A blue-toned photograph from 1993 shows a pensive, backward-glancing child. It seems to matter that this is a Black child, that this is a boy. A silkscreened paragraph runs over his face. This text doesn’t directly match the image. Written in first person, it laments falling in very adult love with handsome hustlers described in short phrases or with single words set off by full stops, the hustlers characterized as abusive but elegant, tattooed, and muscular. They carry syringes. They’re confused and angelic. Sometimes their bodies resemble children’s bodies. “Experts of injection. Champions of sexual positions,” the text reads. “HIV positive. Vacated. Vanished. Vaporized.”
This harrowing silkscreened text becomes a curse, an eerie prediction, and a reminder about borrowed time and the gangly boys sometimes kicking around inside stoic men. This photograph from Christian Walker’s Vivisections series is one of the final works in a properly elegiac retrospective that traveled to the Tufts University Art Galleries from the Leslie-Lohman Museum in Manhattan, which has a mission to support, exhibit, and preserve LGBTQIA+ art. The Walker photograph may be among the last surviving works by the artist—dead at the age of fifty in a Seattle halfway house in 2003, allegedly from a drug overdose. Although he made photographs until his untimely end, the exhibition wall text suggests that most of his latest works haven’t resurfaced. Before the halfway house, Walker was in dire straits, living on the streets. It sounds like maybe someone at the halfway house threw away his photos and personal effects after he died. Still, his ruthlessly sharp analysis—or vivisection—calls to mind other contemporaneous fulminations, like David Wojnarowicz’s powerful Untitled (One Day This Kid), an edition from 1990 where the boy depicted is Wojnarowicz and the text around him predicts the hatred and violence the artist knew he would experience soon after he discovered his desire for other boys’ bodies. Wojnarowicz wrote: “One day this kid will do something that causes men who wear the uniforms of priests and rabbis, men who inhabit certain stone buildings, to call for his death.”
