Warhol's Rarely Shown Queer
Sexual Work Comes into Public View
By Christian Bain

"Why can't Andy Warhol be a modern master and deeply queer at the same time? ... Why, if queer is now so in the clear in the culture at large, has it been muted if not silenced in a major show devoted to the American artist, who more than any other, gave it voice?"

Holland Cotter
The New York Times
July 14, 2002

If you traveled to Los Angeles for the Andy Warhol Retrospective, you didn't see them. They were nowhere to be found. The explicitly gay sexual work of the artist whose vibrantly queer outsider perspective revolutionized modern art and gave America a fresh look at itself was omitted from the exhibition.

In the exhibition, Warhol Explicitly Queer, Sept. 17 - Oct. 26, 2002, the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation is showing what the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles didn't show: queer sex. Visitors to the gallery's show view nine rarely seen and very gay erotic works by Andy Warhol. Included are the Sex Parts series and Fellatio (both created in 1978); a drawing executed by Warhol on an Air India menu and a party invitation for a Halston party. Victor Hugo, who figures anonymously yet prominently in many of Warhol's erotic/pornographic works is the subject of the menu.

The Sex Parts (six screenprints) and Fellatio (also a screenprint) were purchased from a dealer by the Foundation in the fall of 2001. These seven pieces as well as many other of Warhol's explicitly queer sexual works all originated in close-up Polaroid (Big Shot) snap shots taken by or for Warhol of Hugo and others (sometimes including Warhol himself). The Polaroids, many of which can be viewed at the Andy Warhol Foundation in Pittsburgh, were a way for Warhol to capture the "action" in explicit images without the need to stop and actually draw them while they were happening. Warhol would then render them as drawings and paintings that were extremely sexual and intimate without revealing the identity of the men involved — perhaps exemplifying an ideal of anonymous gay sex. The separate Air India menu emblazoned with "portraits" of Victor Hugo, spontaneously created at the request of and given to Hugo by Warhol during a flight, was offered for purchase by Hugo to the Foundation.
(See page 7.)

Still, the question posed by Cotter in his review of the Andy Warhol Retrospective at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, begs an answer. Queer though he was, Warhol both challenged and evaded the pervasive homophobia that prevailed when he made his reputation as a much-emulated graphic designer in the 1950s. Among the first works that he chose to exhibit in public were erotic drawings shown at the Bodley Gallery in 1956, which one of his biographers describes as proclaiming "Gay is beautiful" a dozen or more years before such a statement would have been accepted even by most gay men. The following year when he submitted work featuring a group of boys kissing boys to the more exclusive Tanager Gallery, they were summarily rejected.

Even his most supportive critics subtly "degayed" Warhol, at least in part to make his controversial and revolutionary work more acceptable to an often hostile public. More conservative critics like Robert Hughes, in his Time magazine Warhol obituary, used coded allusions to his "degraded," "toxins," "careerism," "facetiousness" and "celebretity worship" to diminish his work with covert references to his semi-open queerness without ever actually mentioning it.(1)

Yet, in many cases, degaying and strategic silences may well have been useful to Warhol as a survival strategy in negotiating a homophobic culture(2) while simultaneously pressing his revolutionary pop images of Campbell's soup cans, Marilyn Monroe, etc., just up to, but not quite across, the shifting line of what was deemed acceptable. The pernicious effect of this de-gaying can be seen in the fact that even a short biographical sketch used in preparing this essay failed to mention either Warhol's sexual orientation or any of his queer-themed drawings, paintings or movies.

As the editors of Pop Out: Queer Warhol put it: "[E]ven given ... Warhol's devotion to making queer sex visible, public and sexy, Warhol was never entirely 'out' nor 'in' the closet. In turns he was both and neither, depending on context, exigency, and survival ... because so much of how he managed his identity and his cultural contexts is rooted in the fifties, before Stonewall ... [O]ne of Warhol's standard gestures in negotiating normative culture was to take an apparent opposition and work both sides of it. ... such gestures had the effect of transfiguring, exploding, or reworking the kinds of categories by which he might be policed or judged: inside/outside, gay/straight, work/sex, real/artifice, high art/low art, and many others."(3)

Yet despite Wahol's extraordinary roles as the most famous and possibly most influential exemplar of Pop Art, Warhol's situation was in many ways shared by other queer artists before and during his lifetime. The nine Warhol works are part of a larger show of nota-ble erotic works by artists who coped with similar challenges, including pieces by Patrick Angus, Neel Bate, Bruce Bellas (Bruce of LA), Jean Cocteau, Jared French, Duncan Grant, Philip Hitchcock, George Platt Lynes, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jack Pierson, Marion Pinto, Deni Ponty, George Quaintance, Pavel Tchelitchew and Wilhelm Von Gloeden.

A number of these artists were already active when Warhol exploded into the art world, but it was largely because of him that work with a demonstrably gay sensibility began to make its way, however haltingly, into mainstream consciousness. There is, in a very real sense a "before Warhol" and an "after Warhol" reality as to what can now be seen in an increasing number of public venues.

The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation draws on a long and unique history dating back to 1969 of collecting, conserving and displaying unambiguously gay and often explicitly erotic art. Over the years the Foundation's gallery has provided an essential outlet for hundreds of artists whose work was and still is denied access to mainstream galleries.

This show continues that tradition.

(1) Pop Out: Queer Warhol Edited by Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, & Jose Esteban Munoz, Duke University Press, 1996, p. 3.
(2) Ibid, p. 4.
(3) Ibid, p. 4-5.