Gary Indiana, In Memoriam

1950-2024

Gary Indiana was not afraid of talking shit. He knew the exact cost of flipping someone off in print. “Whenever you think about power, you have to think in terms of symptoms.” He abhorred Israel, corporate greed, Disney World, presidential dishonesty, sleep clinics, and mainstream LGBT identity politics. In-person, he drank vodka and smoked cigarettes with the kind of dry, cynical drawl only a man of his generation can. In an email to Seven Stories Press employee Allison Paller about a potential gig he wrote, “Please just dump the whole ‘LGBTQ’ approach. If I were that vapid I hope I’d at least have had the good sense to jump out a window a long time ago.” 

His novels chronicled and archived a sleazy world of tainted love, aborted lovemaking, seedy apartments, perfunctory blowjobs, and sidewalk book sales. He once joked that men just out of prison made the best boyfriends. In his memoir, he wrote about a wide array of sexploits: “a real fuckorama every weekend,” “roiling puddles of flesh,” or the simple joyous head one gives before moving on to bigger things. This curiosity and devilish exploration led him to all sorts of strange bedfellows. 

While Indiana’s narrators aren’t necessarily the most lucky in love, the man himself was notoriously horny. To expose a gay man’s conquests after his passing is perhaps impolite, but Indiana is a unique case where he might appreciate the attention toward his many famous fucks and flings. A new erotic bond could be formed around any corner, though it’s always tinged with danger. Characters worry about getting AIDs or being stealthed without a condom. Sex and death entwined like a wily ouroboros. 

Indiana’s acuity for writing about broken hearts and bodily decay endured throughout his long, labyrinthian life. He was known for being a horny vicious critic who nursed grudges, his writing prickles like a man who often got the short end of the stick. Even his erotica ripples with disappointment. 

Bring up any Gary Indiana book — Horse Crazy, his crime trilogy, his Village Voice columns, his collected arts criticism, Rent Boy, I Can Give You Anything But Love, or any of the many, many articles he wrote for every publication from Artforum to Harper’s to Criterion — and you’ll get an earful about how singular his cranky, precise sentences are. They aim like arrows dipped in hallucinatory venom. 

Indiana’s friends all had plenty of memories to share. Sarah Nicole Prickett remembered a favorite sweater Indiana let her borrow during parties. Many have surfaced their falling outs with Indiana as a way to memorialize his famous mean-streak. Producer Christine Vachon fell out with Indiana over a film that he argued glorified Valerie Solanas and said he was going to “pull [their] uteruses and vaginas out through [their] nostrils.” To be eviscerated by him was to be read. Sometimes for filth alone. 

He arrived to a New York that no longer exists. Just a phantom city that lives underneath the sewers. Rent was cheap and sex was cheap. He was bicoastal long before it became fashionable to aspire to such aeronautic heights. Across the course of his 74 years, he led many lives. An artist, a playwright, a novelist, a journalist, a critic. “The more we become what we intended to be,” he wrote earlier this year in Granta, “the less real the earlier versions of ourselves appear to us, and yet there we were, who we were, forever for all time a monad on its travels.” 

To eulogize the writer, would seem to be, on the surface, to eulogize New York. The late writer was intimately acquainted with a bygone of the city where sentimentality was the ultimate sin. But Indiana was never a sentimentalist and detested such easy nostalgia. “This reification of downtown — I don’t get it… Many of us went on to do things that were infinitely more interesting and complex than what we were doing then. What I think is necrophiliac is to fetishize these moments in time…” The world was his subject. He was just at home writing about his friendship with Louise Bourgeois, Dr. Kevorkian’s trial, or Branson, Missouri. It feels almost more appropriate to string a long line of quotations together rather than try to write about the man who drank his way through Euro Disney only to remark: “You know you are in bad trouble when the lyrics of popular songs start making you cry before breakfast.” 

While he’s known for his ties to the Lower East Side, Indiana spent many years in LA and traveling abroad before stumbling into his job as the arts critic for the Village Voice where he continually found ways to “startle” his readers. Indiana never thought he’d become an art critic and even worried about becoming overly-identified with the profession since it was not a respectable job for grown-ups to maintain. 

