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Bless You, Toxic Dwarf: An Appreciation of Gary Indiana
Gary at his best was being at his worst.
I arranged for them to visit each other in New York; in the relative seclusion of Lawrence, Kansas, where William had moved in 1981; and on the set of David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch in Toronto, which Gary would write about for the Voice and for a film book I was putting together for Grove. His short, funny novel brings back the hustler high jinks/escorts engaged in organ theft and takes successful downtowners down, specifically in a swipe at Kathy Acker, his former friend, lampooning her well-crafted persona in the guise of a tattooed writer named Sandy Miller. He is an icon of a demimonde now mythologized by a generation who lives their version of bohemia in a far more bourgeois, less dangerous city, even if they do so out in Ridgewood and not on Avenue C. He’s being reissued by some of the best independent presses — McNally Editions, Seven Stories, and Semiotext(e), where co-editors Hedi El-Khoti and Chris Kraus have also published Gary’s friends Cookie Mueller, Lynne Tillman, William Burroughs, and Anne Rower — and enemies Kathy Acker and David Wojnarowicz, leaving his work and his legacy ready to be discovered by the new readers who admire the old times and the settling of old scores that he renders acutely and brilliantly.
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