Episode One: David Wojnarowicz

Hi and welcome to Star Gays, the Queer Astrology Archives Podcast, where we examine the lives of important queer artists, activists, and thinkers through the lens of their astrological birth chart. My name is Elly and I’ll be your host. In each episode, we will focus on one individual and overlay their natal chart on their biography to draw connections between their life experiences and astrological influences.

Since this is the first episode I’ll give you a little background on my approach to astrology and some thoughts on why I’m making this podcast. I started studying astrology seriously in 2019 and have been deeply invested ever since. My studies in astrology have been a blend of modern and Hellenistic and my primary teachers and influences are Chris Brennan, Kelly Surtees, Michael J Morris, Kirah Tabourn, Chani Nicholas and Demetra George. In terms of the technical stuff – I use whole sign houses, traditional planetary rulers, and the essential dignity scheme of the Hellenistic tradition but I also use the outer planets, and a psychological, archetypal approach to astrology that’s more reflective of modern astrological traditions.

My practice is informed by my lived experience as a queer and trans person, as well as scholarly pursuits in literature, history, and gender/sexuality/feminist studies. The idea for this podcast came about after a tutoring session with Michael J Morris. I asked what I should do next and they suggested I take one or two charts and study them as closely as possible. They said be sure to pick people that I wanted to spend a lot of time with. I came up with a list of like 20 people and being a Libra rising with a Sag moon I couldn’t choose, and so the idea for this podcast was born. So this isn’t exactly what Michael had in mind but I do hope to use this podcast as a tool to develop my relationship with astrology, as well as a way to honor the legacies of the individuals we will be studying.

I’ve been thinking a lot on the why behind this podcast and I think that creating my own archive and my own queer lineage has been incredibly important to me in developing my sense of self and figuring out my place in the world. And because queer histories are often erased, I spent so long knowing that there was more than you know, Stonewall, HIV, and Queer Eye in terms of queer art and activism but not really knowing how or where to find it. And it’s only in the last 5 or so years that I have figured out where to find what I’m looking for. And that process of discovery and relationship to queer art and artists has had a profound impact on who I am. I still feel like I’m constantly discovering queer art from the archives and feeling like wow I can’t believe I didn’t know about this. And at the same time – astrology has been a critically important tool for understanding my life and figuring out my place in the world. Studying the cycles of time has allowed me to connect to the past and be more present in my own experience. These have been ways that I have located myself and rooted into who I am and where I come from. So it only made sense to me to build out a queer archive through the lens of astrology. And I think especially in this current moment where transness is being criminalized, it feels even more important to ground into that lineage and look back at history and see what activist tactics we were using, how we were existing and creating art, and living through difficult times to hopefully learn some things that we can use today. So I’m hoping we will all learn a little astrology, a little queer history, maybe discover some art we didn’t know existed. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy exploring the queer universe with me.

Just a couple notes: there is so much that can be said about the astrology of any one person, and there are many ways to interpret the symbols. I don’t intend for this podcast to be an exhaustive treatment by any means and welcome insights and disagreements on interpretations. And, I’m also assuming that listeners have some basic understanding of astrology. I will try to walk through my interpretations as I go but I may skip over definitions of basic astrological concepts. So let’s get into it.

[Desire by Three Teens Kill Four plays]

For today’s episode we are going to take a deep dive into the chart of artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. Born on September 14, 1954 at 9:01 AM in Red Bank, NJ, (I’ll put a link to his chart in the show notes). David Wojnarowicz was a multimedia artist, painter, photographer, writer, and HIV/AIDS activist who lived and worked in the East Village art scene of New York until his death from AIDS related complications on July 22, 1992. His early life was tumultuous – his father was physically abusive and after his parents divorced in 1956, his father abducted him and his siblings to the midwest. By 1965, Wojnarowicz was back to living with his mother in New York, He attended the High School of Music & Art (which is now called Laguardia High School) intermittently, but by 1971 at age 17 he was living on the streets full time and doing sex work. Throughout the 70s, he was based in New York but traveled to San Francisco, the Southwest, and France. David’s early artistry included music with his band 3 Teens Kill 4, whose song Desire we just heard a little bit of. He did a series of photographs of himself with a huge cutout poster face of the poet Arthur Rimbaud around New York. He made super-8 films, and also did lots of graffiti and stencil art – notably in the abandoned Christopher street piers which was also a regular cruising site for gay men. His work was shown in various galleries in Manhattan and his name became more widely known after his work was included in the 1985 Whitney Biennial, “the Grafiti show.” David collaborated with many artists including photographers Peter Hujar and Nan Goldin. He also wrote essays focused on the lives of people in his community. In 1987, Wojnarowicz’s mentor and lover Peter Hujar died of AIDS and around the same time he learned that he had sero-converted. From this point, his art became more explicitly focused on HIV/AIDS activism. It is this work that he is most remembered for today. As a political artist working on controversial topics, Wojnarowicz received frequent criticism and his work was often attacked as obscene. In 1989, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) revoked funding for a show that was organized by Nan Goldin, because of his essay “Postcards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” which was included in the liner notes for the show. Much of David’s work was visceral and angry but it was important to him to capture the lives of people who others might prefer to look away from including gay people, people with AIDS, homeless people, etc. David continued to work until he died of AIDS in 1992.

