GARY INDIANA (1950–2024)
SUCH A DAZZLING PROSE STYLIST. Such a daring and scary performer in readings, as an actor, or simply as a figure in the world moving through various overlapping cultures and subcultures. Gary to me represented the most radical way of being an intellectual, an aesthete, a satirist, a polemically mean gossip and score-settler. As many have said, Gary appeared waifish, even “gamine,” especially in his youth; but he could, however, also look wrecked, like twenty miles of bad road but in a good way. (We all can sometimes. Even Linda Evangelista.) Which reminds me: Gary once asked me to accompany him to the New York runway shows, around the time Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui unleashed their “grunge” collections. He was covering them for the Village Voice but felt clueless about fashion. The superest of the supermodels would défilé to “Rape Me” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; Soundgarden, Jane’s Addiction, and Hole—not dance music.
Gary wasn’t typologically part of the gay male sexual packaging at all; he eschewed hot guy–ism, clonism, body fascism, etc. His looks may have played well at New York’s Mudd Club or the Pyramid, but not so much at places like Boy Bar and Uncle Charlie’s. I don’t think this is irrelevant in the slightest: Gary didn’t care or decided not to care about oppressive homosexual aesthetics. He rejected the silent mandate that those Marys outside the normative faggy affects and modes (“hot,” “cute,” “butch,” “straight-acting,” and so on) should adopt a Quentin Crisp–y amusing/bitter manner, with no obvious libido or expressions of desire because “Ew, you’re ridiculous, who would fuck you?” Gary refused to suppress his sexuality out of politeness; he exaggerated it, exacerbated it, made it into an unrepentantly theatrical, in-your-face performance.
And his books certainly—such as Scar Tissue and Other Stories (1987), White Trash Boulevard (1988), Horse Crazy: A Novel (1989), Gone Tomorrow (1993), Resentment: A Comedy (1997), and Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story (1999)—are ALL ABOUT THAT. Gary never self-marginalized: He was utterly homosexual; a queer and a cocksucker in the most radical stylistic expressions and ideational effusions. He was sine qua non. A useful counterpoint would be someone like Rene Ricard, a very interesting mind and personality but, ultimately, a much more familiar type of fag, à la “that old queen.”
I think Gary influenced me more than any other contemporary (maybe American) writer. I was lucky enough to be a recipient of his impeccable generosity and kindness. But I was also aware that at any moment he might explode into another character, a sort of one-homo Eumenides, a Man-Medusa, a cunt-bitch-meanie who’d say the most horrible things to you, offering assessments about your taste, intellect, or personality that, ultimately, were much more right than wrong. His eviscerations were often lethally accurate.
Gary went for all the most impolitic, “bad gayzzz” topics—the REAL subjects for so many. He was never good at keeping quiet. Of course, neither am I. Perhaps we are “failed” fags. That’s OK. The world needs us. Desperately.
David Rimanelli is a writer, curator, and contributing editor of Artforum.
