He was really a writer of heartbreak: the thought playing in my head like a soundtrack since I heard that he was gone. Yes, he was merciless, scathing, caustic, acerbic—both the gracious and backhanded tributes have so far oozed the same film of adjectives. And yet. The eight novels, handful of stories, profusion of essays, and affectingly angular memoir by Gary Indiana will transcend the spectacular reputation he touted himself half the time (but only half). He liked to strike a vicious posture. This explains his taste in titles. Scar Tissue, Horse Crazy, Vile Days, Depraved Indifference, Resentment: A Comedy, White Trash Boulevard, Utopia’s Debris: beneath the cackling malice lay a complicated longing. This was clear to those who knew him. It’s also there in the work itself. His Village Voice art criticism from the 80s was part broadside, part requiem. A large part of the fiction concerns destroyed or illusory love. Born in 1950, he’d already seen history piss on his revolutionary fantasies by the time AIDS came to murder his world—the gay world, plus the “Downtown” world that he pretended didn’t really exist. His best work thrives on a seething feeling of betrayal: a wound whose perpetual freshness was, in his case, the opposite of naïve. It was wise, a sign of strength. If you still have the capacity to feel betrayed, some vital thrashing part of you is not yet hardened, not yet mercenary, not yet poisoned, not yet numb—despite the fact that numbness tends to make a few things easier. He was really a writer of heartbreak, which is a way of saying that he wasn’t lazy.
I’ll leave you with a passage from a writer he loved, and was always pressing his friends to read. Jean Guéhenno, the French essayist who basically none of us had ever heard of, refused to publish a single word under Nazi occupation. Instead he kept a journal about his life in an impoverished village, later published as Diary of the Dark Years, which was one of Gary’s final literary obsessions. Many times in the past few years he’d send me a page from Guéhenno’s diary, or call me up to read me a specific passage. This is something I remember him reading to me as I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge: