Andy Warhol

8 Warhol and Sex

The received wisdom is that Pop Art’s predecessor — Abstract Expressionism — was a virile, macho, heterosexual (if not heterosexist) art form. This is allegedly demonstrated by its grandeur, energy, aggression and high seriousness. In reacting against Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art is therefore supposed to be playful, ironic, vernacular, dandyish and camp, even if not necessarily gay.

A biographical analysis would certainly tell us that the big names of Abstract Expressionism — Rothko, Pollock, De Kooning — were certainly heterosexuals. The stars of Pop were largely, though by no means exclusively, gay. Indeed Warhol was not initially welcomed into the fold by other gay Pop Artists because he was perceived as being too gay by half, though this was evidently an objection to his personal style rather than to his art.

However, the idea that aggression, virility or energy are uniquely heterosexual, or that playfulness and irony are uniquely homosexual, is a proposition that is destroyed by even the slightest acquaintance with either heterosexuals or homosexuals. Would a heterosexual paint a dollar sign any differently from the way a homosexual would? Would a homosexual drip paint onto a canvas differently from the way a heterosexual would? The questions are absurd, but one answer might be that no two people would ever paint a dollar sign or drip paint in exactly the same way, even if they shared the same sexual orientation.

When it comes to subject matter that addresses sexuality, however, the issues are different. While Warhol was finding his style in the late 1950^s, his art included a lot of drawings of the male nude. They might be thought of as erotic, and in their day were regarded as mildly shocking, even if they were simultaneously dismissed for their campiness. By any standard they appear transparently ‘homosexual’. Today they also look incredibly old fashioned in a way that Warhol’s work from just a few years later never does. These drawings look ‘1950^s’ and demonstrate the extent to which Warhol discovered himself in the 1960^s.

The works that first made his name — the soup cans, Brillo boxes, dollar bills, Green Stamps and so forth — appear extremely cool and neutral. To speak of them in sexual terms seems to be missing the point. The Coke bottle admittedly doesn’t quite fit this description. It does have a calculated sexual element: it is a phallic symbol, but one with an hourglass figure. In that sense, however, its appeal would therefore appear to be polysexual. Critics used to speak a lot about Warhol’s ‘polymorphous perversity’ — a term taken from Freud, referring to a state of human development when the child responds to all manner of stimuli, before his or her sexual identity has been fixed.

These days this analysis of Warhol is rather sneered at. The straight world, it is argued, wanted to embrace Warhol’s work but didn’t want to face up to the fact that he was gay so they reinvented him as ‘polymorphous’. There is some truth in this; on the other hand Warhol was also responsible for introducing gay culture to a mass audience that might previously have been alarmed or repelled by it.

He wasn’t alone in this. Warhol was not single-handedly responsible for introducing hustlers, transvestites and sado-masochism to the mainstream: one might cite David Bowie, Lou Reed or John Schlesinger (director of Midnight Cowboy) as equally important. But Warhol prefigures all these people, and they all tip their hat to him. Reed was a member of Warhol’s house band. Bowie sang a song called Andy Warhol and went on to play him in the movie Basquiat. Various Warhol superstars appeared in Midnight Cowboy to give it ‘authenticity’.

This is not the time or place for an in-depth discussion of the 1960^s ‘sexual revolution’. Suffice it to say that this was an era in which there was much talk of liberation, both for men and women, and much talk — at least among hippies and would-be hippies — about free love. A refusal to condemn or be shocked by homosexuality was an inevitable part of this package. However, it is extremely hard to make a mental connection between Warhol and ‘free love’. Today he seems the least ‘hippie’ of artists.

We are told that Warhol’s own sex life was anything but a sexual carnival. He appears never to have had a satisfactory, lasting sexual relationship, and in a 1980 interview with Scott Cohen he admitted, or possibly boasted, that he was still a virgin. Sexual guilt and a Catholic upbringing must surely have played their part, and after the shooting there were probably physical difficulties. Together these things guaranteed that Warhol’s enthusiasm would be for observation rather than participation.

At a time when a great deal of popular art and entertainment was a celebration of unfettered sexuality, Warhol began to suggest that sex was, at best, over-rated, at worst a refined form of torture. Ever the true subversive, he wished to be liberated from the imperatives of liberation.

In From A to B and back Again he tells us;

“Sex is nostalgia for when you used to want it sometimes. Sex is nostalgia for sex.” (p.53).

And later;

“After being alive, the next hardest thing is having sex. I found that it’s too much work.” (p.93).

In Exposures he also tells us;

“Truman (Capote) says he can get anyone he wants. I don’t want anyone I can get.” (p.45).

In From A to B he describes how he began an ‘affair with my television’ that enabled him to stop caring about close relationships with other people, but he claims it was the tape recorder, which he called his wife;

“…that really finished whatever emotional life I might have had, and I was glad to see it go.”

In a passage that contains at least as much pathos as it does humour he says;

“Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape, and when a problem transforms itself into a good tape it’s not a problem any more.” (p.32).

Perhaps he is saying that emotional pain is tolerable so long as you can turn it into art. Or perhaps he is turning the pain into a good self-deprecating joke. Either way the pain seems perfectly real.

But for all this detachment and rejection, there is no sense that Warhol wasn’t involved in sex, fascinated by it, and that it figured greatly in his art. Equally it is not easy to feel that he would have been altogether ‘better off’ if by some means or other he could have been sexually ‘liberated’.

The Warholian universe was highly charged with sexuality, whether the Factory or Studio 54 or the sets of his movies. Perhaps at a personal level Warhol enjoyed surrounding himself with people whose sexuality was less problematic, or at least more visible, than his own. The voyeur and the exhibitionist were thus able to have a profound, symbiotic relationship.

