Now that 2024 is circling the drain, I’ll start regaling you with my “Favourites of the Year!” Most noteworthy passing: American author, playwright, actor, essayist, art critic and all-round bête noire Gary Indiana (né Gary Hoisington, 16 July 1950 – 23 October 2024) died of lung cancer aged 74. (As Indiana told an interviewer in 2014 “I’ve been smoking since I was practically two years old.” His brand of choice was Camel Filters. It’s amazing the dissolute Indiana lasted this long, considering his peers were people like David Wojnarowicz and Cookie Mueller). Anyway, words like “lacerating” and “scathing” barely suffice when discussing Indiana’s oeuvre. When I was in my twenties, buying each new work by Indiana and Dennis Cooper was de rigueur. (I probably purchased them at the long-defunct radical Compendium bookstore in Camden Town). I moved around a lot and wound up re-selling them to used bookstores for a pittance. Then Indiana’s books mostly lapsed out of print! (In more recent years, they’re gradually being reissued by Semiotext(e)). It didn’t help that Indiana gleefully burnt bridges throughout his life. As one of his associates noted almost admiringly, “He went through agents the way I go through t-shirts.” Some of his most noteworthy books were speculative fiction inspired by true crime figures like the Menendez brothers (Resentment: A Comedy (1997) and Andrew Cunanan (Three Month Fever (1999). (The viewers who clutched their pearls over Ryan Murphy’s recent Menendez miniseries would REALLY lose their shit over Indiana’s book. Indiana would have swooned over Luigi Mangione). For anyone interested in investigating Indiana, his memoirs I Can Give You Anything But Love is available in paperback. And his interview with Butt in July 2024 is essential. As its intro summarizes: “Gary earned his notorious reputation over the course of his unflinching, decades-long career. He writes about addiction, alienation, corruption, exploitation, obsession, perversion, power and sexuality with unfiltered candour, leaving no room for politeness … His tendency toward destructive obsession was kept in check by his brilliance, cutting humor and heart.” Pic: “Gary Indiana Veiled” by Peter Hujar, 1981.
