On the Cover

David Wojnarowicz, 1954-1992

David Wojnarowicz, radical artist, writer, and activist, died of complications resulting from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome this past July. Wojnarowicz was one of the most powerfully insightful and influentially challenging artistic commentators upon the cultural politics of the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Wojnarowicz refused to be silent; he spoke out and acted up militantly, defiantly, and eloquently — both in and beyond his art — against the indifference, greed, hypocrisy, and brutality of u.s. government sanctioned repression and oppression of gay men and lesbians and of people with HIV and AIDS. Wojnarowicz refused to give way to the genocidal thrust of new right moralization about “abnormal”, “improper”, and “unnatural” “lifestyles” and “values”. Wojnarowicz fought Jesse Helms and Donald Wildman and all others who tired to turn the epidemic of AIDS into an excuse to justify increased persecution of those already marginalized by racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism and homophobia. His example encourages us to fight on without compromise — with rage, defiance, passion, and commitment — against the new right, the new right state, and the capitalist interests new right ideologists legitimate and the new right state protects and defends. The cover of this issue reproduces Wojnarowicz's “A Formal Portrait of Culture”. The caption Wojnarowicz appended beneath this work reads as follows: “I kill people in my head endlessly, certain politicians, religious leaders or people I feel are killing me on a daily basis. I believe in violence as self-protection; I have fantasies of violence as revenge and I don’t feel uncomfortable with those fantasies.” Nor should we feel uncomfortable with fighting back, by any means necessary, against those who use their control of the power of legal violence every day to maintain and to reproduce oppression and exploitation, and dehumanization and destruction.