MY THESIS IS AT LAST COMPLETE
Here it is, fell totally free to skip it if you don't wanna read all of it. It's about the influence of gay culture and American cultural homophobia/gender essentialism of the mid 1900s had on Warhol's work.
A Man of Unconventional Morality
Andy Warhol, as a gay artist
Pentecost 2
With the advent of McCarthyism and the beginning of what would later be known as the “Lavender Scare”, the 1950s in America were not a time when one could be openly gay. However, Andy Warhol, whom fellow gay artist Jasper Johns once called “too swish” , made his way to Manhattan in 1949 and immersed himself in the New York City lifestyle. His involvement in theater culture and obsession with female celebrity (a stereotype of gay men, which still persists to this day ) heavily influences his work, and perhaps still influences gay subculture - or at least a stereotype of gay subculture - at this time. To learn how gay culture perhaps informed Andy’s work, and in turn how Andy’s work still can be seen influencing gay culture, one must understand the context of the time in which Andy was working. By comparing gay history and experiences with contemporary gay culture, aided by the analysis of many LGBT historians, this paper explores how gay culture influenced Andy Warhol and his larger body of work.
In February of 1950, two politicians made statements, which would change the landscapes of politics and American culture. The speech by Senator Joseph McCarthy in Wheeling, West Virginia would go down in history as the launch of the “Red Scare”, based on McCarthy’s claim that Communists had infiltrated the US State Department. Meanwhile in Washington, DC, as a counteraction against McCarthy’s claims of Communist infiltration, State Department Deputy Undersecretary Jack Peurifoy vehemently denied that the workers dismissed from the State Department were anything more than security risks and that none were Communists. Of these security risks, 91 were
Pentecost 3
gay men and women. While history remembers the hysteria caused by the “Red Scare”, in reality, the “Lavender Scare” of LGBT people in government was a far more public concern of “good, honest, wholesome” Americans of the time. Of all the “security risks” fired in the McCarthy era, the majority had not been suspected of Communism at all, but were instead alleged or confirmed to be gay. It became such a hot topic that one Congressman complained, “I have no idea what homosexuals are, but I never saw anybody get as much free advertising in the Congress of the United States all my life.”
The Lavender Scare was not just part of governmental nightmares; it also caused a public scandal. Harry Truman’s cabinet members advised him, “The country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the Government than about Communists.” Newspapers took to the coverage of so-called “sex perverts” in the government with the same mentality that wartime bulletins discussed venereal disease. While some publications plainly talked about homosexuality or “sex perversion”, many newspapers preferred more vague terminology, which makes it currently more difficult to chronicle articles about the Lavender Scare. Some newspapers preferred terms such as “moral weaklings”, “sexual misfits”, “moral risks”, “misfits”, “undesirables”, or people with “unusual risk.” Government bulletins also avoided addressing the presence of gay men in the federal government, instead referring to them in all bulletins and memos as “men of unconventional morality.”
Pentecost 4
It was during this permeating cultural scare that a young Andrew Warhola was growing up in Pittsburgh. The son of Slovakian immigrants and the youngest of several boys, Andy was not exactly what could be considered subtle even by today’s standards-his Judy Garland records, paper doll collection, and membership to the Shirley Temple fan club assured this. Despite the permeating homophobia and pervasively oppressive gender essentialism of the time, Andy’s family seemed to accept his eccentricities, though denying the possibility of his being gay. According to many sources, his mother never knew; apparently, her moving in with him later in life was in order to “help him find a nice girl.”
As a child, Andy Warhol suffered from a condition called St. Vitus Dance, similar to Bell’s Palsy. From this condition came many unpleasant skin blotches and a lifetime of self-esteem issues relating to his appearance. In Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he recounts a conversation he had with someone simply referred to as “B”:
“Day after day I look in the mirror and I still see something-a new pimple…. I was telling the truth. If someone asked me, “What’s your problem?” I’d have to say, “Skin.”
While the truth value of Warhol’s personal stories is debatable, such “shy exhibitionism”, as author Eve Sedgewick says, “is deeply queer…I’d remark here how
Pentecost 5
frequently queer kids are queer before they’re gay….” Writer Simon Watney echoes this once more:
“I am personally less interested in the element of fetishism in Warhol’s life and work than in this curious, quintessentially queer combination of intense shyness and dandyism, both of which equally inform his dazzling fantasy of stardom.”
