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Can’t We Just Call It Sex?: In Memory of David Wojnarowicz
- Wesleyan University Press
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313 dodie bellamy Can’t We Just Call It Sex? In Memory of David Wojnarowicz Dodie Bellamy is a prominent figure in the New Narrative movement, which from its inception pursued writing at the intersection of genre fiction and sexuality. In her essay on David Wojnarowicz,Bellamy takes the often repeated explanation of experimental writing—“the reader makes meaning”—and turns it into a physical encounter, scarcely mediated by the page.Bellamy’s view of the reader is that she is“not merely a passive recipient of the writer’s sexuality, but an active participant in the romance,” thus bringing active eroticism and the bodies of real persons (often naming names) into play. If every reader, as reader, has an engaged sexual body as well as a creative critical mind, the experience of reading may be understood directly as a form of sexuality. Even more importantly, the reader is queer, capable of fantasies beyond the scope of social or internalized norms and also of a transgressive relation to the text.The title of her essay,as Bellamy tells us,comes from Kathy Acker’s response to the term “New Narrative”: “Can’t we just call it sex?” It is dedicated to the memory of David Wojnarowicz, a multimedia artist and arts/political activist who died of AIDS in 1992. I once had dinner in a Taoist restaurant with a serious young man. Let’s call him “Rendezvous.” We savored the restaurant’s specialties, sweet and sour “pork” made from deep-fried gluten, roast “duck” made from tofu skins, and stir-fried “chicken” that tasted like it was grown on Mars. All these analogues reminded but never fooled, and our conversation naturally turned to writing and its relationship to the“real thing,”that is,life.I asked him what he thought of Kathy Acker. Rendezvous swallowed a mouthful of slippery but genuine straw mushrooms, then admitted that he reads her books by skipping to the “dirty parts.” I flashed back to when I was ten years old, and in my parents’ bedroom I found a pulp paperback, Lust Campus. I was dying to cruise through those small yellowing pages, but my mother was in the next room. She hardly ever left me alone in the house: I bode my time. Weeks seemed to pass, though in actuality I think it was a few days. Finally, one fateful afternoon, she had errands to run, and decided to leave me home to watch the spaghetti sauce she had simmering on the stove. Opening the screen door she shouted at me, “I’ll be back in an hour or so. Behave yourself.” As soon as the latch clicked I darted into her bedroom. Lust Campus toppled off the bookshelf into my 314 dodie bellamy chubby eager little hands. I flipped rapidly through the pages past the tedious exposition until I landed on a sex passage—then sitting cross-legged on the polished oak floor I wallowed in obscenity while the spaghetti sauce burned to a scorched red mass, like lava. I remember a detailed description of taking off a woman’s bra and an orgy where a group of college students were lying on the floor in a circle. Since I was so naive about the birds and the bees this didn’t strike me as kinky, merely as information. All sex was equally arousing and this book was great. Then I heard my mother’s key in the back door— I crammed the paperback in the bookcase and rushed to the living room, sprawled on the couch like nothing had happened. Dropping her purse on the coffee table my mother sniffed at the scorched air. “Dodie, what the hell have you been doing while I was gone?”“Nothin’.” On my own I never would have thought of applying the Lust Campus approach to Kathy Acker, but Rendezvous seemed so highly motivated I decided to give it a try. Scanning my bookcases I happened upon Empire of the Senseless . Opening the book I discovered that Kathy had inscribed it: “Love, Acker.” Beneath that she’d added, “New Narrative? Can’t we just call it sex?” After recovering from a Jungian pang of synchronicity I began to flip rapidly through the pages with my chubby eager hands. I found plenty of sexual snippets, but extended sex scenes were rare. I thought to myself Rendezvous must be quick to burn. Finally on pages 93–95 I located a passage that’s pretty hot. In it a...