When Paul Thek and Peter Hujar’s mutual friend, the author Linda Rosenkrantz, portrayed the two artists in her 1968 novel Talk, it was as a single character named Clem Nye. While he never appears in the story, the sexy and talented Clem is a continual object of fascination. In Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was, the real-life models for this character come into sharp focus – no longer a myth but an uncompromising, sometimes fractious reality.

Thek and Hujar were an indelible part of the New York scene of the 1960s and after. Thek became known for a multifaceted practice that spanned realist painting and conceptualist installations; Hujar remained dedicated to photography. Both, however, dwelt on the fringes. In the six years that Thek showed with the trend-setting Stable Gallery in the 1960s, he barely sold a thing. ‘I only hope someone with my talent will not starve,’ he once quipped. Hujar never took to fashion photography with the same gusto as, say, Richard Avedon. As Durbin remarks: ‘He was so much better at capturing performers, on- and offstage, than he ever was supermodels swaddled in stylists.’

Beginning in the late 1950s, when the pair were in their twenties, the story unfolds episodically, providing a meandering account of their gradual passage from love to alienation. We are given sketches of Thek’s dreary middle-class childhood in Brooklyn and Long Island, and of Hujar’s more humble and troubled beginnings.