Comedian Lily Tomlin accurately described the atmosphere of the time when she jokingly stated, “Nobody was gay in the 50s; they were just shy.” This can be multiplied in Andy’s case, according to Carl Willer’s in the book The Life and Death of Andy Warhol: “He thought he was grotesque.”
Looking at his childhood also allows us to see the impetus behind the first of his works-not only the male nudes, but also the seemingly innocuous painting of Dick Tracy. According to Warhol “super star” Ultra Violet, Andy revealed that he had quite a deep childhood crush on the fictional character, as well as Popeye, another popular cartoon of the era. When she asked why those two cartoons, he simply explained, “They were stars.”
Pentecost 6
According to essayist Michael Moon, these childhood crushes could have help cement a desire to portray stereotypical Hollywood good-looks in a simplistic, yet exaggerated fashion:
Consider, for example, that the graphic signature of Chester Gould’s image of Dick Tracy is the literally “clean-cut”, razor sharp appearance of his facial profile-in (again, literally) clear-cut contrast with the “villains” of the strip and their “blank”, disfigured, repellent, and grotesque facial features. The
potential of such a graphic schema is, of course, high for generating invidious narratives about the supposedly inevitably authoritarian, violent, and punitive relations of “clean-cut” men to other men; one can read out of Warhol’s subsequent biography the complicated efforts the general catharsis of “movie star good looks” on a mass scale in the thirties and thereafter had on his attitudes toward himself and other people and his choices of erotic objects as an adult.
The use of childhood comic book crushes in his work also extended to images of Superman and Batman, tying into Dr. Fredric Wertham’s famous book Seduction of the Innocent, in which Wertham accuses comic books of encouraging violence, drug use, and most notably homosexuality in children. From Seduction of the Innocent in regards to Batman comics:
“The atmosphere is homosexual and anti-feminine. If the girl is good-looking, she is undoubtedly the villainess. If she is after Bruce Wayne, she will
Pentecost 7
have no chance against Dick. For instance, Bruce and Dick go out one evening in dinner clothes, dressed exactly alike. The attractive girl makes up to Bruce, while, in successive pictures, young Dick looks on smiling, sure of Bruce.” He also states: “As they sit by the fireplace the young boy sometimes worries about his partner: “Something’s wrong with Bruce. He hasn’t been himself these past few days.” It is like the wish dream of two homosexuals living together.”
While Wertham’s work is rightfully considered with embarrassment today (the chapter these quotes are taken from being hysterically called “I Want to Be a Sex Maniac.”), it would be ridiculous to ignore the possibility that Warhol was particularly attracted as a child to such themes found in superhero comics. With the exultation of being above the average man (whether in powers such as Superman, or money and good looks like Batman, or perhaps even the close personal friendships such male characters were allowed), Warhol was undoubtedly attracted to them at least as a form of celebrity or cultural icon.
In spite of today’s modern views of liberality in the art world, the permeating fear of being outed during the time of Warhol was all too real. When he was confused as to why his idols, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (also both gay) avoided him,
Pentecost 8
filmmaker Emil de Antonio was forced to tell him: "Okay, Andy, if you really want to hear it straight, I'll lay it out for you. You're too swish, and that upsets them.”
The true first of Andy’s works to be put on gallery display are often the least talked about, not due to lack of technical skill but because of their role in cementing Warhol as a gay artist. His early male nudes were confronted with an aggressive homophobia from the Tanager Gallery. Philip Pearlstein, who had asked him to submit the works in the first place, stated: “He submitted a group of boys kissing boys which he remembers the gallery hated and refused to show.” Gallerist Marco Livingstone referred to these drawings as “essentially private”, putting them into a metaphorical closet away from Warhol’s publically acceptable works. In contrast, Warhol biographer Guiles commented that the pieces portrayed being gay as beautiful, decades before such a statement became remotely acceptable to say.