The world Warhol moved in undoubtedly contained a high proportion of homosexuals. Yet his art does not feel gay in the way that, say, Cocteau’s or even David Hockney’s does. Warhol’s world feels sexually inclusive rather than exclusive.

A movie such as Couch (1964) (its title puns on the idea both of the casting couch and the psychiatrist’s couch) shows all manner of gay and straight sexual activity, some of it very explicit, some of it rather listless and abstract. It is as close to a straightforward pornographic movie as Warhol ever made, but it assumes the existence of a wildly polymorphous audience, one that probably doesn’t exist. Whatever your sexual proclivities Couch is guaranteed to contain something that will not turn you on.

Warhol says in POPism;

“And there were a lot of straight people around at the Factory, too, anyway. The gay thing was what was flamboyant, so it got attention, but there were a lot of guys hanging around because of all the beautiful girls.

Of course, people said the Factory was degenerate because ‘anything went’ there, but I think that was a very good thing. As one straight kid said to me; ‘It’s nice not to be trapped into something, even if that’s what you are’.”

Certainly the women in Warhol’s entourage and movies always appeared very charismatic, sexually confident and powerful, at least the way Warhol presented them; women such as Nico, International Velvet, Jane Forth, Edie Segwick and Andrea Feldman. The ones who survived and went on to have careers outside Warhol’s orbit — Viva, Mary Woronow, Sylvia Miles — never achieved the status and success they had had within it.

Warhol’s fascination with women connected to a fascination with drag and drag performers. He made portraits of them, most conspicuously in a 1975 series called Ladies and Gentleman, and they frequently featured in his movies. An interest in drag is hardly unexpected in someone who is obsessively concerned with sexuality and glamour. It solves certain problems. It suggests that these things can be put on and taken off, like a wig or a dress.

There is a certain kind of crude drag act that can appear to be a misogynistic mockery of femininity, but that never seems to have been Warhol’s angle. He said that he liked Candy Darling so much because ‘on a good day’ you couldn’t believe she wasn’t a man. The clear implication is that some days were better than others. But Candy Darling did look the part. She wanted to look like a woman, not like a man dressed as a woman.

Others in the Warhol crowd, such as Jackie Curtis and Holly Woodlawn, achieved less successful transformations, and when Warhol himself attempted drag, the effect was not only unconvincing but positively alarming. In photographs by Christopher Markos, or in a variety of Polaroid self-portraits, the effect is both comical and grotesque. The make-up doesn’t hide the gaunt, rough Warhol face. If anything it makes him look more masculine.

In The Film Director as Superstar (1974) Joseph Gelmis interviews Warhol and says to him;

“It’s been suggested that your stars are all compulsive exhibitionists and that your films are therapy. What do you think?”

Warhol’s reply is priceless. He ignores the question and simply says;

“Have you seen any beavers? They’re where girls take their clothes off completely. And they’re always alone on a bed. Every girl is always on a bed. And then they sort of fuck the camera.”

Gelmis, who seems not to realize that he is being toyed with, writes;

“The only time that Warhol became at all animated was when he started to discuss the ‘beavers’ he had seen earlier in the day.” (p. 112).

We are all a lot more familiar with pornographic images today than we were when Warhol began his work, and Warhol himself is partly responsible for that familiarity. Prior to the 1960^s the idea that an artist would be concerned with, or even admit to an interest in, pornography was shocking. Warhol’s occasional use of pornographic images, in his films and paintings, owed a lot to his own personal interests, and yet the art he made from them is of a piece with his other work.

An interest in glamour and an interest in pornography might seem at first to be contradictory, yet both involve the display and consumption of sexuality. Whereas glamour creates a smooth, glossy carapace of sexuality, pornography seeks to reveal its gross, sweaty, biological nature. Certainly the sexual images of Couch or even Kiss, seem very grubby indeed.

Warhol liked a certain amount of grime or dirt in his work, the grain of a newspaper photograph, the smear of the silk-screen squeegee, the roughness of 16mm film. Certainly in those days most pornography had a similarly rough-edged look to it, that it has certainly lost over the decades.

In 1977 Warhol began making some explicitly sexual works, based on nude Polaroids he had taken of men having sex. The less explicit ones are now known as the Torso series, the more explicit ones as Sex Parts, and some of these are very explicit indeed. The men are faceless, they are reduced to their body parts. Yet the works display an eye for composition that creates a sort of abstract beauty while not reducing their impact as sexual images.

Although Warhol’s death in 1987 meant that he did not see the very worst effects and terrors of AIDS, his diaries contain many references to the disease, and he certainly lived long enough to lose several close friends. In the early 1980^s Warhol’s celibacy suddenly looked less like an ironic pose, and more like good sense. Images of extreme gay sex from the 1970^s inevitably now serve as memento mori. Warhol’s skull paintings, even though they were done well before anyone knew about AIDS, appear now to be the grim other side of his depiction of body parts.

Warhol’s most enigmatic utterance on sexual matters is recorded in a book by Victor Bockris called William Burroughs; A Report from the Bunker. Bockris, Burroughs and Warhol are in conversation:

BOCKRIS:

Andy, you had the best sex in England?

WARHOL:

No, the best sex was when this guy bit off this guy’s nose. That was the best sex.

BURROUGHS:

I heard about that.

WARHOL:

Wasn’t that the best sex, Bill?

BURROUGHS:

Ah yes, I imagine so.

WARHOL:

The best.

Summary

Warhol’s initial success coincided with a period of ‘sexual liberation’ yet his work and life subvert any easy ideas of liberation.

Warhol was gay, yet he isn’t simply a ‘gay artist’.

His work shows a simultaneous fascination with glamorous and pornographic imagery.