This period is fictionalized in his first novel, Horse Crazy. The book is many things, but it is also the tale of a freelancer’s heartbreak. The novel begins as the critic gains upward mobility by securing a column at a paper he detests. The man he loves, an ex-heroin addict turned artist, does not gain such stability. In his introduction to the book, Tobi Haslett notes the chaste nature of their relationship becomes “enshrined as a virtue in a world devoured by AIDS.” While the narrator is the one who’s successful, he’s also the loner. It is his almost-lover that glides through the world with raw sex appeal. But consummation is also a cause for fear: “If you had sex now it was a matter of deciding… whether the degree of risk involved (and who could calculate that?) was ‘worth it.’” This interplay of who’s playing who, desire, and pain haunts the entire book. 

Horse Crazy’s first chapter follows the narrator as he rides the Staten Island Ferry with a friend and they discuss their boy problems. “Perhaps we all grow up with these salvational fantasies that never get entirely dislodged by experience.” This dark nugget of truth sticks in my gums. Reciting them aloud, one finds they are solid. The first novel is always about getting back at someone, an old lover or a parent for instance. Such anger has a way of eviscerating any illusions we have about the past. “Love like a stone in the stomach, a penance, a noose: love like a crime,” he writes on the second page. These are honed bullets. Beware of the coming crucifixion. The author spares no one, least of all himself.  

This from the same man who told The Paris Review: “I’m allergic to the idea of myself as the subject of any of my books.” Yet it would seem many of the characters that populate Indiana’s work are based on people from his life. Not long ago, a friend of mine shared a letter he found while doing research. It’s to “David,” presumably Wojnarowicz. The two appear to have dated and ended things rather poorly. Indiana apologizes for “terrorizing” the artist’s answering machine. It seems plausible the young ex-junkie artist in Horse Crazy was based on Wojnarowicz. Susan Sontag and Kathy Acker also often make appearances as themselves or characters — the latter is “Susan” in Rent Boy, a writer who plays “Scrabble with the Marquise de Sade.” 

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Indiana’s prose fights, shouts, bristles, and shimmies through the noirish shadows of decaying cities. Crime was his passion. He chronicled and dissected the lives of handsome men, outlaws and murderers who loved building bombs and shooting guns. “Look, I’m not going to lie to you. Part of the attraction for me with the Menendez brothers, or with Cunanan, was that I thought they were sexy. To stay interested in these guys for the time it takes to write a book, you have to have something to look at.” (Later on he would jump up and say “I want you to tell Edward Snowden that the greatest living American novelist would like to suck his dick.”) 

Through his essays and fiction, he sought to “describe what it’s like to be living now, during this span of time, in our particular country and our particular world.” Here he’s describing the work of Renata Adler, but he may as well have been discussing his own approach to a kind of literary anthropology. While he avoided being labeled a queer author, his work didn’t shy away from depicting the gay male ethos of King Kong-sized dildos and a neurotic fear of aging. Certainly, this fear wasn’t unfounded—he endured the psychic toll of living through the AIDS crisis in New York. 

David Velasco, Indiana’s friend and editor during his tenure at Artforum, recalled watching 120 BPM, a French art-film about the AIDS crisis. It was too raw. They soon turned the movie off and then Indiana tried to kiss Velasco. “I was like, Gary nah,” Velasco messaged me. “And then we kissed for a minute or two and I was like you little perv, and I could feel the weight of his sadness, irritation, what we represented for him, the holes in his heart… He was always trying to get me to fuck. I should have said yes, muted the pain and also dialed it up a notch. I owed him that, but I didn’t come through. I loved him.” 

“Famous, famous, what does it mean when you’re alone?” one of the characters in Indiana’s film A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking shrieks. Grief swallowed many of Indiana’s memories. His work dealt frankly with the reality of AIDS, having watched many of his old friends and lovers pass away. 

Indiana was a writer whose presence was felt, not simply read. “He was our best living writer,” Velasco tells me. 

It is hubristic to think anyone can provide a real literary eulogy. There are limits to words. Like Indiana himself, the city is hostile towards writers, gentrified and overrun with fast-casual chains and rose-gold logos. It seems doubtful we could ever have another like Gary Indiana. Few have the grit or ability to alchemize the shit that now surrounds us. He wrote as if every word mattered because he was intimately aware of the stakes. If you aren’t writing for your life, who are you writing for?