ANDREW DURBIN
Author reading and discussion with curator Tim Johnson and writer Eileen Myles
October 24 at Bull Room
Doors at 6 PM, with reading beginning at 6:30 PM
This Fall we welcome writer and author Andrew Durbin for a reading and discussion of his latest book: The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek (2026).
The evening will begin with an author reading by Durbin, followed by an in-depth conversation between Durbin, curator Tim Johnson, and writer Eileen Myles about the book. The program will conclude with a book signing, with copies available for purchase.
When Paul Thek met Peter Hujar in the winter of 1956 in Coral Gables, Florida, a slow-simmering connection began to burn. Thek, twenty-three and living in Miami, was handsome and itching to make it as a painter; in the twenty-two-year-old Hujar, a shy, sensual photographer, he’d found a kindred spirit. By 1960, they were dating and living in New York, beginning decades of sex, love, competition, and reconciliation—an entanglement that changed American art forever.
Surrounded by a robust creative scene populated by Susan Sontag, Andy Warhol, Fran Lebowitz, John Waters, and David Wojnarowicz, Thek and Hujar’s profoundly influential careers, from the early 1960s through the late 1980s, differed as much as the men themselves. The unpredictable and often overlooked Thek crafted visceral installations and sculptures, while Hujar, celebrated and sociable, took penetrating portraits of his world, queer and otherwise. Yet even at their most estranged, and even after their deaths from AIDS, both men were united by a pursuit of liberation—from artistic and sexual limits, from anything short of changing the world.
Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was unravels, for the first time, the intertwined stories and work of two boundary-burning, paradigm-tilting, never-more-relevant American artists. Weaving together deft art criticism with moving portraits of both men’s inner lives, and assembled with exhaustive research, Durbin’s book is an ode to a lost but still-living world—and two men who defined it.
Author Profile
Andrew Durbin is the editor in chief of frieze magazine. He is the author of The Wonderful World That Almost Was: A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, as well as the novels MacArthur Park, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award, and Skyland. He also served as the editor for Kevin Killian’s posthumous work Fascination. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, The Believer, The Paris Review online, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. He lives in London.