“An American writer.” That’s how Gary Indiana, who has died aged 74, described himself to me when I first ran into him at the Village Voice in the no-wave early 1980s.

Elfin yet fierce, with the knowing look of someone who had been around the chopping block of desire, Gary struck me as an authentic downtown literary artist, with a provenance that roped in Frank O’Hara’s concept of personism and Lou Reed’s unsparing empathy. (I’d throw in Joan Didion, but I’m pretty sure that Gary would haunt me if I did.)

He wasn’t born Indiana – his real surname was Hoisington. I never knew why he changed it, but I took the revision as a sly homage to Robert Indiana, and his byline was fitting for a writer who became the Voice’s art critic during the reign of Reagan.

Gary, who was born in New Hampshire in 1950, covered the deadly exploits of Andrew Cunanan and the Menendez brothers, turning their crimes into a dark critique of American values. He wrote a searing play about Roy Cohn, made savage, sometimes campy videos, and earned his reputation as a bête noir of the art world and a hero to the underground.

Maybe that’s why I was eager to help him with a particularly New York problem: stopping the landlord from throwing him out of his East Village apartment. Because I edited some of the paper’s best reporters on local politics, I was aware of the options, and I ran them by Gary. Presumably he kept his flat, since he never mentioned the threat again. I like to think that having a cheap crib in a hot neighborhood is one of the three great New York accomplishments.

Another one is hearing that “the check is in the mail”. To get an idea of the third achievement, read Gary’s fiction, in which the most florid sexual promises turn out to be lies. Here’s my favorite example, from his novel Horse Crazy (the steed being, probably, heroin). The protagonist is sitting in a bar when he sees the man of his most torrid dreams on a distant stool. He works up the courage to approach, only to discover that the guy is really a spot on the wall. Few writers have been as acute to the fallacies of erotic life.

I recall editing a remarkable piece of reportage by Gary that involved attending a straight porn shoot in LA. It was an elaborately detailed account, but the most memorable thing was its lack of sexual charge, a tone that captured both the explicitness and the distance of professional pornography. We made his piece the cover of that issue, with photos by Sylvia Plachy that fully embodied his POV. Because of its candor – or maybe because of the alienation that the piece evoked – we got into some sort of trouble; I don’t remember the details, but advertiser boycotts and bomb threats were frequent reminders that the Voice was doing something right. And publishing Gary Indiana, with his tactile crossover of journalistic skill and literary chops, is part of what that right thing was.

“People thought I was gratuitously vicious,” he told a colleague, Joy Press, who interviewed him for the Voice in 2002, “but I was just trying to be honest. It gave me the opportunity to introduce a note of dissonance into the march of folly. People think that you’re self-destructive if you’re willing to make gestures against power that ensure the making of enemies. But if your only concern in life is your success and viability among the people who wield power, then you might as well just start taking a lot of Klonopin every day.” Today, when many people make gestures against power in the most power-hungry ways, Gary Indiana would stand by those words – and the words stand for him.

Richard Goldstein is the former executive editor of the Village Voice