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Memories That Smell Like Gasoline
Not content to be a tremendous photographer, painter, film-maker, performance artist and activist David Wojnarowicz (1954-1992) was also the author of three classic books: "Close to the Knives," "The Waterfront Journals "and "Memories That Smell Like Gasoline," now back in print from Artspace. This volume collects four tales--"Into the Drift and Sway," "Doing Time in a Disposable Body," "Spiral" and the title story--interspersed with ink drawings by the artist. "Sometimes it gets dark in here behind these eyes I feel like the physical equivalent of a scream. The highway at night in the headlights of this speeding car speeding is the only motion that lets the heart unravel and in the wind of the road the two story framed houses appear one after the other like some cinematic stage set..." From these opening sentences of the book (in "Into the Drift and Sawy"), Wojnarowicz lets loose a salvo of explicit gay sexual reverie harshly lit by the New York cityscape: escapades in movie theaters and bus terminals, amid the ascent of AIDS and Wojnarowicz's own consciousness of the virus in himself and at large in the gay community.
64 pages, Hardcover
First published September 2, 1992
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About the author
David Wojnarowicz
30 books334 followersDavid Wojnarowicz was a gay painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist who was prominent in the New York City art world of the 1980s.
He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, he for a time lived on the streets of New York City and worked as a farmer on the Canadian border.
Upon returning to New York City, he saw a particularly prolific period for his artwork from the late 1970s through the 1980s. During this period, he made super-8 films, such as Heroin, began a photographic series of Arthur Rimbaud, did stencil work, played in a band called 3 Teens Kill 4, and exhibited his work in well-known East Village galleries.
In 1985, he was included in the Whitney Biennial, the so-called Graffiti Show. In the 1990s, he fought and successfully issued an injunction against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association on the grounds that Wojnarowicz's work had been copied and distorted in violation of the New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act.
Wojnarowicz died of AIDS on July 22, 1992. His personal papers are part of the Downtown Collection held by the Fales Library at New York University.
He was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, and later lived with his mother in New York City, where he attended the High School of Performing Arts for a brief period. From 1970 until 1973, after dropping out of school, he for a time lived on the streets of New York City and worked as a farmer on the Canadian border.
Upon returning to New York City, he saw a particularly prolific period for his artwork from the late 1970s through the 1980s. During this period, he made super-8 films, such as Heroin, began a photographic series of Arthur Rimbaud, did stencil work, played in a band called 3 Teens Kill 4, and exhibited his work in well-known East Village galleries.
In 1985, he was included in the Whitney Biennial, the so-called Graffiti Show. In the 1990s, he fought and successfully issued an injunction against Donald Wildmon and the American Family Association on the grounds that Wojnarowicz's work had been copied and distorted in violation of the New York Artists' Authorship Rights Act.
Wojnarowicz died of AIDS on July 22, 1992. His personal papers are part of the Downtown Collection held by the Fales Library at New York University.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 94 reviews
December 15, 2025
He burst into my home naked and covered in Kaposi threw me on the bed: “you would’ve thought I was sexy if you saw me before I got sick.“ I kissed him and pushed him off and ran from the apartment. Woke up.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline ~~ David Wojnarowicz
This is the third David Wojnarowicz memoir I have read in as many weeks. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is by far the most enlightening ~~ as well as the most disturbing of the three.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a celebration of sex, love, sex, art, and sex. In a life sadly cut short by AIDS, David Wojnarowicz truly lived.
A large portion of Memories That Smell Like Gasoline focus on Wojnarowicz's years spent as a child prostitute ~~ living homeless on the streets of New York City; the last section is focused on his battle against the disease that would, sadly, kill him, as well as the government agencies that idly stood by while hundreds of thousands of people were demonized by society, eventually succumbing to the disease. Wojnarowicz’s world is bleak, harsh, and unsympathetic ~~ and yes, Wojnarowicz’s world is also gloriously alive, dignified by surprising acts of heartrending humanity.
Wojnarowicz had his first sexual encounter at the age of 9 ~~ with an older man offering him money for sex ~~ by the age of 12 he was hustling regularly in the seediest areas of New York.
