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 Without ever formally coming out, Andy Warhol was openly, obviously and famously queer almost a decade before Gay Liberation urged us “out of the closets and into the streets”.
Writing in The New York Times in 2002, Holland Cotter went so far as to call Warhol “the first major postwar artist to put gay identity … at the very centre of his work”. Says Cotter: “Just by being himself, a public sissy, he automatically became one of the most important political artists of his time.” For Cotter, sex was a “main ingredient” of Warhol’s work. “He did whole series of sexually explicit paintings and took hundreds, probably thousands, of explicit photographs … almost exclusively of men and male sex parts.”
As a rising star in the commercial art world of New York, Warhol had first attempted to go public with explicit homoerotica in 1957, a time when the fear of homosexuals was second only to the fear of communists in the American psyche. That year, New York’s hip Tanager Gallery refused to display Warhol’s drawings of boys kissing. “The style of his work was too decorative, the subject too gay, and he was too femme,” Cotter writes.
After Warhol rose to international fame in 1962 with his repetitious paintings of the Campbell’s soup cans, the sexuality in his work became more covert, but only briefly so. The shimmering silver silk-screens of the young Elvis and Brando speak for themselves, but the artist went so far as to claim his paintings of cartoon characters were also sexually inspired. He once claimed his mother had caught him “playing with myself and looking at a Popeye cartoon”.
By 1964, just two years into his fame, Warhol announced he was giving up painting in favour of ‘underground’ filmmaking, which he did until he was shot in 1968. Praised by critics but largely unseen by audiences, many of Warhol’s films were drenched in sexuality. Witness titles such as Blow Job, Taylor Mead’s Ass, My Hustler and the Brokeback Mountain of 1968, Lonesome Cowboys. Even Sleep shows Warhol’s then lover John Giorno sleeping nude for an interminable eight hours. Warhol’s “actors” or “superstars”, as he called them, were rarely required to act. Rather, Warhol would record the real life activities of the artists, heiresses, hustlers, transsexuals and speed freaks that gravitated towards his ‘Factory’.
One such hustler and speed freak was Lou Reed, who first rose to fame in 1966 when Warhol managed Reed’s band, The Velvet Underground. Taking their name from a BDSM pulp novel, the leather-clad Velvets’ deliberately dissonant sounds and streetwise celebrations of illicit substances and kinky sex were out of tune with the lovey-dovey Summer of Love. They were, however, the perfect soundtrack for Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a travelling multimedia ‘happening’ that combined Warhol’s films and photographs with a pioneering light show and a suggestive ‘whip dance’ that screamed S&M. The Velvets would go on to write ‘Sister Ray’, a 17-minute noisefest about an amphetamine-fuelled orgy between sailors and drag queens. Just what they made of it in Kansas is anyone’s guess.
After the shooting, Warhol closed the Factory doors to the street people of New York. He handed over the cine-cam to Paul Morrissey and returned to painting and Polaroids. Though Warhol’s work after 1968 is often derided for its concentration on commissioned portraiture, the artist retained an experimental as well as a sexual edge. The Oxidation series of paintings involved the artist and his cohorts pissing on specially prepared canvasses, whilst the Sex Parts series is a collection of enlarged and painted Polaroid close-ups of explicit gay sex acts.
But what of Warhol’s own sex life? He had cultivated an image of himself as a sexless voyeur, interested only in the act of looking and of recording rather than doing. He even claimed medical complications from childhood chorea left him hypersensitive to touch. But away from the self-made mythology, Warhol did enjoy an active queer sex life. According to Giorno, Warhol loved nothing more than “servicing” his men. And recently, twins Richard and Robert DuPont went public about their time as precocious runaways in the Studio 54-era Warhol camp. Andy, it seems, had a thing for twins.
“He would kiss me, and yes he touched me – he would sometimes jerk me off,” says Richard. Warhol also used Richard to recruit “cute friends” to take part in the creation of the oxidation paintings. “Andy would watch. He didn’t touch himself, but he did this moaning. ‘Oh!…Oh!…’ It was like he was having an orgasm while he watched us. Or at least faking one. And then he would take us to lunch and give us $100, or some of his silk-screen wallpaper of the cow or Mao.”
Richard says that while he has some regrets about his time in the Warhol entourage, “a lot of the things that make me angry to remember are the things that I enjoyed too.”
“I went along with it all, playing the game and having fun. I was not chewed up and spit out by any of these people – if I didn’t like them, I always could have left.”
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