Ok. I think what I’ll do is go through Sun, Moon, Rising and ruler of the ascendant, and the Benefic of Sect (which is the planet capable of doing the most good –Jupiter in a day chart and Venus in a night chart) and Malefic Contrary to Sect (which is the planet capable of causing the most problems – Mars in a day chart and Saturn in a night chart). I’d love to eventually look at events and different timing techniques but I think for today we’ll mostly be doing character analysis and using David to try to understand how some of the astrological archetypes can play out. And like I said I can’t possibly talk about all aspects of each of these planets so I’m just pulling what’s most interesting or stands out the most to me. And of course, everything is connected, so some of the things we’re talking about are coming from a couple different places in the chart and we’ll look at how those parts are connected.

And in terms of sources a lot of the quotes I’m pulling are from “The Weight of the Earth: The Tape Journals of David Wojnarowicz,” but I’m also pulling from some internet articles and his biography by Cynthia Carr. I’ll include links to all of them in the show notes, as well as a copy of David’s birth chart again so you can follow along.

A quick overview of David’s chart. He was a Virgo Sun, an Aries Moon and a Libra rising. Venus, the ruler of his ascendant, was in Scorpio with Saturn. He had Mercury in Libra, Mars in Capricorn and Jupiter in Cancer.

Okay let’s talk about the Sun!

So David’s sun was in Virgo in his 12th house. And I really wanna talk about the 12th cause with the 12th house we get themes around suffering, isolation, enemies, self-undoing, all of the places and people that exist in the margins or outside of the public sphere such as prisons, hospitals, and the streets. With David’s sun in the 12th, we can see all of these themes playing out in his personality, his lived experiences, and through his art. So as a teen he did not always have stable housing and while in his adult life he did have more stable housing, he continued to focus on people who lived on the streets of his community in the Lower East Side of Manhattan as well as other people who were in the margins including gay people and people with HIV/AIDS. He seemed to see people that others might ignore. His art often centered these people. In an essay on queer shame Margaret Morrison wrote, “He wanted to make honest art, art that derived from ‘his uneasiness with the world.’ His [goal] was to ‘embrace stigma and shame and to tell uncomfortable truths’” in his art. He wanted to aim a spotlight on the social ills that people did not want to look at. His first book “Sounds in the Distance” (which was later re-published as “the Waterfront Journals”) collected the experiences of marginalized people and turned them into monologues.

His uneasiness with the world came from a real felt sense of alienation and intentional distancing from what he called the “pre-invented” world. By this he’s referring to the concepts, social values, roles, and moral restrictions that are so ingrained in society they seem to be innate (although they’re actually created by those in power). His conception of the pre-invented world is probably one of the most crucial keys to understanding his artwork. It’s almost like his aim is to unveil what is happening behind the scenes (another 12th house theme) of this pre-invented existence. Very Wizard of Oz. By doing this, his work not only called attention to the fabrication of the pre-invented world but it also asked the audience to reorient themselves around the people whose lives were dismissed or erased by it.

In the introduction to The Weight of The Earth, David Velasco writes of Wojnarowicz: “He seems so at home inside alienation. He gets power from it.” The sun represents the core, our will to live and David’s will to live or his power is coming from alienation. David was an outsider. He was different from others and he valued the ways he didn’t fit in. Actually he was highly critical of the people he saw as participating uncritically in the pre-invented world. The editors of the book also echo this sentiment: “He spoke aloud, alone, hoping that, by way of velocity and will he could escape the sticky seat of the self and of ‘pre-invented’ existence.” This second quote speaks to that alienation but also to self-undoing. It is not enough for David to escape the pre-invented world, he’s also trying to escape himself.

