A Note of Dissonance

For the magazine, he wrote a virtuoso essay about the work of Louise Bourgeois (“A Coney Island of the Viscera”) in 2019. Picking a favorite passage from that piece is like choosing among one’s children. But this sample gives a good sense of the whole:

“She treasured books, mostly paperbacks, stacked and shelved in no discernible order. She never threw anything out. In those years, she still left the house; we ran into each other at openings. As it happens, I loved her. At her house one afternoon, she fetched the monkey fur she wore in the famous portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, draped it over my shoulders and said, ‘I think you should wear this for a while.’”

In 2022, Gary wrote a harrowing piece for the magazine in response to Paul McCarthy’s NV/Night Vater, a dark rumination on fascism, celebrity and the 1974 movie The Night Porter. (A razor-sharp line from that essay: “Hollywood is amazing, Lucia says. I’ve never felt so alive or so dead.”)

Gary was a joy to edit and a marvel to read. We will miss his moral fervor, his wit and his lifelong devotion, as he once described it, to introducing “a note of dissonance into the march of folly.”