It wasn’t that Andy was gay. It was that he was SO gay. I met Andy in the early ’60s, a time when most gay artists butched it up with the sloppy clothes and the Jackson-Pollock-macho look – either because their collectors wanted an art star or they were afraid of running into their mother on her way to catch a Broadway matinee. Andy went in the opposite direction: he acted overtly gay. I am convinced it amused him to push his gay act in everyone’s face and watch passively while they had to eat it. We all knew he was anything but helpless.
I never saw him with a lover. There were even rumors that he didn’t have sex. Yet he pranced and posed around the Factory like he was in a play.
Not only did he wear his queer image 24/7 but the Silver Factory under his rule became the most known den of inequity in all of New York. The walls were not white and full of art, they were black and there was no art to be seen on them, just flickering pieces of silver paper. It was a place where you would come into physical contact, God forbid, with the strange and bizarre creatures of the night. Not prostitutes – that would be glamorous, but homosexuals mingling freely with the upper class. Everything was liquid, dangerous and delicious and above all, queer.
Andy did not hang with the art crowd in the front room at Max’s, he coiled in the back room where most people were afraid to go. He hung out with Jack Smith of Flaming Creatures and Ronnie Tavel from Queer Theater and instead of drinking beer at Cedars he made movies.
Maybe his art wasn’t particularly gay but his movies were. They were the real monsters of the night where beautiful gay boys were the sex objects worshiped and watched through his camera, while high society girls were exposed as nagging medusas, beautiful but repulsive or just pretty and dumb as a box of rocks. Wharhol’s world of cinema was the opposite of Hollywood where gays weren’t allowed to be seen in their true form but used relentlessly for their talents. Sex was a hovering threat, not the fake struggle between John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara that always ends up walking off into an even faker sunset. Sex was a drag Queen about to slide her snake-like tongue down your daughter’s throat. My poor mother didn’t even know what a drag queen was much less how close it was to her daughter. But for me, Andy’s films were right up there with Genet, where the devil becomes the angel and you are suddenly disconnected – floating free of shit or in shit – it didn’t really matter, except that after you returned life was a bummer, a stupid hopeless bummer.
No you don’t think of Andy as political but looking at all the gay material on TV now, I guess he won.
Artillery Magazine Vol 5 no. 5 May/June 2011
Photo: Paul America in Warhol’s “My Hustler”