Gary Indiana (1950–2024)

Polymathic novelist, playwright, artist, and critic Gary Indiana, who gained acclaim in the 1980s for his vinegary and irreverent writing on art in theVillage Voice, has died. He was seventy-four. His death was first reported byFriezein the early hours of October 24. Indiana is perhaps best known for his true-crime trilogy inaugurated in the late 1990s—Resentment: A Comedy;Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story; andDepraved Indifference—addressing the warped disregard for human life that characterized the turn of the millennium. Widely lauded for what he called “narrative porn” and what critic Christopher Glazek described as “deflationary realism,” he possessed a brash, vivid, and unsentimental writing style that lent both his fiction and his nonfiction a strutting confidence that elevated whatever subject was at hand. A feared and revered figure in the worlds of art and literature, he remained unimpressed with himself. “I call myself a ‘talented amateur,’” he told theNew York Times‘s Andrew Marzoni in 2023.

Gary Hoisington was born in 1950 in Derry, New Hampshire, where his mother worked as a town clerk and his father co-owned a lumber company. Accepted to the University of California, Berkeley, at the age of sixteen, he swiftly departed for the West Coast only to abandon traditional education altogether shortly thereafter. Following a stint in Los Angeles, where his job as a receptionist for an inner-city medical clinic gave him access to “an endless supply of pharmaceutical amphetamines,” he moved to New York in 1978. Under his newly chosen moniker of Gary Indiana, he embarked on a career as an actor and playwright in the city’s burgeoning downtown theater scene, writing and acting in plays includingCurse of the Dog People(1980) andThe Roman Polanski Story(1981) at such appealingly disreputable venues as Club 57 and the backyard of actor Bill Rice’s East Village studio. He was active in experimental film as well, appearing in works including Michel Auder’sSeduction of Patrick(1979) andA Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking(1980); VALIE EXPORT’sThe Practice of Love(1985); and Christoph Schlingensief’sTerror 2000: Intensivstation Deutschland(1992), in which his character is slaughtered by a machine-gun-wielding Udo Kier. “I wasn’t trained, and I certainly didn’t have the technique of a professional,” he told Tobi Haslett in a 2021 interview for theParis Review. “Directors would cast me because of the way I was, not what I could pretend to be.”

In 1985, having brought his inimitable voice to pieces forArtforumandArt in Americaout of financial necessity, after a friend suggested he take up writing in order to help pay the rent, he was offered the role of art critic for theVillage Voice, which he would go on to hold through 1988. In his time there, he churned out uncensored opinions on artists both famous and obscure, seemingly guided by a hot internal lodestar and unswayed by sales figures, popularity, or public opinion. “The first thing to say about Gary Indiana as an art critic is that he was humane,” wrote Christian Lorentzen inArtforumin 2019. “His harshest judgments were arrayed against various forms of cruelty, lifelessness, and greed.” Indiana brought to bear a keen eye, an incisive intelligence in his reviews for the publication, which were collected in the 2018 volumeVile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns, 1985–1988.

While still at theVoice, Indiana published two collections of short stories, 1987’sScar Tissue and Other Storiesand 1988’sWhite Trash Boulevard. His first novel,Horse Crazy, about an intense gay relationship in the time of AIDS, which ravaged his community, appeared in 1989. He shifted his attention to producing fiction and long-form articles on topics ranging from the trials of Jack Kevorkian to the California porn industry, while continuing to contribute criticism to outlets includingArtforumandVice. In 1992, he cowrote Ron Vawter’s one-man showRoy Cohn/Jack Smith, penning an imaginary speech for Cohn after he and Vawter failed to turn up the transcript of a talk Cohn had given at a dinner during which he attacked gay rights. “One of my earliest memories is of Roy Cohn whispering in Joe McCarthy’s ear on television,” he told theNew York Times’s Stephen Holden that year. “The Army-McCarthy hearings and the Rosenberg executions were an indelible part of my childhood.” Conflicted real-life figures remained a touchstone for him, as embodied by the aforementioned true-crime trilogy consisting of 1997’sResentment: A Comedy, which took as its subject the murderous Mendendez brothers; 1999’sThree Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story,about the killer of designer Gianni Versace; and 2002’sDepraved Indifference, about the con artist and convicted killer Sante Kimes.

Though he professed last year to be suffering from “writer’s hesitation,” Indiana remained wildly prolific throughout his life, producing other notable volumes of fiction includingRent Boy(1994) andDo Everything in the Dark(2003) as well as numerous nonfiction books on Andy Warhol, Dike Blair, and Tracey Emin, all written after 2010. As an artist, too, he was a force to be reckoned with, working mainly in the fields of video and photography. His 2013 videoStanley Park, which linked the consequences of human-effected environmental deterioration to ever-more repressive governmental policies, was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and that same year, hisA Significant Loss of Human Life, which expanded on these themes and placed them in the context of Marxism, was one of twenty-two pamphlets issued by Semiotext(e) ahead of the Biennial.

Indiana himself proved an object of fascination for many writers and was the subject of a slew of volumes and essays that variously attempted to decipher his work, among them James Annesley’sBlank Fictions: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel(1998), Haslett’s “Modern Love” inN+1(2016), and Sarah Nicole Prickett’s “The Dry-Eyed Mourning of Gary Indiana” for LitHub (2018).

In the last decade of his life, Indiana traveled frequently between Havana and a sixth-floor walkup apartment on Manhattan’s East Eleventh Street. Though his writings loomed large, Indiana, described by Haslett as “a mix of prince and punk,” himself did not; the White Review’s Michael Barron in 2016 wrote of being shocked to find him sitting demurely and diminutively in a corner of New York hot spot Lucien, sipping water and munching on table bread. Still, his star continued to shine, his tawdry 2015 memoir I Can Give You Anything but Love reaping accolades; the 2022 collection Fire Season: Selected Essays 1984–2021 showing him to have been prescient regarding both art and politics; and a 2023 reprint of Rent Boy reaching entirely new audiences. At his death, Indiana was at work on a novel. The Times’s Marzoni asked him how he would know it was finished.

“You just know,” Indiana replied. “Nothing is ever completely finished, but I know when I get to the end of something that this is the last scene of the book, or this is the last shot of the video. It tells you: enough already.”