Gary Indiana, novelist and cultural critic, 1950-2024

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While living in Los Angeles during the 1970s, Gary Indiana worked at an art house cinema where he amused himself with a game that would become a fitting symbol of his later work.

Whenever a celebrity came to watch a film, he would hand them a disposable napkin and ask for an autograph. After they graciously returned the napkin, Indiana would take “somewhat childish pleasure in using the napkins to mop up Coke spills”. 

Indiana, who has died at the age of 74, was a writer of American decadence and social decline. “I was aware at an early age that this country is rotten to the core, but it took years to begin to understand why it was rotten, what produces the rot,” he told an interviewer in 2021.

Born Gary Hoisington to a lower middle-class family in rural New Hampshire in 1950, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1967, during the height of campus unrest. He dropped out nearly immediately and began living in a commune, reading the interwar Frankfurt School philosophers and supporting himself by working as a technician and scriptwriter on pornographic films.

He left for Los Angeles, where he stumbled into the punk scene and changed his name. A car accident in the late 1970s prompted a move to New York, where he began writing, acting in and directing plays alongside members of the Downtown avant-garde. In East Village bars he mingled with figures such as the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the Velvet Underground’s Nico, actress Cookie Mueller, serial killer Joel Rifkin and artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

In the late 1980s he penned a much-followed weekly column as art critic for the Village Voice. There he wrote with “infinite enthusiasm” for the work he loved, according to Hedi El Kholti, a publisher and friend of Indiana’s, while mounting caustic, often erudite takedowns of the art world’s golden calves. He became an icon of the New York underground — although he spent the rest of his life vehemently rejecting the romanticisation of the era. 

It was only in his thirties that he began writing novels, after an ill-fated relationship with an artist and drug user spurred his first novel, Horse Crazy. While outwardly a study of romantic obsession and mental breakdown, the book also served as a moving account of the Aids crisis. His next two novels, Gone Tomorrow and Rent Boy, continued to probe the way Aids had changed what it meant to be gay in America. He refused to fall into either easy moralising or nostalgia for the world that had been left behind. 

Indiana’s writing attempted to make sense of the violence and underbelly of contemporary life — particularly gay life — but his satirical instincts remained intact even when he dealt with the darkest and most transgressive subject matter. 

“There was a performative quality of Gary’s rage and anxieties,” said Chris Kraus, a writer who reissued Indiana’s work as a publisher at Semiotext (e). He worked himself “into a lather on the page to the point it became schtick or self-parody”.

In the late 1990s, a trilogy of novels brought an engrossing, modernist approach to true crime. Resentment: A Comedy, released in 1997, followed the trial and media fanfare around Lyle and Erik Menendez, two brothers who had killed their parents in their Beverly Hills mansion. Three-Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, was a fictionalised account of a gay man who had embarked on a killing spree, murdering five people including fashion designer Gianni Versace.

The final book in the trilogy, Depraved Indifference, centred on incest and a pair of mother-and-son con artists, and treated grift as a central feature of modern capitalism.

In the past few decades, Indiana began to shuttle between the US and Cuba, escaping post-9/11 New York and writing a memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love.

Following reissues of his novels and cultural reportage in recent years, Indiana found a new audience among a generation of writers and artists who came to see him as a vital link to an earlier avant garde that was more risky and less pliant to commercial pressures. But he never retreated to a more palatable literary stardom, or lost his edge.

“He was being treated for lung cancer these last few years,” Dan Simon, who published Indiana’s work at Seven Stories Press, told the FT. “Once at a dinner he lit up a cigarette and I said to him: ‘Are you really smoking, with lung cancer?’ He replied, ‘Of course I have lung cancer, and of course I’m smoking.’”