While his commodity works found him with considerably more attention and praise, there were still those who would detract his works. In 1971, Tate Gallery curator Richard Morphet referred to Warhol’s works as passive compared to Stella and Kelly, stating in his catalogue that it was “paradoxical that an art so concerned with process should need to involve figurative image.” All that was shared by his subject matter, according to European critics was the banality of subject matter. Subject matter, which was conveniently attributed to a culture of gay men, was easy to criticize. By assigning a
Pentecost 9
label of supreme banality or reading far too much into the work than was intended, many critics and historians ignore the over-arching queer themes in Warhol’s work of the time. The seemingly rampant consumerist theme within Warhol’s work was, as proposed by several writers, an extension of growing up gay in the 1940s and 1950s.
“How do you explain about yourself to yourself, let alone to others, when you have absolutely no legitimate or legitimating model for your own most intensely personal feelings about other people and the world? You must turn to those elements that are culturally on offer and make them speak your queer feelings, as best you can.”
Perhaps the best examples of Warhol’s sexuality imbued into his work were his films. Showings of his movies My Hustler, Blow Job, and Lonesome Cowboys were regularly raided by police, not unlike Stonewall would be in 1969. Many films of the era were “lost” or destroyed due to violation of the Hays Code’s strict regulations against any portrayal of homosexuality in film. Despite the clear signals that these films are largely for gay audiences and informed by gay experience, many historians continue to ignore the inherent “queerness” of them, relegating the sexuality of the films to the prurient nature of Pop Art.
Pentecost 10
In her examination of sexuality in Warhol’s work in general, Jennifer Doyle examines “the mobile ‘rhetoric of prostitution’, which moralizes about any display of a
sexuality other than straight male ones,” and claims that this rhetoric causes historians to dismiss and degrade intrinsic parts of Warhol’s art and films because they do not fit kyriarchal standards of sexuality.
“The use of a rhetoric of prostitution and its stigma of outlaw sex to name the artistic practices of a famous (and famously) gay man more often than not functions to signal (but only through inference) Warhol’s homosexuality while also displacing the discussion of sexuality in Warhol’s work….”
Time magazine cemented the thinking of the time best when it declared in 1966 that Pop was a threat to “normal” masculinity and trivial (meaning campy) at best. As Susan Sontag had said two years prior in her famous essay “Notes on ‘Camp’”, camp embraced effeminacy, extravagance, surface, and appearance. This was a far cry from the misogynist, gender essentialist views held by 1960s America, even in the most liberal of spaces.
Pentecost 11
Warhol during the AIDS crisis perhaps faced the most difficultly in addressing the disease. He created only one painting (AIDS/Jeep/Bicycle) , left unfinished in response to the pandemic, an almost nonresponse in the face of what must have been a fearful time. Warhol was famously terrified of illness, having grown up ill in a time where lack of funds could have very well meant death; this was exacerbated by the AIDS crisis. He snubbed Robert Mapplethorpe at a party after Mapplethorpe had contracted HIV. For a man so seemingly obsessed with the morbid-and to a degree his own death-the closeness of the AIDS crisis to the bohemian and largely gay society circle he spent his time with, appears to have made him even more aware of his own mortality.
The Rorschach paintings, done so shortly before his death, can be seen as a sort of revelatory departure into the idea of death. As part of his book America, these paintings were closely juxtaposed with images of graveyards. Warhol stated of the images:
“I never understood why when you died, you didn’t just vanish….I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment’.”
While statements and images such as this can never be directly connected to the beginning of the AIDS crisis, it would be untrue to say he did not influence the activism and awareness of the era. Artists such as Gran Fury and Robert Gober used the bold
Pentecost 12
graphic language given by Warhol to the art world as a method of visual intervention into the crisis and as part of the ACT UP campaigns. Even without his direct hand in the AIDs activism movement, his visual influence is undoubtedly clear, inserting him into the narrative of art and AIDS awareness.
Andy Warhol succumbed to complications from gallbladder surgery at 6:31 am on February 22, 1987. At his funeral (after the priest sprinkled the holy water), Paige Powell dropped a copy of Interview magazine and a bottle of Estee Lauder perfume into the solid bronze casket. Even in death, Andy Warhol’s peculiar theatricality shown through. His influence upon art as we know it today is undeniable; the influence of queer culture and American homophobia upon his art is equally apparent. To ignore such a cultural influence is to not only ignore a readily apparent influence on Warhol’s oeuvre, but to participate in an ongoing erasure of such influences in culture at large.
