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Gary Indiana, the elfin novelist, cultural critic, playwright and artist whose crackling prose and lacerating wit captured the ravages of the AIDS crisis, Manhattan’s downtown art scene, lurid true crimes and his own search for love, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 74.
The cause was lung cancer, said Jerry Gorovoy, a friend.
Prolific and polymathic, Mr. Indiana was the author of more than 10 books of fiction, memoir and criticism, all of which tackled, in one way or another, a culture careering toward ruin.
“Horse Crazy” (1989) is a roman à clef about a 30-something writer obsessed with a beautiful, young, heroin-addled photographer — a “Death in Venice” set in the East Village amid the darkening storm of AIDS. “Resentment: A Comedy,” published in 1997, was the first book in Mr. Indiana’s lightly fictionalized crime trilogy; its backdrop is the Los Angeles trial of the Menendez brothers for the murder of their parents, a setting that allowed Mr. Indiana to skewer celebrity culture in a collection of scabrous and hilarious portraits. Richard Bernstein, writing in The New York Times, praised Mr. Indiana for his “dazzlingly good writing.”
“One reads Mr. Indiana’s new work with astonishment at his talent,” Mr. Bernstein wrote, “and astonishment at the absurdist bleakness, the alienating nihilism, of his vision.”
“Resentment” was followed by “Three-Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story” (1999), which delved into the bizarre life of the serial killer who murdered the fashion designer Gianni Versace. Next came “Depraved Indifference” (2001), a novel based on the mother-and-son con artists and murderers Sante and Kenneth Kimes. With all three books, Mr. Indiana said, “I was trying to understand something about the pathology of families.”
It was 1978 when Mr. Indiana landed in New York City, by way of San Francisco and Los Angeles, having escaped his own family pathology by leaving his home in New Hampshire at 16. In California, he made movies with friends, wrote for a few underground journals and had some terrifying adventures.
He was skinny, nervous and erudite, and he began churning out poetry, film reviews and essays for indie presses, hoping to find his way as a playwright and novelist. He quickly became an impresario of the East Village’s febrile art scene, performing in a few No Wave movies, staging plays at the Mudd Club and in his friend Bill Rice’s backyard, and overseeing lunatic cabarets featuring knife juggling, fire effects and a man who ate lightbulbs (and who happened to be Mr. Indiana’s boyfriend at the time).
Mr. Indiana was by his own admission a chaotic showman and an intellectual goad, prickly and kind in equal measure — “an acerbic pixie with a great streak of humanity,” as Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, the art world photographer who made many portraits of him over the decades, put it.
When his friend Jeff Weinstein became the arts editor of The Village Voice, he persuaded a reluctant Mr. Indiana to become the paper’s art critic. For the next two and a half years, beginning in 1985, he played that role, upending the pompous traditions of the form. It was, as he wrote later, a time of terrible emergency, and he used his essays to explore his rage at the government’s indifference to the AIDS crisis and at an art world veering from joyous eclecticism to a grimly corporate market ethos.
He also wrote lyrically and passionately about work he found worthy. His columns were mouthy, diaristic, discursive and often very funny.
Covering a Warhol auction at Sotheby’s, Mr. Indiana wrote of being menaced by a “full-blown fire-hazard of elderly women with no wrinkles and men with no lips.” At a Gerhard Richter show, which he mostly liked, he noted that the German artist “often handles paint like a master violinist playing third-rate chamber music at a formal tea.” One column was simply a collection of quotes from newspapers and magazines, many about the interior design of Julian Schnabel’s loft; it concluded with a dictionary definition of the word “angst.”
In one lovely, twisting essay, Mr. Indiana ruminated on smoking (he had recently tried to quit), addiction in general and a performance by Marianne Faithfull in which she smoked throughout, apologizing that she was losing her voice as a result.
“When you do break down and give in to whatever addiction you have,” he wrote, “it comes back to you just how intolerable reality can be and why people take drugs in the first place.”
