GARY INDIANA (1950–2024)
GARY INDIANA PASSED on October 23, 2024, triggering an outpouring of grief from some of his peers and a certain rancid glee among others—those “grinning simian farts” (per Frank O’Hara) in the art and lit worlds too jealous of his prodigious literary gifts to acknowledge how far above them he sailed with pretty much every line he wrote. His erudition was equally intimidating, but if you wanted to find a subject about which you knew nothing, a writer you’d never read, or a film you’d never heard of, Gary’s brilliant essays were always illuminating and enlightening, and frequently laced with sudden shards of animus that gave a reader the sense of biting into a fragment of glass in an otherwise delicious strawberry tart.
We knew each other for almost fifty years, our friendship born out of mutual admiration and a hundred readings and rent parties in various bars and performance spaces across New York City, bohemian outposts that sprang up like night-blooming flowers and just as quickly disappeared. I remember explosive rehearsals of Gary’s 1981 play The Roman Polanski Story held at my loft, with a wonderful cast including Cookie Mueller and her lover Sharon Niesp, fistfighting between takes; Diana Vreeland look-alike John Heys; and petite blonde Vicki Pedersen, who told me recently that she first recognized Gary’s genius when she realized he had given her parts (those of the Gypsy Queen and Nastassja Kinski) primarily to utilize her pronounced stutter.
Gary was a sharp-tongued Shakespearean imp, perverse and hilarious, capable of great mischief and tremendous wisdom.
Gary was a sharp-tongued Shakespearean imp, perverse and hilarious, capable of great mischief and tremendous wisdom. In one of his final interviews, he mentioned that he perceived himself sexually as a kind of human rag doll, which was why he occasionally allowed certain well-built studs to toss him around apartments and hotel rooms. I cannot condone such behavior, but I understand the desire, owing to his doll-like—or, rather, childlike—qualities. I occasionally felt the urge to pick him up and carry him about myself, though I did so only once, sweeping him up as we flaneured north along West Broadway one spring afternoon. He seemed as comfortable in my arms as my daughter used to feel when she was small. I let him down gently at Prince Street, and we promptly cracked up—Alex Katz was observing us warily from his doorstep.
Years ago, I reread Gary’s novel Do Everything in the Dark (2001) and wrote to tell him how its inherent sadness had moved me. He replied with a fierce and elegant four-thousand-word evaluation of the book and its critics, especially those who claimed to find its tone “less cynical” and “less angry” than his usual astringent sensibility. His response to their opinions is worth quoting at length here:
It’s the angriest thing I ever wrote in my life. I was angry at the way my life and my friends’ lives have been written off as worthless in this shitty system, angry at people being cowed into thinking that they’ve failed in life because they haven’t gotten rich or had the golden shower of celebrity fairy dust poured over them, angry at sneering journalists and reviewers who churn out nothing but boilerplate so that even a positive notice is as stupid as a negative one. And I guess mainly angry that all this is normal, and all the resilience we develop over decades is paid for by the incremental loss of human feeling.
One of the final texts Gary published—the last piece I heard him read, in a joyful performance he gave at Saint Mark’s Church in November 2023—was a brief treatise on aging, “Five O’Clock Somewhere” (it appears in issue 166 of Granta), a clear, unwavering examination of how the body and mind begin to almost imperceptibly (if you’re lucky) disintegrate as we grow older and more frail. Gary was beginning to experience this corporeal breakdown, but there is not a speck of self-pity in his words, only the limpid observations of a highly refined witness describing how it feels to be awake on the precipice.
We had talked on the phone several times in early October 2024. On the Saturday I was scheduled to visit, he was teetering on the edge of incoherence from pain and pain meds as he serenaded me with sea shanties and show tunes, so I promised to arrive instead on Sunday morning, with tasty pastries from Veniero’s bakery, down the street from his apartment. The following morning, I biked over to the East Village, dropped forty dollars for a sizable cheesecake and two napoleons, then proceeded to Gary’s building, just across from Saint Mark’s Church, in whose peaceful yard we had often sat and savaged so many of our mutual friends and frenemies. No answer to buzzer number twenty-three. A kindly neighbor let me in, and I began my trek up those hideous stairs. How he could even make it to the sixth floor post-chemo I couldn’t imagine. I decided to make a video on my way up, but the thirty-second film ends abruptly at the fourth floor with a quick product shot of the Veniero’s cake box accompanied by the cameraman’s labored breathing. I made it up two more flights and knocked on his door, but there was no answer. Knocked again. Silence. I kissed the doorframe, left the napoleons, and sheepishly took the cheesecake, before descending that appalling stairway for the last time.
May these words from Marguerite Yourcenar’s sublime Memoirs of Hadrian (1951) accompany him on his voyage:
He will recognize the way,
and the guardians at the gate will let him pass
and he will come and go among those who love him
for millions of days.
Max Blagg is a New York–based writer. His latest book, Late Start for Mardi Gras (Shallow Books, 2024), is a collaboration with twenty-one artists. An exhibition of the original artworks from Late Start is forthcoming this spring.
