Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wajnarowicz

World AIDS Day 1992

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Falling Buffalo), 1988-1989.

David Wojnarowicz: I started running away from home periodically for different lengths of time and ended up living on the streets sometime in my mid-teens. I came close to dying there. I was a walking skeleton and had no access to any kind of healthcare. I remember, at 17, trying everything I could in terms of city agencies and not being able to obtain health anywhere. Eventually I got off the streets when some guy picked me up in Times Square who let me live with him for a month in this cheap apartment in that area. He was an ex-con man. He worked as a counselor with fake degrees at a halfway house for ex-cons. He got tired of me being around because I was always stealing animals from pet shops and I turned his place into a zoo - giant African frogs and lizards and turtles. It was something I just always did as a kid. I used to steal alligators out of Macy’s and let them go in Central Park Lake thinking they were going to eat ducks and survive. I didn’t realize issues like winter.

   A boxed cassette of someone's interview with me in which I talk about diagnosis and how it simply underlined what I knew already existed anyway. Not just the disease but the sense of death in the American landscape. How when I was out west this summer standing in the mountains of a small city in New Mexico I got a sudden and intense feeling of rage looking at those postcard-perfect slopes and clouds. For all I knew I was the only person for miles and all alone and I didn't trust that fucking mountain's serenity. I meant it was just bullshit. I didn't buy the con of nature's beauty; all I could see was death. The rest of my life is being unwound and seen through a frame of death. And my anger is more about this culture's refusal to deal with mortality. My rage is really about the fact that WHEN I WAS TOLD THAT I'D CONTRACTED THIS VIRUS IT DIDN'T TAKE ME LONG TO REALIZE THAT I'D CONTRACTED A DISEASED SOCIETY AS WELL.