"It's funny how sex passes through you."

on Gary Indiana

It’s funny how sex passes through you. Gary Indiana—the huge bitch and faggot forefather who died yesterday—said that. Or rather, one of his characters did, in his novel Rent Boy (1993). I think I’ve overheard a million john life stories and another million whore life stories and once you plow off the bullshit the john’s story’s always “I’m lonely” and the whore’s story’s always “I came from a dysfunctional family,” its hustler hero complains. Rent Boy is about being desired, an inversion of another Indiana novel, Horse Crazy (1989), which is about the trials and tribulations of the poor bastard doing the desiring. If only these states of excruciation were mutually exclusive! But their author knew, even if his characters don’t, the truth: sex has a funny way of passing through all of us.

I have nothing to say that the elegies of social media haven’t said better, so I’ll leave you with a few humble recommendations for things to read and watch by and about the departed. Though I’ve only been reading Indiana for a few years now, I know, as all of us do, that something has been lost to us as artists, or New Yorkers, or Americans, or whatever. Thank god the work persists.

By Gary Indiana

• “Fuck Israel,” (VICE, 2012)

• “A Coupla White Faggots Sitting Around Talking” (short film, 1981)¹

• Some of his last published work: “Malaparte!” (The Ideas Letter, 2024) and “Five O’Clock Somewhere” (Granta, 2024)

About Gary Indiana

• “A Vision of Neoliberalism in Flames,” by Christian Lorentzen

• “Gary Indiana, The Art of Fiction No. 250,” interview by Tobi Haslett

• “Gary Indiana Doesn’t Travel in Any Circles,” interview by Andrew Marzoni

• “Sleep When I’m Dead,” by M.H. Miller²

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1. Liz Purchell turned me on to this one.

2. “You want to do what the artist wants, but you don’t want to go down in the books as the jellyfish killer.”