Why “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” Endures in the Twenty-First Century

It’s thirty-five years later and the twenty-first printing of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. I love this book, it’s why I’m here now. It amazes me that it still resonates in the world. I’ve lived many lives since then. That was perhaps the lifetime that formed me the most, the years of the Ballad. I still believe these photos tell the truth of that time. It’s important, for me, to recontextualize the afterword every ten years. The foreword is forever, that’s the real narrative of this work. Just like I constantly re-edit my slideshows, I want to continue updating the record of my life.

I grew up in a period in which the glue of suburbia was denial. It maintained the culture, the mentality, the outer face. I didn’t accept the myths that families tell themselves and present to the world. I saw very early that my experience could be negated. That I never said that, I never did that, that never happened. I needed to get away.

I took the pictures in this book so that nostalgia could never color my past. I wanted to make a record of my life that nobody could revise: not a safe, clean version, but instead, an account of what things really looked like and felt like and smelled like. I don’t think I could, at this age and in this body now, live the life that I lived then. It took a certain level of fearlessness, a wildness, quick changes—of clothes, of friends, of lovers, of cities.

When I wonder what people are talking about when they say that the Ballad helped them, I guess that it showed young people there was another way to live, that they didn’t have to swallow the version of the norm that hurt them, that they didn’t feel part of, that was destroying them. The book gave a mirror to kids who had no reflection of themselves in the world around them. They knew that they weren’t alone.

In the old days, people told me they moved to New York because of the Ballad. They were introduced to other great artists, other great personalities, and a whole other world of brilliance and beauty. They found a world where friends could replace family, where the people who kept you alive were the ones you chose. Relationships weren’t based on toxic expectations of who you were. You were free to be anyone you wanted. Somebody told me recently my work averted their suicide. If I can help one person survive, that’s the ultimate purpose of my work.

It’s commonly said that this book is about “marginalized” people. We were never marginalized. We were the world. We were our own world, and we could have cared less about what “straight” people thought of us. I made my people into superstars, and the Ballad maintains their legacy.

In the ’80s, there was a certain freedom, and a sense of immortality, that ended with that decade. AIDS cracked the earth. With everyone dying, everything shifted. Our history got cut off. We lost a whole generation. We lost a culture. We didn’t just lose the actors, we lost the audience. There are few people left with that kind of intensity. There was an attitude towards life that doesn’t exist any- more, everything’s been so cleaned up.

Lately when I’m working with the photos of my missing friends, it’s as if they are frozen in amber. For long periods of time I forget they’re not on this planet. But the pictures show me how much I’ve lost; the people who knew me the best, the people who carried my history, the people I grew up with and I was planning to get old with are gone. They took my memory with them. The pictures in the Ballad haven’t changed. But Cookie is dead. David is dead. Greer is dead. Kenny is dead. I talk to them all the time, but they don’t talk back anymore. Mourning doesn’t end, it continues and it transmutes. This book is now a volume of loss, as well as a ballad of love.

In spite of everyone dying around me, there is that sense in your youth that you’re immortal. Death isn’t relevant to you directly. I went from being young to being old, I didn’t experience the transition. In your sixties, it’s a much different awareness of death, of seeing how limited your time is and how quickly it goes. After fifty a woman is invisible in this country, which is sort of a relief, it gives you a freedom that I like. Americans are not conditioned to respect their elders. Young people are really dismissive, you lose your credibility. They treat me like a crazy old lady because I look like a punk grandma. I’ve talked to other women over fifty and many of them feel the same. I would like to just not give a fuck.

The world has changed so much as to be unrecognizable. These are dark days. Everybody has to find their way to fight back, because that’s all we have. We don’t have elected officials that are going to fight for us. We don’t have leaders that will save us. We don’t have courts that will give us justice. We have the media but it’s been jeopardized. The people in the streets are the only chance we have.

When I got sober in 1988 and came out of my self-imposed isolation, I realized the extent of the AIDS epidemic and how many of my friends were dying. I curated the first show about AIDS in New York, Witnesses Against Our Vanishing. The catalogue was censored because of the brilliant and furious words of David Wojnarowicz, which provoked outrage and brought people to the streets. Witnesses helped lay the foundation for the art world to start organizing around AIDS.

When I got sober in 2017, I needed to find my fight again. As always, I did what I know in my body. For three years, I’d been lost in a deadly addiction to Oxycontin. I came out of my own opioid crisis and realized that America was in the throes of a terrible overdose crisis. I couldn’t stand by to watch another generation disappear.

I decided to make the personal political. I organized a group of artists and activists called P.A.I.N. (Prescription Addiction Intervention Now). Our first mission was to target the Sacklers, the family behind Oxycontin. Their private Pharma company ignited the opioid overdose epidemic, profiting off the addiction and death of five hundred thousand Americans. To get their ear we called them out on the stage where their name was most celebrated––the museum world. Through their toxic philanthropy they created a myth, but we succeeded in changing their legacy.

My work is in the permanent collections of these museums and at the risk of ruining my career I confronted them as an artist. P.A.I.N. is a small group but we make a lot of noise through direct action. We started by throwing thousands of fake Oxy bottles into the Nile at The Met in 2018 and since then we’ve acted up in museums across the world. We’ve been successful in pushing institutions to live up to their ethical mandate by cutting ties with the family and taking down their name.

By giving a public face to the opioid epidemic we’re helping to destigmatize drug use and over- dose. P.A.I.N. is not anti-opioid, we’re anti-opioid profiteers. We’re working with other activists to create a safe world for drug users.

One thing I haven’t talked about all these years is my sex work in the late ’70s and early ’80s. That’s how I could afford to buy the film and to develop the photos in this book. I’ve always needed to protect this secret. Many people already write about the Ballad in a very reductive way, that it’s only about drugs and sex. I worried that this would become the voyeuristic filter through which all of the work would be viewed. That who I am and everything I do would be discredited by that role.

A sex worker is a hard worker, and it’s a term that shows due respect. Words matter. The same evolution of language applies to people with substance-use disorder, those of us who used to be called junkies. I feel it’s important to share my last secret, the one I’ve held onto since the ’70s, in order to combat stigma. If it gives a voice to somebody else to feel less shame, then it’s worth it.

My thoughts about relationships and interdependency have changed over the decades. I still make no emotional distinction between my friends and my lovers. But I don’t want the same kind of stranglehold intimacy that I needed in the past. I don’t need somebody else to prove I exist. There’s no Nan Goldin in my house, there’s only Nan.

Photography has been redemptive for me, it’s helped me chart my descents and my reconstruction. For many years, I didn’t pick up a camera except to photograph the sky. I lost the need to photo- graph my life or the people in it. My photos were no longer my diary, my paintings were. Then during the COVID-19 quarantine, I started photographing a new friend for the first time in years. I wanted to show my friend her beauty. It’s fascinating to see how much a face can change over a year when you look at someone deeply enough and how the degree of intimacy colors a photo.

When I was a kid I thought, What a waste if I don’t leave a mark on the world. Through the Ballad I found a way to make a mark.

This essay originally appeared in Aperture’s 2021 edition of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.