Henry Darger, Throw-Away Boy: The Tragic Life of an Outsider ArtistBy Jim Elledge (Overlook Press)
Henry Darger was born in Chicago, probably in 1892, into a poor Catholic family and a rough circumstance: when he was an infant his parents moved to West Madison Street, around Halsted, which Elledge describes as “one of Chicago’s most notorious vice zones.” His mother died in childbirth when Darger was three years old and his father descended into alcoholism and destitution. Unsupervised, Darger “ran wild” through their rough neighborhood, racking up an impressive record: setting a fire, slashing a nun with a knife, throwing ashes into the eyes of a peer. At age 12 he was sent to a Catholic home for boys after he was caught masturbating in public.
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When one of his escape attempts finally works, Darger makes it back to Chicago. He finds work as a janitor and, more importantly, and possibly for the first time in his life, he finds a real friend—”friend” in the pre-Stonewall euphemistic sense. Whillie is an older man, whom Darger may have met at church. Their relationship spanned decades. In their time together they went sometimes to the old Riverview Amusement Park, which Elledge says was a popular gathering spot for gay men. They had their portrait taken together on a set designed to look like a caboose. It’s captioned, in the style of the times, with a jaunty phrase—”We’re on our way”—which provokes from Elledge a special inanity (“The caption suggests a journey to an actual destination, especially because of the train motif, but it also refers to a metaphoric journey—their relationship”).
About a fictional character, Darger wrote this: “One cause mainly of the boy being bad, and a foolish one at that was because he was angry at God for not having created him into a girl which he wanted to be more than anything else.” Elledge elides an obvious possibility about the gender identities of Darger and his contemporaries with a single sentence: “Initially this might seem as if they believed that they were transgendered, but the context in which they admitted dissatisfaction with their gender has nothing to do with feeling that their gender didn’t match their bodies.”
