Stunning, soul breaking and thought reforming writing, that I decided to finally try to read again, after having it on my shelf for several years because I wanted to get authentic views on gay prostitution as survival in earlier decades for my punk novel. In a way I felt a profound disconnection from the material when I started it, despite the beautiful writing-as a middle class white gay guy who’s never been denied the essentials of life, I felt my sometimes naive eyes almost widening at the blunt truth of a white gay artist/writer surviving and earning from prostitution as a teenager, and fighting against conservatives on censorship of art and battling AIDS in later life-but there’s a huge universal quality to Wojnarowicz’s writing, to use a cliche. Like a good little liberal, I talk the talk, but when I’ve passed homeless people in DC, I’ve noted when I skip my eyes over them, and Wojnarowicz’s themes are like a left hook to the jaw for doing that, for ignoring or denying the world that does exist. He took America to task in the eighties, early nineties for it’s denial of the landscape of people living under a certain class level, of alternate sexualities, of censoring art, life. A good chaneling of anger. Being of a generation where that expanse of the queer landscape is a somewhat faded memory, it’s strengthening to at least read and think. I’m eager to finish the book flying to Chicago, over this audaciously hopeful (I hope) new America.