By the age of 17, Wojnarowicz was living on the streets of New York, having escaped his mother's apartment; he did this for the next two years. At 19, he moved into a halfway house, and began writing poetry and creating ‘zines ~~ his earliest ventures into art making.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline has, in addition to the writing, several captioned black-and-white drawings. These captioned drawings are even more disturbing than the writing. Both the art and writing in Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is fearless, intense and honest.
David Wojnarowicz viewed himself as invisible in the eyes of society ~~ first as a child prostitute, then as an HIV-positive adult.
And so, my obsession with David Wojnarowicz continues.
For a man who said of himself, I’m a blank spot in a hectic civilization, David Wojnarowicz continues to have a profound effect on this world.
Iolo Carew as photographed by David Wojnarowicz
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline ~~ David Wojnarowicz
This is the third David Wojnarowicz memoir I have read in as many weeks. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is by far the most enlightening ~~ as well as the most disturbing of the three.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a celebration of sex, love, sex, art, and sex. In a life sadly cut short by AIDS, David Wojnarowicz truly lived.
A large portion of Memories That Smell Like Gasoline focus on Wojnarowicz's years spent as a child prostitute ~~ living homeless on the streets of New York City; the last section is focused on his battle against the disease that would, sadly, kill him, as well as the government agencies that idly stood by while hundreds of thousands of people were demonized by society, eventually succumbing to the disease. Wojnarowicz’s world is bleak, harsh, and unsympathetic ~~ and yes, Wojnarowicz’s world is also gloriously alive, dignified by surprising acts of heartrending humanity.
Wojnarowicz had his first sexual encounter at the age of 9 ~~ with an older man offering him money for sex ~~ by the age of 12 he was hustling regularly in the seediest areas of New York.
By the age of 17, Wojnarowicz was living on the streets of New York, having escaped his mother's apartment; he did this for the next two years. At 19, he moved into a halfway house, and began writing poetry and creating ‘zines ~~ his earliest ventures into art making.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline has, in addition to the writing, several captioned black-and-white drawings. These captioned drawings are even more disturbing than the writing. Both the art and writing in Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is fearless, intense and honest.
David Wojnarowicz viewed himself as invisible in the eyes of society ~~ first as a child prostitute, then as an HIV-positive adult.
And so, my obsession with David Wojnarowicz continues.
For a man who said of himself, I’m a blank spot in a hectic civilization, David Wojnarowicz continues to have a profound effect on this world.
Iolo Carew as photographed by David Wojnarowicz
December 30, 2017
angry dark corrosive self-lacerating; stark sad lonely contemplative; the road the theater the restrooms the back alleys; driven diseased desperate despairing... these four stories, these four personal narratives put on display a hungry heart and an even hungrier dick - fully illustrated by very graphic, very haunting black and white drawings with blurred and shadowy line work - a heart and a dick and an emptiness and a need, four things that drove him out to the streets and inwards to himself, lashing himself and lashing out; his early life as a pre-teen and then teenage prostitute scarring him irrevocably but also providing fuel for his creative rage, a rage and a lust that is somehow so childlike - fully embraced by the children's book that holds these stories - and yet something so old because terrible experiences can age a man, can make his outlook blurred and his world a shadowy place, can make him embrace death... and yet he lived, to embrace the ugly as beautiful, as real, he lived to write and rage and to comfort and mourn and most of all, he lived to tell... and then he died, before his time. rest in peace, David Wojnarowicz, you broken man who survived your breaking and showed your wounds for all the world to see, rest in peace you beautiful soul, one of my first inspirations; you taught me so much.
April 18, 2023
’I am disappearing but not fast enough.’
October 31, 2022
Wojnarowic's unflinching recollections of his throwaway-kid youth and an adulthood lived amidst the extreme social decay of underclass New York are beyond gritty. They're so harrowing, in fact, that they read like an indictment not just of society, but humanity itself.
August 3, 2009
To me, Wojnarowicz's writing is a trip into a vortex. Timeless and pin point historical-I can never know what it was to be a survivor of abuse, prostitute kid turned passionately political, life angered affirming multi-artist working in the beginning of the US AIDS onset. I can though, have a profound reaction to his intense prose, ascribing to a portrait of an artistic life, want of love, sex, anger towards bigots and the US systems. Oddly I realized on my third time of trying to read Close to the Knives, I need to have my own personal experience of reading Wojnarowicz's work, and that I'm not going to have the same experience as others, from a distance of time and the world I live in now, that he left behind, being in some ways better and in some ways deadly the same.