We can also see his concern around ‘enemies’ (another 12th house theme) in the art world. In the Tape Journals he says, “What I’m trying to say is the fact that people can do the work they do, or they can make the things that they make and they can make them with the intensity that they make them or the feeling that they make them or the emotion that they make them or the reasons that they make them or the intent, and some asshole can come along and because he can’t get fucked start spreading a series of rumors or misinformation or bending the ear of collectors or of people looking at the art, saying that it’s shit. I don’t know…the whole system’s completely set up like that. I’m just thinking, Here I am busting my gut to make these things, do these things that are part of my personal truth, and I put them out in front of this unknown group of people. With all the intent of what I make to put it out there for judgment or put it out there for somebody to say this about or that about or to dismiss [it]…” – David’s concerned about putting something of himself out into the world and it being poorly received because of someone’s ill will towards him, as opposed to the merit of his work. He goes on “suddenly, I got struck with a feeling that I wanted to start smashing things…[smashing] all the art in the apartment…I had this vision of the amount of destruction I could do to this room and to all the things I’ve made.” So we see this anxiety around enemies creating the desire to destroy his art, which is a real act of self-undoing. So with just a few quotes from David, or others’ about him we can see how the Sun’s placement in the 12th house is deeply present in all aspects of his life. There is a profound sensitivity to the way the world works, to all the cogs in the machine and a desire to have nothing to do with it.

David’s focus on his own alienation and anxiety around enemies might make him come across as anti-social but the reality was quite the opposite (if not uncomplicated). David was deeply enmeshed in the arts and queer community of the Lower East Side in the 80s. He worked at Danceteria (a New York City nightclub – where lots of other artists worked at the time, including Keith Haring) and as I said earlier, he collaborated with many artists, most notably Peter Hujar and Nan Goldin. On his friendships an LA Review of Books article wrote, “His friendships sustained him in ways that his queer and anti-capitalist work could not” and of course, his artwork is deeply relational at its core. It pulls people from the margins in and holds them close. I think what we are seeing here is the relationship between his 12th house Virgo Sun and his Libra rising which create the “conflicted cravings for retreat and for connection”. (quote from editors intro to Weight of the Earth)

The rising sign in astrology is related to the motivation for life and David being a Libra rising is motivated to connect and build relationships with other people. It’s just that the people and places he’s drawn to connect with are the most marginalized – these 12th house people. I think we can also bring in the fact that Mercury (the sun in Virgo’s ruler) is in Libra further connecting his motivation for life and his core purpose. Mercury, as the host of the Sun, provides it with relational communication skills. On top of that we can bring in that the sun rules the sign of Leo, which is on the cusp of David’s 11th house of friends, groups, and alliances. So we have several signifiers of his purpose and motivation being relational.

I want to take a closer look at another interesting aspect of David’s Libra rising: which is about justice and fairness. Libra’s symbol is the scales and David’s work often addresses how the systems and structures in our society (our pre-invented existence) perpetuate injustice. A lot of David’s later work in response to the AIDS epidemic highlights this in particular. For example he famously wore a denim jacket emblazoned with the message “If I die of AIDS – forget burial – just drop my body on the steps of the F.D.A.” This was a sentiment he repeated over and over. In his memoir, Close to the Knives, he wrote: “I imagine what it would be like if friends had a demonstration each time a lover or a friend or a stranger died of AIDS. I imagine what it would be like if, each time a lover, friend or stranger died of this disease, their friends, lovers or neighbors would take the dead body and drive with it in a car a hundred miles an hour to Washington D.C. and blast through the gates of the white house and come to a screeching halt before the entrance and dump their lifeless form on the front steps.“ These statements were powerful critiques of the FDA and the government’s failure to prioritize treatments for HIV/AIDS and to make those treatments accessible to the people who needed them most. And his words actually inspired AIDS activists to hold a political funeral in 1992 where they scattered the ashes of friends and loved ones lost to AIDS on the White House lawn.

I’ll give some more examples when we get to Jupiter in a minute but his work is motivated by an awareness and anger at how unjust it is that he and his community are not getting the care they need and deserve.

Ok. Let’s take a look at Venus now.

If we bring Venus into the picture, which is, the ruler of Libra and therefore his ascendant ruler, we can gain some further insight. In Hellenistic astrology, the ascendant is most closely associated with the native, while the other houses stand for other people in the native’s life. And so the ruler of the ascendant becomes one of the most important planets for describing the native and their life’s focus. The ascendant ruler is often described as the driver of the person’s life, steering them towards their purpose and Venus is the planet of love, beauty, pleasure and connection. So his life is being steered towards those ideals.