Gary Indiana was born Gary Hoisington on July 16, 1950, in Derry, N.H. His father, Carol Charles Hoisington, who was deaf from Ménière’s disease, was a gambler and an alcoholic who owned half a lumber mill, which he had won in a craps game. His mother, Cecile (Robitaille) Hoisington, was the town clerk.
A small, bookish child — “threateningly brainy,” as he put it in his 2015 memoir, “I Can Give You Anything but Love” — he was bullied horribly. In one terrifying incident when he was just 8 or 9, he was gagged, blindfolded and hogtied by two swimming instructors, who left him on a raft in the middle of a lake for hours. He had two half brothers from his father’s first marriage, one of whom lived at home and tormented him.
Gary’s own transgressions were shoplifting Signet paperbacks of “Anna Karenina,” “Crime and Punishment” and “Lolita" from the local news shop.
At 16, he left Derry for the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out after only four months. He drifted in and out of various communes, taking acid and dressing in drag — demure pleated skirts and silk blouses, like a legal secretary, he often said.
When a friend began directing and writing pornographic movies, Gary was hired as a script girl; on set, he learned technical skills, like deploying a boom mike. Together, he and his friends began making home movies and staging happenings that they would film in the Victorian house they shared in San Francisco.
At one such happening, Mr. Indiana was raped by a member of the Hells Angels; sent by his parents to a Boston facility to recover from the crippling depression caused by that assault, he was raped again, by a health-care worker.
From there he headed to Los Angeles, where he worked by day as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society, helping residents in the Watts neighborhood; at night, he sold popcorn at a movie theater. He began writing for obscure art journals, changing his name to avoid embarrassing his parents — a choice, made on impulse, that he regretted for decades. When he rolled his car, while drunk, on the freeway, he decided it was time to move to New York.
Mr. Indiana disavowed his art criticism after he quit The Voice in 1988. It irritated him to be considered in the vanguard of a movement from a time and place that he felt was not worth sentimentalizing.
“It had made him a star in a world that he hated — the amped-up, hyper-capitalist art world,” the longtime editor Ira Silverberg, once one of Mr. Indiana’s publishers, said by phone. “He was a Marxist at heart, and he retreated into fiction, which is where he wanted to be anyway.”
But in the summer of 2017, the writer Bruce Hainley set out to exhume Mr. Indiana’s columns from copies of The Voice that had been stored on microfilm in the library at the University of California, Los Angeles. After typing them up, he put them on a hard drive and gave it to Hedi El Kholti, an editor of Semiotext(e), the avant-garde publishing house. Mr. El Kholti then persuaded an extremely ambivalent Mr. Indiana to allow him to publish the collection. “Vile Days: The Village Voice Art Columns 1985-1988,” edited by Mr. Hainley, appeared in 2018. Semiotext(e) had earlier published some of Mr. Indiana’s out-of-print novels, earning him a new generation of reverent readers.
“He was one of the very greatest writers (among other things) of the last century,” Mr. Hainley said.
Information on survivors was not available.
For the last 30 years, Mr. Indiana lived in a walk-up apartment on the sixth floor of an East Village tenement with a shared toilet out in the hall. It was an architectural pentimento of former times, as he put it, in the middle of a now-gentrified neighborhood — gentrification that is mostly a result of the scrappy endeavors of Mr. Indiana and his cohort. In his preface to “Vile Days,” he called this “an insignificant burp of art history that created a seismic shift in the history of New York property values.”
But he seemed to have softened his stance on his role in that history. “I’m not prone to much sentimentality,” he wrote, “but you should really treasure your own history, however weird it is.”
Mr. Indiana “understood the absurdity of everything,” said the novelist Lynne Tillman, an old friend. “So I want to phone him and tell him he died. He’d roar with laughter. What kind of man was he? It’s why I write novels. If I tried to sum him up, he’d become a character.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
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