There's something, in that distance, that reads Wojnarowicz's world depiction as realistically fantastical-in a surreal sense, not in goblin and elf sense, but one that reminds me of Viriconium The Pastel City/A Storm of Wings/In Viriconium/Viriconium Nightsand Neuromancer.
There's something, in that distance, that reads Wojnarowicz's world depiction as realistically fantastical-in a surreal sense, not in goblin and elf sense, but one that reminds me of Viriconium The Pastel City/A Storm of Wings/In Viriconium/Viriconium Nightsand Neuromancer.
July 27, 2023
Quatro contos. Textos carnais, sexuais, corpóreos. Textos únicos que nos fazem voltar a um tempo/espaço que não devemos esquecer.
January 27, 2015
Living with disease, one has good days and bad days. Sometimes it's easy to forget that one is living with disease when a whole lot of good days make you forget about the bad. But every once and awhile one comes along to make you remember. A reminder that something is living in your body, eating away at who you are, screaming from deep inside as David Wojnarowicz screamed :
"THERE IS SOMETHING IN MY BLOOD AND IT'S TRYING TO FUCKING KILL ME!"
Memories that smell like Gasoline
(San Francisco: Artspace Books, 1992), 59.
David Wojnarowicz remains to this day one of the few voices I found after coming out of the hospital that spoke in a manner I understood. He felt what I was feeling and he spoke about it, sometimes screaming about it, as it seemed the only way to express his frustration about being sick. Bad days bring back all those feelings. Sitting on the toilet all morning, being a slave to one's body, being tied to one's medications and to a particular set of circumstances because of pills and timing reminds each of us what it is be sick. To be consumed by a disease. We have to rise above it and try and not let the disease define who we are. To become more than a body with a disease, to become a person who is not defined by sickness but rather someone who happens to be sick. But bad days make it so hard. Sometime anger, frustration, self-pity and fear take on a weight larger than deserved. Sometimes it is hard to see past the walls imposed by the confines of our bodies. What Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain calls the "incontestable reality of the body."Pain can become so consuming. So world destroying, making each us so small and insignificant, making the simplist of tasks difficult. My own way of dealing with such days is to channel the energy I have on good days into forgetting about the bad. Into reclaiming a life lived in the most "normal" manner possible, but never forgetting how pain can at any moment cause a life to come to a halt. How pain causes each of us to withdraw into ourselves to become defined only by our bodies by the confines of the self. But also how it enables each of us to reach outside of ourselves to imagine the pain of others. Pain is constant in the lives of all of us and understanding its relationship to ourselves, our identities can enoble our attempts for empathy and compassion. My own work has been fascinated by the inability of art to describe pain. To make others understand its importance. In the face of the indescribable to always make an effort to describe it. To give the formless, form, shape and substance. It is a fascinating concept that makes my own experience more manageable.
"THERE IS SOMETHING IN MY BLOOD AND IT'S TRYING TO FUCKING KILL ME!"
Memories that smell like Gasoline
(San Francisco: Artspace Books, 1992), 59.
David Wojnarowicz remains to this day one of the few voices I found after coming out of the hospital that spoke in a manner I understood. He felt what I was feeling and he spoke about it, sometimes screaming about it, as it seemed the only way to express his frustration about being sick. Bad days bring back all those feelings. Sitting on the toilet all morning, being a slave to one's body, being tied to one's medications and to a particular set of circumstances because of pills and timing reminds each of us what it is be sick. To be consumed by a disease. We have to rise above it and try and not let the disease define who we are. To become more than a body with a disease, to become a person who is not defined by sickness but rather someone who happens to be sick. But bad days make it so hard. Sometime anger, frustration, self-pity and fear take on a weight larger than deserved. Sometimes it is hard to see past the walls imposed by the confines of our bodies. What Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain calls the "incontestable reality of the body."Pain can become so consuming. So world destroying, making each us so small and insignificant, making the simplist of tasks difficult. My own way of dealing with such days is to channel the energy I have on good days into forgetting about the bad. Into reclaiming a life lived in the most "normal" manner possible, but never forgetting how pain can at any moment cause a life to come to a halt. How pain causes each of us to withdraw into ourselves to become defined only by our bodies by the confines of the self. But also how it enables each of us to reach outside of ourselves to imagine the pain of others. Pain is constant in the lives of all of us and understanding its relationship to ourselves, our identities can enoble our attempts for empathy and compassion. My own work has been fascinated by the inability of art to describe pain. To make others understand its importance. In the face of the indescribable to always make an effort to describe it. To give the formless, form, shape and substance. It is a fascinating concept that makes my own experience more manageable.
