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As Wojnarowicz’s waterfront writing developed in the late 1970s, he looked for new ways to represent the strange temporality of the ruined waterfront. The figure of the ghost became the ideal symbol with which to articulate the experience of cruising there. He produced the photographic series Arthur Rimbaud in New York, placing the nineteenth-century French poet in sites that Wojnarowicz himself frequented, including the derelict piers and warehouses of the waterfront. In his writing, Wojnarowicz took up cross-temporal invitations of connection and erotic communion found in the work of writers such as Walt Whitman and William S. Burroughs. In this chapter, I explore the development of Wojnarowicz’s ghostly idiolect in the late 1970s and early 1980s through a hauntological investigation of my own, examining the erotic possibilities it offered him and the queer new personal temporalities he generated through it. Through close reading, I trace a cross-generational history of literature in ruins and by the sea that positions Wojnarowicz’s waterfront writing within a broader social and cultural context, effecting a rich, interdisciplinary interpretation of his creative practice, as well as exploring his own influence on contemporary artists like Emily Roysdon.

This chapter explores how David Wojnarowicz and other New York artists, including Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, engaged with ruins visually in their artwork from the 1950s to the early 1980s. I am concerned with how and why a visual culture of ruins developed with such fervor in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and how artists manipulated the city’s dilapidation to their creative advantage. This chapter traces the development of a queer visual culture that focused on ruins as both subject matter and medium in American art in this period, and its relation to a critical aesthetic interest in contemporaneous urban processes of abandonment, ruination, and renewal. I consider this visual culture of ruins in relation to site-specific art practices and cultures of display, an interest in “crummy” spaces that had been gaining momentum in Manhattan from the time of the waterfront’s abandonment in the early 1960s. In this chapter, I am interested in how this work might appear, achronologically, different from the erotic vantage point of cruising, itself a queer way of looking in the city and a visual culture interested in ruins and in the places where the city’s heteronormative fabric falls apart.

This chapter offers an account of an unanalyzed mode of writing about HIV/AIDS. Pushing against the metrocentricity of U.S. AIDS literature and scholarship, a body of nonurban AIDS memoirs took the disease out of the city in the 1990s. These stories figure the disconnection between lived experience of AIDS and consensus knowledge about it, and show how affect produces irritations that unsettle conceptual categories. Specifically, David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration (1991) and Jan Zita Grover's North Enough: AIDS and Other Clear-Cuts (1997) stage unexpected environmental encounters that produce discord. These memoirs model how the irritations of discord generate a productive form of suspicion that confers experiential epistemic authority onto sick bodies enmeshed in their surroundings.

This chapter introduces the key material features of the ruined waterfront and some of the political and economic circumstances surrounding its abandonment in the 1960s. These histories are connected to broader narratives of preservation and urban renewal in New York throughout the twentieth century. The chapter also introduces the idea of cruising as a queer method for exploring the history of the waterfront and David Wojnarowicz's work in and around in it.