A Man of Unconventional Morality
Andy Warhol, as a gay artist
Pentecost 2
With the advent of McCarthyism and the beginning of what would later be known as the “Lavender Scare”, the 1950s in America were not a time when one could be openly gay. However, Andy Warhol, whom fellow gay artist Jasper Johns once called “too swish” , made his way to Manhattan in 1949 and immersed himself in the New York City lifestyle. His involvement in theater culture and obsession with female celebrity (a stereotype of gay men, which still persists to this day ) heavily influences his work, and perhaps still influences gay subculture - or at least a stereotype of gay subculture - at this time. To learn how gay culture perhaps informed Andy’s work, and in turn how Andy’s work still can be seen influencing gay culture, one must understand the context of the time in which Andy was working. By comparing gay history and experiences with contemporary gay culture, aided by the analysis of many LGBT historians, this paper explores how gay culture influenced Andy Warhol and his larger body of work.
In February of 1950, two politicians made statements, which would change the landscapes of politics and American culture. The speech by Senator Joseph McCarthy in Wheeling, West Virginia would go down in history as the launch of the “Red Scare”, based on McCarthy’s claim that Communists had infiltrated the US State Department. Meanwhile in Washington, DC, as a counteraction against McCarthy’s claims of Communist infiltration, State Department Deputy Undersecretary Jack Peurifoy vehemently denied that the workers dismissed from the State Department were anything more than security risks and that none were Communists. Of these security risks, 91 were
Pentecost 3
gay men and women. While history remembers the hysteria caused by the “Red Scare”, in reality, the “Lavender Scare” of LGBT people in government was a far more public concern of “good, honest, wholesome” Americans of the time. Of all the “security risks” fired in the McCarthy era, the majority had not been suspected of Communism at all, but were instead alleged or confirmed to be gay. It became such a hot topic that one Congressman complained, “I have no idea what homosexuals are, but I never saw anybody get as much free advertising in the Congress of the United States all my life.”
The Lavender Scare was not just part of governmental nightmares; it also caused a public scandal. Harry Truman’s cabinet members advised him, “The country is more concerned about the charges of homosexuals in the Government than about Communists.” Newspapers took to the coverage of so-called “sex perverts” in the government with the same mentality that wartime bulletins discussed venereal disease. While some publications plainly talked about homosexuality or “sex perversion”, many newspapers preferred more vague terminology, which makes it currently more difficult to chronicle articles about the Lavender Scare. Some newspapers preferred terms such as “moral weaklings”, “sexual misfits”, “moral risks”, “misfits”, “undesirables”, or people with “unusual risk.” Government bulletins also avoided addressing the presence of gay men in the federal government, instead referring to them in all bulletins and memos as “men of unconventional morality.”
Pentecost 4
It was during this permeating cultural scare that a young Andrew Warhola was growing up in Pittsburgh. The son of Slovakian immigrants and the youngest of several boys, Andy was not exactly what could be considered subtle even by today’s standards-his Judy Garland records, paper doll collection, and membership to the Shirley Temple fan club assured this. Despite the permeating homophobia and pervasively oppressive gender essentialism of the time, Andy’s family seemed to accept his eccentricities, though denying the possibility of his being gay. According to many sources, his mother never knew; apparently, her moving in with him later in life was in order to “help him find a nice girl.”
As a child, Andy Warhol suffered from a condition called St. Vitus Dance, similar to Bell’s Palsy. From this condition came many unpleasant skin blotches and a lifetime of self-esteem issues relating to his appearance. In Philosophy of Andy Warhol, he recounts a conversation he had with someone simply referred to as “B”:
“Day after day I look in the mirror and I still see something-a new pimple…. I was telling the truth. If someone asked me, “What’s your problem?” I’d have to say, “Skin.”
While the truth value of Warhol’s personal stories is debatable, such “shy exhibitionism”, as author Eve Sedgewick says, “is deeply queer…I’d remark here how
Pentecost 5
frequently queer kids are queer before they’re gay….” Writer Simon Watney echoes this once more:
“I am personally less interested in the element of fetishism in Warhol’s life and work than in this curious, quintessentially queer combination of intense shyness and dandyism, both of which equally inform his dazzling fantasy of stardom.”