July 24, 2015
Dark, dirty, raw. Wojnarowicz never leaves the reader of his writings or the viewer of his art feeling anything other than exposed.
October 26, 2023
It's harrowing but harrowing is too sterile of a word. i feel nauseous, like crying, my stomach hurts, i want to be crushed into the ground.
February 12, 2024
Even if it weren’t for the sheer quantity of watercolour erections, Wojnarowicz allows isolated moments to reverberate with undeniable vitality. The impact is visceral. An acute sense of being alive is foregrounded on dark paranoia. Phallic flesh eating maggots, the president on a little television screen first mistaken for a kaposi in the inner thigh, the evening news. Politicians make zombies of a hidden people who, unwavering from daily routine, must be artificially set apart to maintain some reason over death. A parallel threat: that of forced disintegration and of disappearing before our eyes.
December 30, 2025
“I’ve gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form; my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, and the sounds that come from my throat. But I’m fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists; drifts spinning slowly into the other somewhere way back there. I’m a xerox of my former self.”
Amazing words by Wojnarowicz intertwined with his equally amazing illustrations. These four stories encapsulate the imperfect queer trauma referenced by Vuong in the foreword, and it makes so much sense that this would be one of the writers he idolized so much; their styles and streams of consciousness flow hand in hand through AIDS to the modern era. Wojnarowicz was a literary force, and still is to this day. Everyone interested in or lacking knowledge in the topic of AIDS-centric literature and the AIDS experience should read this collection.
Amazing words by Wojnarowicz intertwined with his equally amazing illustrations. These four stories encapsulate the imperfect queer trauma referenced by Vuong in the foreword, and it makes so much sense that this would be one of the writers he idolized so much; their styles and streams of consciousness flow hand in hand through AIDS to the modern era. Wojnarowicz was a literary force, and still is to this day. Everyone interested in or lacking knowledge in the topic of AIDS-centric literature and the AIDS experience should read this collection.
December 26, 2025
Last chapter is so so sad but so so good☹️
April 24, 2020
Queer Writing at its Best
He writes lines that you wish you said, that you wish you’d thought of, but he’s thought of them for you and laid them out, in order, right here, to read.
He writes lines that you wish you said, that you wish you’d thought of, but he’s thought of them for you and laid them out, in order, right here, to read.
July 23, 2022
Lots of sex and violence, usually intersecting - incredibly graphic, visceral, horrifying, traumatic. At points, blurring reality and dreams. Perhaps unreliably narrated, because sickness does that to a person, yet still one of the most honest things I’ve read. Difficult to consume. The last section struck me the hardest, especially the final two pages. Reflections on sickness and death… assault… grief… irony… how to confront all of that? Through trying not to think about it, I guess. But here… not through choice, but through enforcement; through having life snatched prematurely, through feeling as the body grows weaker and fades into nothingness. Through erasure: erasure by a government that chooses not to see and a community that turns a blind eye because looking suffering head-on is impossible and confronting disease and mortality is hard when you’re young and lustful and hated by the world.
And yet; glad to have read it.
And yet; glad to have read it.
