely queries Hujar to keep him talking, but there’s really no need: He’s a born conversationalist and, chain smoking and namedropping in equal meas ure, he could talk the fat off a chicken bone. Peter Hujar’s Day should make the viewer more curious about the subject’s life, or his “Speed of Life,” as the Morgan

C OLIN C ARMAN

PETER HUJAR’S DAY Directed by Ira Sachs Janus Films

Library called a 2018 retrospective of his nearly 6,000 contact sheets, all in black-and-white exposure. The Ukrainian son of a waitress and a bootlegger, he was born in Trenton, New Jersey, left home at sixteen, and only gained recognition with a single publication, Portraits in Life and Death (1976), which featured friends Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, Vince Aletti, and Susan Sontag (who wrote the introduction). Lebowitz, photographed when she was just 25, has since said: “He was practically starv ing to death and see how expensive his work is now.” The Hujar of 1974 is penurious: he’s a starving artist, “fuzzy” about finances, as he tells Rosenkrantz, and needs to become a better “businessman.” Rosenkrantz, fitting the stereotype of the good Jewish mother, worries that the shutterbug is not eating his vegetables. By the 1980s Hujar had befriended both David Woj narowicz, with whom he was romantically involved, and his rival Robert Mapplethorpe, though he never realized those two photographers’ level of fame. Ul timately, in 1987, it was not malnutrition or lung can cer that caused his untimely death at age 53, but AIDS-related pneumonia. But as Peter Hujar’s Day makes plain, Rosenkrantz and Hujar are not dead so long as their words survive. In Sachs’ version, you get the mundanity of Hujar’s daily grind. He waters his houseplants by fill ing up a coffee pot in the bathtub. He purchases an order of chicken chow mein, which in 1974 cost a whopping $3.45. But you also get the grandeur of that grind: the details of photographing Allen Gins berg in his Lower East Side apartment and Hujar’s horror at the Beat poet’s shabby decor: a Bob Dylan poster, a mattress on the floor, all “linoleum and Indian things,” that are “rundown and dreary.” Hujar and Rosenkrantz chortle at Ginsberg’s Eastern spirituality, which they dismiss as performative. The Howl au thor is a “compulsive chanter,” Rosenkrantz says with an eye roll, and worse, he’s “always been ugly.” Hujar also captured another Beat writer, William S. Burroughs, whom he describes to Rosenkrantz as attractive but preoccupied with “prep-school boys” in neckties. If this film is accurate, Ginsberg crudely en couraged Hujar not only to photograph the Naked Lunch author but to get naked for him too. It’s a sad aside that shows how our queer pioneers were expected to put out for other queer men who outranked them. Shit-talk aside, Peter Hujar’s Day is a reminder that few

English actors Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall play Hujar and writer Linda Rosenkrantz. Set in 1974, inside a re-creation of Rosenkrantz’s apartment, the film is simply a back-and-forth between Hujar and Rosenkrantz, the latter having asked a group of her famous friends to narrate the events of their last 24 hours. Around that time, Hujar left magazine work to shoot por traits, or what he called “uncomplicated, direct photography of complicated and difficult subjects” and those who “cling to the freedom to be themselves.” A collection of Rosenkrantz’s in terviews, which she’d imagined as a book, never came to fruition, but the transcript did, and it fell into the hands of writer

Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw in Peter Hujar's Day (2025).

director Ira Sachs after being discovered in a gay bookstore in Paris. The project poses a formidable challenge since movies, by definition, involve bodies in motion, and the only things moving in Peter Hujar’s Day are mouths, mainly Hujar’s, when it’s not obstructed by a cigarette. Sachs directed Whishaw in Passages (2023) and he shares the actor’s dedication to the queer avant-garde. Earlier this year, this day-in-the-life was awarded “Unsung LGBTQ Film of 2025” by the Dorian Awards, and without Whishaw—who arrived on set with 55 pages of text to memorize and had only rehearsed his lines privately—the center would not hold. That center remains an enigma: No video of Hujar survives, and the only audio is a self-hypnosis session in which he tries to quit smoking. The Colin Carman, PhD, a regular contributor to these pages, is the author of The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys: Eros and Environment (2020).

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