sex in the archives

What is it about?

This article deals with some very queer diaries in The New York Public Library, the David Louie Bowie Diaries, 1978–1993. These descriptions of New York sex in the periods before and after AIDS consist of text, drawings, and photographs, including information on drug taking, numerous clubs (the Mineshaft was one of Bowie’s haunts), a great amount of casual sex, and material dealing with the New York fisting scene. They are not philosophical or romantic reminiscences but sex diaries. The article deals both with a described sexual world and the source that represents it. The diaries are a chronicle. But they are also sexual objects, Bowie’s own sexual archive. He was aroused both by the memories they stored and his textual and visual renderings. He refers to masturbating to his drawings – even while executing them. The archive is imbricated in its recorded sexual encounters in intriguing ways.

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Why is it important?

The diaries contain sexual accounts, sexual histories, yet they are also sexual exhibits; drawings (mainly of the penises of their creator's sexual partners) are interspersed with the text. This article deals both with a described sexual world and the source that represents it. The diaries provide details of the New York sex in the periods before and after AIDS, what their author called a “Daily Diary of an American Gay Experience.” They provide an extended glimpse of a sexual milieu that, as Andrew Holleran once observed, can now seem “as exotic as ancient Egypt.”

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