October 5, 2007
why bother noting books that you don't feel FIVE STAR about?
i read this book one morning when i woke too early b/c of an accidentally epic drunk followed by teh most heinous hangover I've EVER had - and it fit perfectly. like the first time you read JT leroy, but w/o the boy wonder (too bad to be true) more like, the wonder, and the boy, and how hell can be described so lyrically that you don't mind visiting for a while. loved it. changed my life. read it.
i read this book one morning when i woke too early b/c of an accidentally epic drunk followed by teh most heinous hangover I've EVER had - and it fit perfectly. like the first time you read JT leroy, but w/o the boy wonder (too bad to be true) more like, the wonder, and the boy, and how hell can be described so lyrically that you don't mind visiting for a while. loved it. changed my life. read it.
February 23, 2017
DNF.
Only halfway through this insufferable book and I couldn't mentally, emotionally, or physically (no pun intended) take it any longer.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is an ensemble of filthy, gloomy, strictly sex-driven short stories that are everything wrong with the gay scene and the stigma that comes with it.
Absolutely horrifying.
1 star.
Only halfway through this insufferable book and I couldn't mentally, emotionally, or physically (no pun intended) take it any longer.
Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is an ensemble of filthy, gloomy, strictly sex-driven short stories that are everything wrong with the gay scene and the stigma that comes with it.
Absolutely horrifying.
1 star.
March 13, 2020
i'm serious about the content warnings. but it's still a definite recommendation
December 7, 2023
A beleza de um coração desesperado.
September 24, 2025
“I come back into the room, yank open the window and lean out above the dark empty streets and scream: THERE IS SOMETHING IN MY BLOOD AND IT’S TRYING TO FUCKING KILL ME.”
Urgent and gut-wrenching and painful and devastating.
Content warnings: terminal illness, grief, sexual violence, rape, sexual assault, child abuse – this is, at times, really difficult reading.
Urgent and gut-wrenching and painful and devastating.
Content warnings: terminal illness, grief, sexual violence, rape, sexual assault, child abuse – this is, at times, really difficult reading.
Read
August 29, 2022punch in the gut like all of David’s work.
February 24, 2025
I tried to pick out a quote to put here but they all hurt the same amount.
May 28, 2025
exceptional. the last chapter is a punch to the face.
July 30, 2025
The last line being “I am disappearing but not fast enough” is one of the most haunting things I’ve ever read. Deeply harrowing and sad and angry
August 16, 2025
- holy shit
- intoxicating, sexy, transgressive, devastating
- i will never be able to write this good
- intoxicating, sexy, transgressive, devastating
- i will never be able to write this good
June 15, 2022
Desperate and heartbreaking and beautiful too
September 1, 2024
Just a lovely happy really positive bed time read this Sunday evening 🙂
August 25, 2020
I am speechless, deeply uncomfortable and in need of a hug.
Great work, but I am sure I will not be coming back to this book ever again. Was too hard to stomach. Especially that scene at the back of the truck.
Great work, but I am sure I will not be coming back to this book ever again. Was too hard to stomach. Especially that scene at the back of the truck.
January 3, 2021
A quote: "Sometimes I come to hate people because they can't see where I am. I've gone empty, completely empty and all they see is the visual form; my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that come from my throat. But I'm fucking empty. The person I was just one year ago no longer exists; drifts spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there. I'm a xerox of my former self. I can't abstract my own dying any longer. I am a stranger to others and to myself and I refuse to pretend that I am familiar or that I have a history attached to my heels. I am glass, clear empty glass. I see the world spinning behind and through me."
January 30, 2020
this is a harrowing, deeply guttural book. from the soul of a very complex individual. who had been down so many unfortunate dark streets, but has made all these little balls of creative expression that could exude so much light.
also, what a fitting title because the descriptions are so fully formed, with all my senses being apart of this reading process. sex acts read as voyeur in some places, seeming participant in others.
stunning
also, what a fitting title because the descriptions are so fully formed, with all my senses being apart of this reading process. sex acts read as voyeur in some places, seeming participant in others.
stunning
August 27, 2018
I read this when it came out and was even more powerful decades later
Wojnarowicz is as important as a writer as he is a visual artist. His voice might be clearest in this memoir. It’s hallucinatory rhythm is seductive as images lurch from horrifying to sexy to downright inspirational
Wojnarowicz is as important as a writer as he is a visual artist. His voice might be clearest in this memoir. It’s hallucinatory rhythm is seductive as images lurch from horrifying to sexy to downright inspirational
Displaying 1 - 30 of 94 reviews