Comedian Lily Tomlin accurately described the atmosphere of the time when she jokingly stated, “Nobody was gay in the 50s; they were just shy.” This can be multiplied in Andy’s case, according to Carl Willer’s in the book The Life and Death of Andy Warhol: “He thought he was grotesque.”
Looking at his childhood also allows us to see the impetus behind the first of his works-not only the male nudes, but also the seemingly innocuous painting of Dick Tracy. According to Warhol “super star” Ultra Violet, Andy revealed that he had quite a deep childhood crush on the fictional character, as well as Popeye, another popular cartoon of the era. When she asked why those two cartoons, he simply explained, “They were stars.”
Pentecost 6
According to essayist Michael Moon, these childhood crushes could have help cement a desire to portray stereotypical Hollywood good-looks in a simplistic, yet exaggerated fashion:
Consider, for example, that the graphic signature of Chester Gould’s image of Dick Tracy is the literally “clean-cut”, razor sharp appearance of his facial profile-in (again, literally) clear-cut contrast with the “villains” of the strip and their “blank”, disfigured, repellent, and grotesque facial features. The
potential of such a graphic schema is, of course, high for generating invidious narratives about the supposedly inevitably authoritarian, violent, and punitive relations of “clean-cut” men to other men; one can read out of Warhol’s subsequent biography the complicated efforts the general catharsis of “movie star good looks” on a mass scale in the thirties and thereafter had on his attitudes toward himself and other people and his choices of erotic objects as an adult.
The use of childhood comic book crushes in his work also extended to images of Superman and Batman, tying into Dr. Fredric Wertham’s famous book Seduction of the Innocent, in which Wertham accuses comic books of encouraging violence, drug use, and most notably homosexuality in children. From Seduction of the Innocent in regards to Batman comics:
“The atmosphere is homosexual and anti-feminine. If the girl is good-looking, she is undoubtedly the villainess. If she is after Bruce Wayne, she will
Pentecost 7
have no chance against Dick. For instance, Bruce and Dick go out one evening in dinner clothes, dressed exactly alike. The attractive girl makes up to Bruce, while, in successive pictures, young Dick looks on smiling, sure of Bruce.” He also states: “As they sit by the fireplace the young boy sometimes worries about his partner: “Something’s wrong with Bruce. He hasn’t been himself these past few days.” It is like the wish dream of two homosexuals living together.”
While Wertham’s work is rightfully considered with embarrassment today (the chapter these quotes are taken from being hysterically called “I Want to Be a Sex Maniac.”), it would be ridiculous to ignore the possibility that Warhol was particularly attracted as a child to such themes found in superhero comics. With the exultation of being above the average man (whether in powers such as Superman, or money and good looks like Batman, or perhaps even the close personal friendships such male characters were allowed), Warhol was undoubtedly attracted to them at least as a form of celebrity or cultural icon.
In spite of today’s modern views of liberality in the art world, the permeating fear of being outed during the time of Warhol was all too real. When he was confused as to why his idols, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg (also both gay) avoided him,
Pentecost 8
filmmaker Emil de Antonio was forced to tell him: "Okay, Andy, if you really want to hear it straight, I'll lay it out for you. You're too swish, and that upsets them.”
The true first of Andy’s works to be put on gallery display are often the least talked about, not due to lack of technical skill but because of their role in cementing Warhol as a gay artist. His early male nudes were confronted with an aggressive homophobia from the Tanager Gallery. Philip Pearlstein, who had asked him to submit the works in the first place, stated: “He submitted a group of boys kissing boys which he remembers the gallery hated and refused to show.” Gallerist Marco Livingstone referred to these drawings as “essentially private”, putting them into a metaphorical closet away from Warhol’s publically acceptable works. In contrast, Warhol biographer Guiles commented that the pieces portrayed being gay as beautiful, decades before such a statement became remotely acceptable to say.
