Class Notes

Douglas Crimp changed my life. He also saved my marriage, which is funny, since he thought marriage was a repressive institution of the state. But that was Douglas—incisive mind, capacious heart.

My husband and I were married in Rochester the weekend before I started in the PhD program in Visual and Cultural Studies. The first two years were a rough transition for us, not least of all because we Southern Californians had never experienced winter and we moved to Rochester without a car. So when Douglas, the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History, loaned me his car while he was traveling, our life became easier. But more than the car, it was the talks with Douglas to and from the airport that felt freeing. He was always going somewhere, writing something new, visiting some brilliant scholar or curator or artist. I cherished those car rides. His feet were so big, sometimes when he’d push the gas pedal his foot would inadvertently also press down on the brakes. I remember his big winter gloves on the steering wheel. The smell of brakes. I miss listening to him. If he was going on a long trip, he would bring me his citrus fruit so it wouldn’t go to waste. On one of our rides, he told me that when he was growing up in Idaho, one birthday he wished for all the bacon he could eat. So I started getting bacon for him. Oranges out, bacon in. That was our routine. When he was away, I’d drive around Rochester in his rusty green Nissan Sentra, listening to his opera cassettes, and I’d imagine the constellation of artists and activists and theorists that surrounded Douglas, and that I might someday be a part of too.

Then Douglas hired me to assist him with the research for his book on Andy Warhol’s films. He was adamant that my work for him not interfere with the progress of my own research. Little did he know that this would be one of the most inspiring and informative experiences of my life. In helping him, I learned how he researched, what threads he followed, how he put it all together.

When Douglas died in July, those who had encountered his work remembered him as one of the world’s most important critics of contemporary art and a foundational thinker in queer theory. For me, he was a friend and a mentor, from whom I learned how to write.

Douglas was a beautiful writer. But he didn’t archive himself. He threw away most of his early drafts. He cared more about living and thinking than he did about keeping things. He told me the prospect of owning real estate terrified him, so he rented. I remember visiting him at his apartment in New York City. His huge desk and bookshelves occupied the “living room.” We were eating lunch amidst his orchids at the small table near the windows, and the Fed Ex man walked in. Douglas said it happened all the time because “they don’t think anyone lives here”—all the other building occupants were businesses.

Douglas expressed his resistance to normativity in his scholarship, his activism, in the art he loved, and the way he lived. He wrote me once saying that he felt like a “freak” in Rochester because, “I went to see the live broadcast of the Bolshoi production of The Pharaoh’s Daughter (admittedly not the best-known ballet) at Tinseltown Greece and I was the ONLY person in the audience.” I love to imagine him there, in that suburban multiplex theater, all alone, watching ballet. I find it totally inspiring.

As I look back on all that Douglas taught me about the queer world and art and writing, I realize that what he really showed me is what it means to live a creative life.

—Lucy Mulroney ’13 (PhD)

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Mulroney is the associate director of collections, research, and education at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale. She is also the author of Andy Warhol, Publisher (University of Chicago Press, 2018).