David’s Venus is in Scorpio, conjunct Saturn within a degree in the 2nd house. Venus is in its detriment in Scorpio, which is to say it is not at home. As the planet of love, beauty and connection, Venus being in its detriment could indicate something like an attraction to things that are not considered conventionally attractive or beautiful. In his own words, he says “I like ugly people or people with some sense of derangement, and that’s something I’ve always felt. Not necessarily deranged but someone who’s off in some way, somebody who’s interesting, who has character, through lack of beauty or whatever. Somebody who is beautiful in a way that’s not classically beautiful.” This is just like such a perfect quote. So he’s motivated by that Libran Venusian desire to connect but because Venus is in Scorpio he’s drawn not to classical beauty but to a more non-conventional beauty. And if we return to his 12 house Sun: where does he find that non-conventional beauty? In people and places who are not centered. So we see all of these different pieces kind of coming together.

Okay let’s talk about Jupiter cause Jupiter is really well placed in his chart. Since David was born during the day, Jupiter is the Benefic of Sect, or the planet most capable of doing good in his chart. Jupiter signifies growth, abundance, optimism in addition to religion and law. Jupiter is in the angular 10th house which is all about career and public image. It is conjunct the Midheaven (MC) within two degrees. It is in its own bounds in Cancer, the sign of its exaltation. The ruler of Cancer, the Moon, is in Aries, applying to a square with Jupiter, so Jupiter is able to receive the support of its domicile ruler. All of these factors together mean that Jupiter is able to manifest some of its most positive qualities in David’s life, in particular in the sector of his career.

And of course we can see Jupiter’s role playing out just in that David is one of the most famous artists of his cohort. Jupiter as the Benefic of Sect in the 10th house just affirms his career and his public standing. His legacy and his art have lived on beyond his life (Famously, his photograph “Untitled: (Falling Buffaloes) was used as the cover for the U2 song ‘One’). But even when he was alive, his work was featured in the Whitney Biennial, and he was well known in the art community and often actually singled out (although not necessarily in a positive way) on a very public stage. A more negative example of this singling out came in April of 1990. Rightwing evangelist Donald Wildmon distributed thousands of pamphlets to Congress and media outlets that attacked Wojnarowicz’s use of homoerotic imagery and the $15,000 National Endowment of the Arts grant that supported a retrospective of his work.

There’s something really interesting happening with Jupiter here. Jupiter signifies religion and the law and if we take the previous example of his work being demonized: it was done by an evangelist so we get the religious leader, and Wildmon sent the works to congress members so there we get the justice and legal leaders. And if he was targeted by Jupiterian figures he certainly matched them with his artwork. There was a righteousness to it. He was motivated by a real sense of justice and anger around injustice, especially in regard to government inaction and Christian homophobia in response to HIV. His work sometimes went so far as to specifically target religious and political leaders. One of his more famous written works is the “Seven Deadly Sins Fact Sheet” from 1989 where he calls out specific leaders and the ways their actions or inactions have caused serious harm to HIV + people. Included on his list of 7 are the former NYC Mayor Ed Koch and Cardinal John O’Connor. Another famous piece features a photograph of young David surrounded by text that reads “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. One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid.” So we begin to see how Jupiter is playing a dual role here – First it’s creating the conditions for Wojnarowicz to become a famous artist and second it makes religious and political leaders a central focus in his art and coincidentally also makes him a central figure in rightwing obscenity fear mongering.

So I wanna circle back and pick up David’s moon in Aries and his Mars, because I think it will really flesh out our understanding of David.

So with the moon – the moon is how we get our physical and emotional needs met, how we live out our purpose (the Sun) in the day to day and David’ moon is in Aries in the 7th. So his purpose gets lived out through impulsive actions (Aries) in David’s one-one relationships (7th house). So he gives a handful of really perfect examples of this. In one moment he’s talking about a boy he’s seeing. He says “I wasn’t even going to think about it beforehand, I was just going to go there and say whatever was in my head” –impulsive, act first, think second. I can’t remember which astrologer it was who said “ready fire aim” but yeah… very Aries.

Or at another moment he says “One guy had been cruising me at the bar…I ended up getting in some really great discussions with him and arguments and everything else–all things dealing with theories of art, the practice of art, and reasons for making things. I didn’t agree with him on just about anything…I was argumentative but it was good and it felt really healthy.” So with that like he’s not just having fun here, but he’s getting some need met from this kind of argumentative interaction.

I do think that the Aries moon in the 7th also indicates some of the challenges he had in relationships with respect to anger. He was known for his rage and we’ve kind of been dancing around that in this episode. But literally every source refers to his rage. It’s almost impossible to read anything about him and not have him described as angry. His biographer Cynthia Carr reported that Wojnarowicz was known to his friends in the East Village as someone who “had a short fuse, a bad temper,”

And I think we can look to Mars, the planet that rules David’s Moon to get some understanding as to why he was so angry.

