Wojnarowicz/Wildmon: Between Queer Imagination and the Aesthetics of Literalism

Abstract This chapter focuses on artist David Wojnarowicz’s legal and political battles with the Christian Right’s Donald Wildmon, founder of the American Family Association (AFA), in order to plot two diverging approaches to art and interpretation. In Wojnarowicz v. American Family Association (1990), Wojnarowicz sued Wildmon for republishing images depicting sexual acts from the artist’s larger works in an AFA pamphlet. Wildmon mailed this pamphlet to Christian conservatives and members of Congress to expose the pornographic and sacrilegious nature of work by queer artists. This chapter details how he did so: through a conservative Christian aesthetics of literalism that refused to distinguish the selections he extracted from the artist’s larger works, thereby reducing the art to “banal pornography.” By contrast, this chapter shows, Wojnarowicz’s art worked through the association and juxtaposition of symbols, often drawn from nature and from religious iconography, as seen in Spirituality (for Paul Thek).