The proliferation of versions of A Fire in My Belly being shown publicly, along with inaccurate statements made about them in the media, prompted Marvin Taylor and Brent Phillips at the Fales Library and Special Collections to release a fact sheet about A Fire In My Belly. On November 29th, one month after Hide/Seek opened, the Christian News Service published an article by Penny Starr entitled “Smithsonian Christmas-Season Exhibit Features Ant-Covered Jesus, Naked Brothers Kissing, Genitalia, and Ellen DeGeneres Grabbing Her Breasts.”[4] The Christian News Service is a division of the Media Research Center, a conservative organization whose mission is to “prove—through sound scientific research—that liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values.”[5], A photo of the film in the exhibition, taken by Starr, was included at the top of the article, with the caption “A crucifix in the video A Fire in My Belly, part of the ‘'Hide/Seek'’ exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. In the Mexican photographs with the coins and the clock and the gun and the Christ figure and all that, I used the ants as a metaphor for society because the social structure of the ant world is parallel to ours.". Conditions apply. David Wojnarowicz. This begins at the two minute mark in Bart Everly’s website. Clough was the Secretary of the Smithsonian who made the decision to remove A Fire in My Belly from the Hide/Seek exhibition. Julia Haas and Alison Maurer, both former students of Jonathan David Katz at Smith College, created the website HideSeek.org, which featured both films put online by PPOW Gallery. The YouTube version of FIMB with music from Plague Mass by Diamanda Galas was loaded by Semiotext(e). PPOW Gallery also issued an Official Statement on the controversy, which read: On behalf of the estate, the gallery would like to offer the artist's words to illuminate his original intentions. "The sound was added for the exhibit, but as stated, we have not seen the combined edit.".

This added soundtrack was not part of the artist’s original work and/or vision and probably has led people to think that A Fire in My Belly was about the AIDS crisis. von Praunheim directed Silence=Death, where footage from Mexico...etc...Peter...etc was used. About Face: How Eleven Seconds of Film Endangered the Smithsonian. Become a SmartPartner today. Retrieved from, Starr, Penny. However, Wojnarowicz never publicly displayed A Fire In My Belly in a finished form, and the version shown at the Smithsonian was created specifically for Hide/Seek by Katz and the artist Bart Everly, with permission from the Wojnarowicz estate. An excerpt of the work was removed from the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture following protests by a religious group and conservative politicians. In a 1989 interview Wojnarowicz spoke about the role of animals as symbolic imagery in his work, stating, "Animals allow us to view certain things that we wouldn't allow ourselves to see in regard to human activity. Wojnarowicz’s collected papers and work are held by the Fales Library and Special Collections in New York City. and 7 min. Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York and The Fales Library and Special Collections/New York University. “Clough defends removal of video” [Los Angeles] 19 January 2011. In a press release (since removed from their website), the Association of Art Museum Directors strongly rebuked the Smithsonian for their decision. Rosa von Praunheim In part, the statement read: On December 4th, Michael Blasenstein and Michael Dax Iacovone were arrested inside the National Portrait Gallery, for handing out leaflets about the controversy while wearing iPads hung around their necks that were playing A Fire In My Belly. Jeremy Biles writes about Wojnarowicz in the Divinity School's newsletter of religion and politics, Sightings. Fire in the Belly, the first biography of David Wojnarowicz, is perhaps the saddest and most devestating book you will read this year. Please try your request again later. (Video below). Something went wrong. 7. Penny Starr PPOW Gallery, which represents the Wojnarowicz estate, made two versions of A Fire In My Belly viewable on its website: the entire seven-minute reel labeled “Mexico, etc…” that Katz had used as source material, and a thirteen-minute Super 8mm reel of related footage, also contained in the Wojnarowicz archive at the Fales Library and Special Collections, which Wojnarowicz himself had labeled “A Fire In My Belly.” They also made DVDs of these works available to any institution that wanted to show them.