Andrew Durbin, author and editor-in-chief of Frieze Magazine, spent nearly five years writing The Wonderful World That Almost Was. This dual biography of photographer Peter Hujar and sculptor Paul Thek—two gay artists who created extraordinary work in the years before and during the AIDS crisis—focuses on their friendship, creativity, and collaboration over more than three decades. They died within a year of each other, in 1987 and 1988, both from complications related to AIDS.
The work and lives of Thek and Hujar have surged back into the cultural conversation in recent years. Hujar was portrayed by Ben Whishaw in Ira Sachs’s poetic 2025 film, Peter Hujar’s Day, and his photographs have graced the cover of an Anohni and the Johnsons album and Hanya Yanagihara’s bestseller A Little Life. Thek’s resurgence has been slower; his most significant works were large-scale installations in Europe, all now lost, which, as Durbin notes, “everyone loved, but few could experience. And when they were finished, there wasn’t much left to sell. But I think his moment is about to come.”
When I meet Durbin in Berlin in late March, he says he hasn’t slept much in the lead-up to the book’s release. After we talk, he’ll speak at the local gallery Gropius Bau, where an exhibition of Peter Hujar’s photography is on view through June 28. This is the first stop on his book tour, and he seems relieved to finally be discussing it. “I wanted to show that they truly lived,” he says of Hujar and Thek. “They accomplished so much, even as they were dying.”
The Wonderful World That Almost Was is an important act of literary recovery in queer art. To write it, Durbin had to race against time: many sources passed away during the book’s completion, including the executors of Thek’s and Hujar’s estates.
Among the many cruelties of AIDS was a second erasure: families claiming their sons died of another illness, stripping their queerness from the record. The collections of many artists—even those celebrated in their time—were scattered and lost. Such a fate might have befallen Hujar and Thek as well, if not for the people Durbin interviewed. His book extends that work, capturing the intimacy of a groundbreaking couple in 20th-century art.
“The lives of artists who died of AIDS have often been read backwards, through the lens of the disease,” Durbin writes in the book’s introduction. “They are seen as tragic, twilight figures.” Working against that narrative, the book centers on their lives from 1954 to 1975, with their deaths addressed only in the epilogue. The result is a love story that feels messy and real.
Hujar first photographed Thek in Coral Gables, Florida, around 1956 or 1957, when they were in their early twenties. By 1960, they were neighbors on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and in love. When I ask Durbin about Thek’s legendary magnetism (Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal were among those who fell for him), he says: “Paul was like a child. He was excited about the world. He was funny, he was playful, he made you laugh. He made you want to take care of him.”
A postcard sent to Hujar from Fire Island shows a crowded beach with a single figure circled by Thek’s pen. On the back, he wrote: “A photograph of happy persons, except me, I am seen looking everywhere for you.”
While on holiday in Sicily in 1963, they descended into Palermo’s Capuchin Catacombs, where photography was forbidden. Hujar, camera in hand, ignored the rule. Paul reached into one glass coffin and picked up what he thought was a piece of paper. It was a fragment of dried human thigh. “I felt strangely relieved and free,” he later said in a 1966 interview for Artnews. “It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like…”Hujar’s photographs of the catacombs were later published as Portraits in Life and Death (1976), the only book he released during his lifetime. For Thek, that afternoon planted the seed for his “meat pieces”—uncanny sculptures of wax flesh displayed in glass-and-metal cases that recalled Christian reliquaries. These works quickly made him the art world’s unsettling new star.
Both men resisted being pinned down. Thek often destroyed his work, deliberately misdated paintings, and created fragile, temporary installations that left nothing behind to sell. Hujar, as Durbin explains, “didn’t want to be known as just a gay photographer.” Even while photographing explicitly gay subjects—such as cruising grounds on the West Side, parks at night, lovers, drag queens, and openly queer friends and artists—Hujar worried that claiming a gay identity would relegate his work to a subcategory most museums and serious critics would ignore. When he did shoot male nudes, including a series of erotic images of David Wojnarowicz, he released them under an anagram of his name: Jute Harper, part of his long search for a fitting alias. Still, his lens continually returned to iconic queer figures like Candy Darling, Susan Sontag, Fran Lebowitz, Wojnarowicz, Jackie Curtis, and John Waters.