Mars is the Malefic that is Contrary to the Sect, which means that it is the most challenging planet in his chart and Mars is in Capricorn, the place of its exaltation. So we have this really powerful Mars. It’s in the 4th house of home family and parents, so we would expect to see challenges in those areas of life. As we talk about earlier, his housing was unstable for most of his life but also his father was abusive and so we can see his father really taking on the energy of Mars and being a Martian figure in his life. Cynthia Carr actually draws these connections between his anger and his home life, writing that his anger was “very likely an effect of the early traumas he suffered from his father’s frequent beatings, his parents’ abandonments of him and his brother and sister, and his parents’ blatant disregard for the effects on their children of constant, abrupt disruptions in their lives. Because he did not have much control of his early life, Wojnarowicz probably felt an urgent need to communicate – to make some sense of his life, to use any language he could muster – and the negative effects, rage and shame, pressuring him from his years of mistreatment were indeed powerful motivators of his work.” So we can see that Mars as the Malefic Contrary to Sect is causing serious problems in David’s childhood which had ripple effects that lasted his whole life and manifested in his one-one relationships later in life. And I think as Carr says, that anger really does come through in his work. Which I think is the result of the connection between Mars ruling his Moon in Aries in the 7th which is in turn ruling his 10th house of career. And then of course there is this opposition between Mars in the 4th and Jupiter in the 10th. It’s a little bit of a wide opposition but I think it’s pretty loud in his chart. I want to play just a little bit of David speaking because I think it’s just a very different experience to hear the anger coming through in his voice. This is David reading an excerpt from an essay called “Do Not Doubt The Dangerousness of the 12 Inch Politician” which you can find in “Close to The Knives.”

I wake up every morning in this killing machine called America and I’m carrying this rage like a blood filled egg and there’s a thin line between the inside and the outside a thin line between thought and action and that line is simply made up of blood and muscle and bone I’m waking up more and more from daydreams of tipping amazonian blow darts in “infected blood” and spitting them at the exposed necklines of certain politicians or government health care officials or those thinly disguised walking swastikas that wear religious garments over their murderous intentions or the rabid strangers parading against AIDS clinics in the nightly news suburbs there’s a thin line a very thin line between the inside and the outside and I’ve been looking all my life at the signs surround us on people’s lips the religious types outside st patrick’s cathedral shouting at men and women in the gay parade ‘you won’t be here next year, you’ll get AIDS and die haha’ and there’s a USA where it’s possible to murder a man and when brought to trial all you have to say is the victim was a queer and he tried to touch you and the courts will set you free and the antiviolence bill and the difficulty that a bunch of Republican senators have with supporting an antiviolence bill that includes sexual orientation as a category of crime victims there’s a thin line, a very thin line and as each T-cell disappears from my body its replaced by ten pounds of pressure ten pounds of rage and I focus that rage into non-violent resistance but that focus is starting to slip my hands are beginning to move independent of self-restraint and the egg is starting to crack America seems to understand and accept murder as self defense against those who would murder us and its been murder on a daily basis for eight, nine ten long years and we’re expected to quietly and politely pay taxes to support this public and social murder and I say there’s certain politicians that better increase their security forces there’s walking swastikas in the forms of religious leaders and healthcare officials that had better get bigger dogs and higher fences and more complex security alarms for their homes and queer bashers better start doing their work from inside howitzer tanks because the thin line between the outside and the inside is beginning to erode and at the moment I’m a thirty seven foot tall one thousand one hundred and seventy two pound man inside this six foot body and all I can feel is the pressure all I can feel is the pressure and the need for release.

Okay we’ve covered a lot of ground here and I think it’s really incredible to see how the planets are shaping David’s experience of the world. I want to just return to David’s Venus one more time because it is also ruled by this powerful Mars. In traditional astrology Mars rules Scorpio. And the anger that Mars provides Venus absolutely influences how his life’s direction is steered by Venus but I think the ultimate motivation was still beauty. In a conversation with the artist Zoe Leonard who took pictures of clouds, he said, “Zoe, these are so beautiful, and that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.” And I think this sentiment really captures something core to David that came up consistently in every aspect of his chart: he was full of anger and discontent but only because he knew things could be different.He believed that another world was possible and he wasn’t going to settle for less.Okay that’s all I have. Thank you so much for listening. This is a bit of a pilot episode so if you have thoughts, feedback or someone you’d like me to do an episode on you can email at ellyrhiggins@gmail.com You can also find me on social media. On instagram it’s @ellyhigginsastro. On twitter it’s @ehastrology. Special shout out to Bobbie for helping to write and produce the intro music as well production on the episode. OK. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll see you next time. Bye.