Woodson, Jason
From David Wojnarowicz Knowledge Base
Woodson is a visual artist. Inspired by Wojnarowicz's piece One Day This Kid..., Woodson created One Day This Kid (20 Years On). To create his version, Woodson altered the black and white image of Wojnarowicz as a young child in the original, giving it a rainbow gradient. On his website, Woodson wrote that "One Day This Kid (20 years on) is a response to the complacency and apathy in the modern LGBT community, framed against the Wojnarowicz piece."
Woodson also altered the text of the piece to read:
One day this kid will die. But before that he will fight. He will fight men who wear the uniforms of priests and rabbis, men who inhabit certain stone buildings, who will call for his death. He will fight politicians who enact legislation against him. He will fight families who give false information to their children and their children’s children, information designed to make existence intolerable for this kid. He will fight against all of this activity and information in his environment. He will fight against his own suicidal impulses, his own desire to submit to danger in the hopes of being murdered. He will fight against his own willingness to submit to silence and invisibility. He will fight attempts to silence him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation, drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving gangs, bottles, knives, religion, decapitation and immolation by fire. He will the doctors, psychologists and research scientists who pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus. He will fight despite being subjected to loss of home, civil rights, jobs and all conceivable freedoms. He will fight and he will die for all of the boys, who like him, discover their desire to place their naked body on the naked body of another boy. He will lay down his life so that one day they may dance till dawn fuelled [sic] by a heady cocktail of drugs, alcohol and steroids without fear of the police. He will lay down his life so that they may be considered a valuable pink commodity and sold things they do not need nor can afford. He will lay down his life so that they may enjoy watching and partaking in the kind of sex that killed him and call it erotic. He will lay down his life so that they will never know the fear of the virus that invaded his system, as they will think themselves invincible. He will lay down his life so that when those new priests and rabbis call for their deaths, they can go shopping. He will lay down his life so that when society uses the word GAY to describe anything they don’t like, they too can announce that they are not interested in fats, fems or Asians. He will lay down his life so that they can take their place in a bold new society as the bitchy queen, or the drama queen or any other form of comedic royalty. He will lay down his life so that their pride will be signified by the sound of a thousand shrill whistles as they push and step over the unconscious bodies of their brethern. He will lay down his life for all of the boys who like him, discovered their desire to place their naked body on the naked body of another boy and they will forget him.