While his commodity works found him with considerably more attention and praise, there were still those who would detract his works. In 1971, Tate Gallery curator Richard Morphet referred to Warhol’s works as passive compared to Stella and Kelly, stating in his catalogue that it was “paradoxical that an art so concerned with process should need to involve figurative image.” All that was shared by his subject matter, according to European critics was the banality of subject matter. Subject matter, which was conveniently attributed to a culture of gay men, was easy to criticize. By assigning a
Pentecost 9
label of supreme banality or reading far too much into the work than was intended, many critics and historians ignore the over-arching queer themes in Warhol’s work of the time. The seemingly rampant consumerist theme within Warhol’s work was, as proposed by several writers, an extension of growing up gay in the 1940s and 1950s.
“How do you explain about yourself to yourself, let alone to others, when you have absolutely no legitimate or legitimating model for your own most intensely personal feelings about other people and the world? You must turn to those elements that are culturally on offer and make them speak your queer feelings, as best you can.”
Perhaps the best examples of Warhol’s sexuality imbued into his work were his films. Showings of his movies My Hustler, Blow Job, and Lonesome Cowboys were regularly raided by police, not unlike Stonewall would be in 1969. Many films of the era were “lost” or destroyed due to violation of the Hays Code’s strict regulations against any portrayal of homosexuality in film. Despite the clear signals that these films are largely for gay audiences and informed by gay experience, many historians continue to ignore the inherent “queerness” of them, relegating the sexuality of the films to the prurient nature of Pop Art.
Pentecost 10
In her examination of sexuality in Warhol’s work in general, Jennifer Doyle examines “the mobile ‘rhetoric of prostitution’, which moralizes about any display of a
sexuality other than straight male ones,” and claims that this rhetoric causes historians to dismiss and degrade intrinsic parts of Warhol’s art and films because they do not fit kyriarchal standards of sexuality.
“The use of a rhetoric of prostitution and its stigma of outlaw sex to name the artistic practices of a famous (and famously) gay man more often than not functions to signal (but only through inference) Warhol’s homosexuality while also displacing the discussion of sexuality in Warhol’s work….”
Time magazine cemented the thinking of the time best when it declared in 1966 that Pop was a threat to “normal” masculinity and trivial (meaning campy) at best. As Susan Sontag had said two years prior in her famous essay “Notes on ‘Camp’”, camp embraced effeminacy, extravagance, surface, and appearance. This was a far cry from the misogynist, gender essentialist views held by 1960s America, even in the most liberal of spaces.
Pentecost 11
Warhol during the AIDS crisis perhaps faced the most difficultly in addressing the disease. He created only one painting (AIDS/Jeep/Bicycle) , left unfinished in response to the pandemic, an almost nonresponse in the face of what must have been a fearful time. Warhol was famously terrified of illness, having grown up ill in a time where lack of funds could have very well meant death; this was exacerbated by the AIDS crisis. He snubbed Robert Mapplethorpe at a party after Mapplethorpe had contracted HIV. For a man so seemingly obsessed with the morbid-and to a degree his own death-the closeness of the AIDS crisis to the bohemian and largely gay society circle he spent his time with, appears to have made him even more aware of his own mortality.
The Rorschach paintings, done so shortly before his death, can be seen as a sort of revelatory departure into the idea of death. As part of his book America, these paintings were closely juxtaposed with images of graveyards. Warhol stated of the images:
“I never understood why when you died, you didn’t just vanish….I always thought I’d like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph and no name. Well, actually, I’d like it to say ‘figment’.”
While statements and images such as this can never be directly connected to the beginning of the AIDS crisis, it would be untrue to say he did not influence the activism and awareness of the era. Artists such as Gran Fury and Robert Gober used the bold
Pentecost 12
graphic language given by Warhol to the art world as a method of visual intervention into the crisis and as part of the ACT UP campaigns. Even without his direct hand in the AIDs activism movement, his visual influence is undoubtedly clear, inserting him into the narrative of art and AIDS awareness.
Andy Warhol succumbed to complications from gallbladder surgery at 6:31 am on February 22, 1987. At his funeral (after the priest sprinkled the holy water), Paige Powell dropped a copy of Interview magazine and a bottle of Estee Lauder perfume into the solid bronze casket. Even in death, Andy Warhol’s peculiar theatricality shown through. His influence upon art as we know it today is undeniable; the influence of queer culture and American homophobia upon his art is equally apparent. To ignore such a cultural influence is to not only ignore a readily apparent influence on Warhol’s oeuvre, but to participate in an ongoing erasure of such influences in culture at large.