Former labor secretary Robert Reich, who wrote recently that "today's young adults are the first generation born this century to have missed the passion of American liberalism," shortchanges the zeal of these artists and activists and their crucial role in electing the president in whose Cabinet he served. Along one wrenching front of that conflict, activists and artists worked in tandem to counter the dehumanizing caricatures of gay people and people with AIDS drawn by the religious right. First, it recalls the proximity of the culture war of the '80s and '90s, which, especially at its climax in the Bush years, played out in very intimate terms.
That scene comes to mind now for two reasons. Yet even in this bastion of heartland conservatism, the quilt - a work of confrontational folk art garbed in unthreatening homespun - was beginning to puncture the surface indifference, to release the welter of private grief and compassion underneath. The year was 1991, and the country was already a decade into its ordeal with AIDS. In the Shadow of the American Dream is finally a record of the private Wojnarowicz, falling in love, exploring erotic possibilities on the Hudson River piers, becoming overwhelmed by the demands of survival, and searching for the pleasure and freedom he believed one could live on.They came from miles around the small-town campus in northeast Ohio to stand before the quilt, to read the messages delicately inlaid in its panels, and to weep. It tells the story of Wojnarowicz’s creative birth, from publishing his first photographs and writing what would become The Waterfront Journals to completing his tour de force, Close to the Knives, at the height of his fame.
Few artists have captured the emotional, sexual, and political chaos of modern urban life as perceptively as David Wojnarowicz, whom Out magazine has called ＂an acute observer of the unmapped region surrounding his heart and one of the best writers of his generation.＂ In journal entries from age seventeen until his AIDS-related death at thirty-seven, In the Shadow of the American Dream chronicles the life of a radical artist who unequivocally defied bigotry even as he became a target for the right wing.
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