ANDREW DURBIN
Andrew Durbin is a poet, novelist and editor. His upcoming dual biography The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek (2026) traces the friendship and romance between the artists, from their first encounter to the painful end of their relationship in the mid-1970s.
Published in Issue 106 of TANK Magazine
Interview by Matteo Pini and Christabel Stewart
CS Can you talk about the development of your relationship to Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, as an editor and writer yourself?
AD The first time I saw a large collection of Peter’s work was in 2018 at the Morgan Library. That same year, I had wanted to write a play about Peter and Paul’s relationship, an idea that I eventually shelved. In early 2021, my editor and I were discussing my writing a book related to queer art, and I said, “It has to be Peter Hujar.” Since then, there has been an explosion in Peter’s renown: the Raven Row show, Ira Sachs’s film Peter Hujar’s Day (2025), and the Linda Rosenkrantz book on which it was based, as well as a large exhibition of his early photography at the Ukrainian Museum in New York. With Paul Thek, the revival has been slightly slower, but there are some major shows planned for the next few years. We live in a moment where people are craving authenticity. If you look at these two artists, they had very specific, uncompromising artistic visions. In the contemporary art world – whether you’re thinking about the market, how galleries are structured or AI – there are so many compromises asked of artists today. It’s impossible to live in a city like London or New York on the kind of budget that Peter and Paul lived on. In many ways, the world that made them possible, that allowed art to live and create so radically – that world doesn’t exist anymore.
MP Both artists seemed fated, in part due to their own volatile personalities, to remain on the sidelines.
AD In some ways, Peter was a victim of photography’s awkward position in the mid-20th-century art world. He wasn’t a Richard Avedon-style commercial photographer, and the gallery system hadn’t yet accepted photographers as artists in the way we think of them now. He straddled these worlds – commercial and fine art – but there wasn’t really a space for work like his. Though Paul’s path was more obvious, he refused to make paintings or sculptures that were palatable for most people.
CS I adore the book’s introduction, which describes a moment at the Chiesetta della Madonna della Civita in Ponza, Italy, where you look for an “unremarkable but beloved” portrait of the Madonna and Child, that the locals had entrusted Paul Thek to touch up. Did the process of writing the book involve both geographical and art-historical journeying?
AD I felt that I had to go to all the places where they lived or worked. In Ponza, I met people who knew Paul, who housed him, and I saw many of his works in their bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms. There were other places, such as Casteldaccia, where Paul lived in a tower in 1962–63, where I could only find some small trace of him, like the view that he would have had from his window. Still, I always learned something new every visit. The research into Peter’s life was much easier since he was a fastidious organiser of his own archive; it’s all more or less in one place – the Morgan Library. Paul, on the other hand, was the opposite: much of his work is in different private collections or has been destroyed, so I had to chase a lot of things down.
CS When you are writing about people who have died, you have to extrapolate certain facts or feelings. Is this a typical poetic license lent to the writing of biography?
AD While I was writing the book, I encountered a few gaps in their lives where we don’t quite know what they were doing. For example, there’s not much from the period from 1960 to 1962, when Peter and Paul first got together. That made writing this book tricky – so much of a relationship takes place between two people in a private room, between two gazes. I never wanted to invent scenarios or moments for them, of course, and I often signal to the reader that some things are missing or unknown, but I also understood that I had a responsibility as a writer to provide some understanding of what was happening between them. I always drew on their own materials – letters, photographs, diaries – as well as the memories of their friends, in attempting to reconstruct something of their feelings. Paul kept many notebooks, and he wrote constantly about himself. He often reflected on past relationships, too. So, I usually had enough material to work out some of their feelings.
MP Peter had a close relationship with animals, and in some ways, his photography of animals feels more intimate than that of humans. What did animals allow him to access?
AD Many people who watched Peter photograph animals remember how special those moments were. His communication with them was so intimate and fundamental. Peter grew up on a farm, and he had a complicated, destructive relationship with his family. In my book, Fran Lebowitz says that Peter saw something of himself in the suffering of animals, which is why his animal photographs have such incredible pathos. I was very annoyed with Susan Sontag when I was writing this book. On Photography reduces photography to the machine itself. But a great photograph is so dependent on the sensibility of an individual’s eye. Those animal photographs really make that clear, because nobody photographs a cow or duck like Peter.
CS You quote Peter saying that he doesn’t want to be remembered as a gay photographer. Similarly, Paul’s sexuality was complicated.
AD At times, Paul struggled with his sexuality – he was mostly attracted to men, but homosexuality often struck him as flawed and empty; he badly wanted a wife and kids. There were periods when I was working on Paul where I felt demoralised and exhausted because of the depths of his torment. I wished, in a naive way, that I could hold his hand, but many people tried that in his life, and it didn’t work.
MP Both artists died of AIDS-related complications, but you write at the start that you don’t want their narratives to be defined by this fact. How was writing the end of the book?
AD By the 1980s, Peter and Paul were no longer speaking, but I knew I wanted to somehow bring them together again. I thought about a beautiful letter the artist Ann Wilson sent to Peter when she learned he was sick. In it, she quotes the Eucharistic prayer – something that becomes a throughline in the epilogue of my book. Both men struggled with their faith, but faith was important to them, and faith allowed me to hold them close at the end. It’s an elegy.