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| Susan Sontag, 1975 Photo by Peter Hujar |
By Vince Aletti
Iwas already living in the East Village when I met him, in 1969, but in many ways Peter Hujar defined downtown for me. I’d been in the neighborhood, off and on, for several years, working dumb jobs until I graduated Antioch and moved into a fifth-floor walkup on Twelfth Street, just off Avenue A. I landed a job at Ed Sanders’s Peace Eye Bookstore, a few blocks away, and started writing about music for the Rat, the city’s most radical underground paper, with offices on Fourteenth Street. So downtown wasn’t exactly foreign territory for me, but Peter knew it more intimately, more intuitively than I did; he understood its rhythms, nuances, pleasures, and pitfalls. He went places I never dared to, and hung out with people I’d only read about. He was charismatic and complicated and, it turned out, deeply insecure, with a damaging family history he kept mostly to himself. During the time I knew him, Peter struggled to make ends meet, doing advertising, editorial, and publicity work in between exhibitions that rarely generated enough income to keep him fed. But if he was discouraged—and he often was—he didn’t let it keep him from that evening’s screening, concert, dance performance, press party, night-club opening, or tour of the baths. His hunger helped whet my appetite for new experiences: Charles Ludlam’s Theatre of the Ridiculous, the Cockettes, “Pink Flamingos,” the Fillmore East, the Fun Gallery, the back room at Max’s, the Tenth Floor, Fire Island, disco, cruising. It was an exciting time; we took liberation for granted and pushed it to the limits. Downtown felt wide open, full of possibilities. You didn’t have to be rich or pretty, but it helped if you could dance.
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| Fran Lebowitz at home in Morristown, 1974. |
Looking at Peter’s pictures, I realize that much of my experience was vicarious. Although I exchanged a few words with Susan Sontag on the dance floor at the Loft one night, I knew her only through her writing, and through Peter’s picture of her lying down, high-strung and self-contained. I met William Burroughs and Brion Gysin at a leisurely lunch hosted by one of Peter’s more eccentric lady friends, but if we exchanged more than a few words I don’t remember them, perhaps because controlled substances were involved. Our circles overlapped but spun at different velocities, sometimes in different directions. Peter had an interest in gender blur—men in beards and lipstick—and sex as performance that I appreciated but never shared. He saw disco mostly from the sidelines, as a spectacle; I was swooning in the middle of the crowd, lost in music. Peter’s downtown intersected with mine mainly in our apartments, directly across the street from each other, over dinner (he cooked, I didn’t), fashion magazines, photo books, and vinyl records. And in his darkroom, over trays of pungent chemicals and taps of running water, watching these photographs appear. If Peter was rarely satisfied with the results, I was often astonished, especially when I knew the subject. Because Peter saw them, got them, with an understanding that was beyond words. Peter loved a fabulous façade, but he was only happy when he could get past it, dig deeper, and connect.
This text was drawn from "Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown," which is out October 25th from Steidl.
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