Gary Indiana’s Exuberant Venom

Gary Indiana (right) in the late 1980s with critic Hilton Als. Photo: Catherine McGann/Getty Images

The Frieze announcement read “Gary Indiana, Acerbic Novelist and Critic, Has Died Aged 74,” though “Gary Indiana, Huge Bitch and Faggot Forefather” would have worked too. Throughout a career of over 40 years, the author’s works — among them a series of true-crime books about the Menendez brothers (Resentment: A Comedy) and Andrew Cunanan (Three Day Fever) — documented the seedy vanities and sorrows of American life. And in recent years, Indiana has been rediscovered by a younger generation all too eager to feel the scorpion sting of a guy who has seen some shit.

Indiana (born Gary Hoisington in Derry, New Hampshire) first emerged as a writer in the 1980s, when he reviewed art for The Village Voice and fell in with a crowd that included the likes of Susan Sontag, John Waters, and Cookie Mueller. “Of course, the primary task was to cover exhibitions,” he recalled, “but much of the art being made in the ’80s dealt with the world beyond four walls of a gallery, and it seemed perfectly natural to blend art criticism with commentary on the state of things.”

From the start, then, his work was high-minded and cross-disciplinary. Critics have affixed to his output any number of adjectives meant to communicate its basic darkness: acerbic, malicious, cruel, contemptuous. If Indiana was so disagreeable in print, it was partly because the historical circumstances called for a hostile prophet. By the late 20th century, the world economic system and its cultural tentacles had advanced a rationalist commercial logic that increasingly forestalled the autonomy of art and beauty. The counterculture was defeated, and in its place came plague, death, and Reaganism. “I know everything that’s happened to New York City, or most of the things that have happened to New York City, are lamentable and horrifying if you have any class-consciousness or any social conscience,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. “I truly don’t miss the old days.” The ’80s — and the financialization of everything — shaped the nature of his opposition.

Indiana’s primary critical targets were a culture industry and political community that accepted and even valorized cold-blooded atomization — “depraved indifference,” as he’d put it — a world of glossy surfaces and televisual imagery that belied the fact that we’re all being taken for fools, brutalized by our idiot overlords. (The Schwarzenegger Syndrome: Politics and Celebrity in the Age of Contempt explores exactly this.) But unfocused spite — sprays of purposeless vandalism — can be funny for only so long. Indiana transcended the limitations of that emotional register because he was also a committed, if not didactic, moralist. A faggy Jonathan Edwards writing sentences of spangled brimstone, denouncing the fallen and taking inventory of the rubbish, he found very little redeemable about the way we live. Yet there’s always a certain sympathy and mystery to his diagnoses. “Who knows what hearts and souls have in them?” he asks in Horse Crazy. (Still, a nice scrim of scatological filth keeps things from getting too sentimental. From Rent Boy: “The way he moved, you could picture some bent-over guy’s ass sucking in Ricky’s prick with an aria of little farts.”)

During his recent reappraisal, writers have often commented on the redemptive potential of Indiana’s venom. The critic Tobi Haslett once said, “Indiana wielded a mace when no mere pinprick would pop the bubble.” The writer Paul McAdory, in his review of the 2022 essay collection Fire Season, writes, “Doesn’t Indiana hate absurdly, morally, ironically, searchingly?” And Christian Lorentzen has called Indiana’s hatred a “purifying agent.” Indeed, Indiana practiced a sort of controlled burning, clearing the chaparral to make way for, who knows what, a less barbaric polity, maybe.

Yet, the hater was at his most affecting when confronted with obsessive love, a feeling that commingles warmth with disdain. Infatuation opens his characters to, and delimits the extent of their participation in, the world. In one of these love stories, an Indiana narrator recalls spending the summer at a friend’s house in Italy; the dream of expatriation seemed to promise a “simpler” life shorn of ambition and pettiness.

But what’s a critic without his knife? “I’ve always been the rare ‘good American,’ a person of unusual refinement, someone appalled by this culture of spectacle and commerce,” Indiana writes. “I suddenly feel this awful distance between our summers in the country and the way I am now, peering into a beautifully decorated room that now has the proportions of a doll’s house … At this moment I understand that I could never live like that, and in fact have probably even spent my last summer in Tuscany.”