In August 1975, Thek sat for his final photo sessions with Hujar. Their relationship had been fraying. “There isn’t a single moment when it began,” Durbin says of their falling out. “It’s a spectrum of experiences. A book can’t capture that.” The sessions produced some of Hujar’s most powerful portraits. “In the second session,” Durbin writes, “Paul’s face moves through all his feelings for Peter—his love, his envy, his dismissal, his misunderstandings, his wanting to forget, his wanting to forgive.”
The last letter Thek wrote to Hujar is filled with ideas and suggestions for Portraits in Life and Death, which was then in progress: “A bush, a door, a gate, a road, a tunnel, pearls.” He writes as if they are at the beginning of something, not the end. The final line reads: “Any time you want to make love, just ask me.”
For queer readers who came of age after AIDS claimed a generation and obscured how those men loved, worked, and created, The Wonderful World That Almost Was offers something rare: proof. “I would love for them to read this,” Durbin says of younger readers, “and realize they can make art however they want.”
“It’s less possible now to have the careers Peter and Paul had,” Durbin acknowledges. “Few can live in New York’s East Village today and work as a photographer. That urban bohemia is gone. But some still remember it, and it is an acute, painful loss. We want a world where Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis are our neighbors. This is the New York we long for and miss. We want those bars where really cool people sit and drink beer.”
Linda Rosenkrantz, now 91 and one of the last surviving members of Hujar’s inner circle, says that Durbin’s book sheds new light on the photographer’s private life: “I don’t think I realized how major the relationship with Thek was in Peter’s life,” she writes. “I suppose it was obscured, even by me, until Andrew explored it so fully.”
That reckoning is now accelerating: in New York, a MoMA screening series is running this month, Durbin’s own exhibition opens this week at Ortuzar Projects, and Galerie Buchholz opens a Thek show on May 13, with a major exhibition also planned at the Watermill Center later this year. “This is a big success in terms of an estate and legacy,” says Noah Khoshbin, president of the Paul Thek Foundation. “This is an artist who did not have a single work in an American institution.”When he died, Thek left behind no institution to preserve his legacy.
In 1975, Thek wrote to Hujar: “…all we wanted to do, and still want to do, is add our names, almost like the lists on tombs for the unknown millions—soldiers and others. We wanted to say, ‘I was here too!'”
The spirit of The Wonderful World That Almost Was is a powerful call for these artists to finally receive the recognition they deserved. “I will love these artists until I die,” Durbin tells me. “And I’m sure I’ll be talking about Peter Hujar and Paul Thek for the rest of my life.”
The Wonderful World That Almost Was by Andrew Durbin will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 14 in the US and Australia, and by Granta on April 23 in the UK. Peter Hujar/Liz Deschenes: Persistence of Vision is on view at Gropius Bau in Berlin until August 23.
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs They achieved so much even as they were dying The Art of Peter Hujar Paul Thek
Beginner General Questions
1 Who were Peter Hujar and Paul Thek
They were two influential American artists close friends who worked primarily in New York from the 1960s until their deaths from AIDSrelated illnesses in the late 1980s Hujar was a master photographer and Thek was a painter sculptor and installation artist
2 Why are they often discussed together
Their deep personal friendship and artistic dialogue were central to their lives and work They influenced each other profoundly shared a circle of creative friends and both created art that intimately explored themes of life death vulnerability and the body
3 What does the phrase even as they were dying refer to
It highlights how both artists produced some of their most powerful and celebrated work in the final years of their lives during the early AIDS crisisa period of immense personal and collective trauma
4 What kind of art did Peter Hujar make
Hujar created stark intimate blackandwhite portraits He photographed friends lovers artists and even animals and cityscapes with a direct unflinching and deeply empathetic style that revealed the essence of his subjects
5 What kind of art did Paul Thek make
Thek was known for his innovative and unsettling work He began with hyperrealistic sculptures of raw meat and body parts and later created sprawling fragile installations using ephemeral materials like wax newspaper and sand often called processions or environments
6 Were they gay artists
Yes they were openly gay and their identities and communities were integral to their work Their art often explored queer intimacy desire and the experience of living outside mainstream society especially as the AIDS epidemic unfolded
Deeper Advanced Questions
7 How did the AIDS crisis affect their work and legacy
The epidemic provided a devastating urgent context for their longstanding themes of mortality Their late work is often seen as a profound prescient meditation on loss the fragility of the body and the resilience of creative spirit Their deaths like many artists of their generation initially overshadowed their work which was later rediscovered and
