David Wojnarowicz’s essay collection, Memories That Smell Like Gasoline, explores the inescapable power of memory. It’s said that olfactory memory is particularly powerful: that a smell can evoke a particular experience, a time and a place, better than any other sense. While the book does not smell of gasoline, it does have the same effect on the reader’s body as a short sharp sudden whiff of gas.
First published in 1992, the year that its author died of an AIDS-related illness, Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is now reissued by Nightboat Books, with a foreword by Ocean Vuong. Amy Scholder, who published the first edition, notes:
[David and I] decided to work on this one first because it felt so close to the reckonings we were having at the time. How memory has a smell and touch and feel. How it seems to change our DNA. How memorializing in words and pictures can find new meaning, keep something alive. Maybe.
The book is haunted by AIDS—yet only one essay, “Spiral,” deals explicitly with his illness and HIV within his community more generally. In the other three, he retreats—escapes—into memories from his adolescence, however difficult: a time when sex was different, a process of discovery not yet intrinsically associated with sickness and death. They are violent yet vital.
The titular essay of Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is a brutal and uncompromising account of a violent sexual assault. The recollection is suddenly triggered by a lonely face in a crowd, an unintentional, Proustian evocation. The smell of gasoline is only imagined and yet pervades the story, an ever-present threat. Recall that one of Wojnarowicz’s earliest motifs, which he spray painted across the ruins of downtown Manhattan, was a burning house—a childlike emblem of domesticity set ablaze—burn it all down and start again.
The untitled drawing on the front cover—two men kissing, waist-deep in a body of water—appears in several artworks by Wojnarowicz. (I have it tattooed on my left thigh.)
The volume is punctuated by drawings by Wojnarowicz, from a series titled “Memory Drawings:” ink sketches of scenes from porno theatres, the type that used to populate Times Square; and black ink cartoons with short captions, illustrating specific memories or dreams, including his time as a child sex worker. “I saw this in a park on 2nd avenue one night,” he writes beneath a drawing of one man fellating another, a third silhouetted nearby; “I wish my eyes were movie cameras so I could record scenes like this in movement.” Text and image intermingle—these aren’t illustrations but rather affirm Wojnarowicz’s particular perspective.
The untitled drawing on the front cover—two men kissing, waist-deep in a body of water—appears in several artworks by Wojnarowicz. (I have it tattooed on my left thigh.)
The volume is punctuated by drawings by Wojnarowicz, from a series titled “Memory Drawings": ink sketches of scenes from porno theatres, the type that used to populate Times Square; and black ink cartoons with short captions, illustrating specific memories or dreams, including his time as a child sex worker. “I saw this in a park on 2nd avenue one night,” he writes beneath a drawing of one man fellating another, a third silhouetted nearby; “I wish my eyes were movie cameras so I could record scenes like this in movement.” Text and image intermingle—these aren’t illustrations but rather affirm Wojnarowicz’s particular perspective.
Wojnarowicz—in both his visual art and his writing—acts as witness; his creative output is testimony to a life lived on the fringes, life as resistance to the dominant order. He is a secular, profane patron saint of the outsider. I long for a day when his words are not relevant, when his revelatory vision of America—often rendered as “america,” dethroned and made ordinary—is no longer deemed prescient but instead feels dated. He writes with a righteous rage about inequality, persecution, and censorship—the era of Ronald Reagan and Senator Jesse Helms—themes that could not be more topical in 2025, plus ça change.
He might—indeed, could—be alive today, aged seventy-one, were it not for the murderous apathy of the government in the 1980s. Memories That Smell Like Gasoline is less prophetic than his emphatically activist writings: more introspective but nonetheless insistent. “Sometimes it gets dark in here behind these eyes I feel like the physical equivalent of a scream,” he writes at the opening of the collection. “I hate highways but love speeding and I can only think of men’s bodies and the drift and sway of my own if sex was a dance I’d do a crawl for that body I saw this afternoon…”—the sentence continues, without punctuation, for another page. Dreams and memories and desires are all given equal weight in his writing—what is, what was, and what might be are all parts within the same puzzle of existence.
The last essay in the collection, “Spiral,” ends with two short pages of text. It is a brilliant, excoriating piece of prose included on a number of the artist’s mixed media artworks: “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 history attached to my heels.” The final sentences haunt me: “I am waving. I am waving my hands. I am disappearing. I am disappearing but not fast enough.” Rarely has writing captured such precarious proximity to death.