Wojnarowicz was born in Red Bank, New Jersey, where he and his siblings survived physical abuse by their father, Ed Wojnarowicz. After his parents' divorce, he moved to New York as a teenager with his mother, Australian-born Dolores McGuinness. Ed, a Polish-American merchant marine from Detroit, had met and married Dolores in Sydney, Australia, in 1948 when he was 26 and she was 16. During his teenage years in Manhattan, Wojnarowicz worked as a street hustler around Times Square. He graduated from the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan.