Red M(irage) by David Wojnarowicz and John Ensslin
Red M(irage)

1977

Saddle-stitched

Red Herring Press

8.5 x 5.5 inches

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Dedicated to his murdered friend (and John Ensslin’s ex-girlfriend) Lee Adler, Red M is Wojnarowicz’s earliest artistic endeavor from this short-lived period of his life. “The title stood for ‘red mirage,’ or as David used to say Red M I Rage,” John Ensslin explained in Cynthia Carr’s biography of Wojnarowicz, Fire in the Belly. “It had to do with this thing David talked about. There’s what you see in front of you and then there’s this movie that plays in your head, this internal vision you have of what’s going on around you. He used to call it ‘the film behind the eyeball.’ That was his expression. So the magazine, if it had any collective reason for being—it was a celebration of people’s individual visions.” David went to great lengths to conceal his early poetry and writings, even to those closest to him at the end of his life, going so far as to exclude all of the articles and magazines in which he was published from his Fales archive, aside from one exception, his beloved copy of Red M. Extremely rare.

G.E.

Work by David Wojnarowicz; David Ensslin