SIMON WATNEY

Queer Andy

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"He thought he was grotesque"—Carl Willers

The first time I got busted was together with some two hundred people watching Lonesome Cowboys in its first week of screening in London in 1969. Serious structuralist film critics undoubtedly attended too, but by and large it was a very queer audience indeed, as were the audiences for all Warhol's film screenings in London in the seventies—and to this day. To this teenager, two years before the first meetings of the U.K. Gay Liberation Front at the London School of Economics, Warhol positively reeked of a seductive American queer culture at its most exaltedly blatant. Yet as soon as one turned to Warhol criticism, one was confronted by a virtual cliff-face of denial and displacement, one consistently directing attention away from any question of subject matter in his films toward primarily if not exclusively technical questions—the speed of film stock he used, details about projection speeds, and so on. Butch, "masculine" things like that. Of the people and issues in these films one learned only that they were deliberately "bland," empty of significance, banal, mere coat hangers for formal filmic experimentation. There is certainly still a powerful and influential critical view that the value of Warhol's films and the rest of his nonfilmic work lies in their concern with such lofty abstractions as time, death, process, and so forth. But never sex, let alone queer sex. Certainly the local police from Tottenham Court Road took a line much closer to that of the audience. They hardly stopped the screening on aesthetic grounds, for crimes against the conventions of the Hollywood Western. On the contrary, they understood only too well that Warhol had made a "dirty" film, a film that encouraged the Western to speak its unconscious, which is, of course, always sexual and usually perverse.

Early Warhol art criticism in Britain followed a similar tendency to the early Warhol film criticism. For example, writing in the catalogue of the highly successful 1971 Warhol exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London, curator Richard Morphet argued that Warhol's choice of subject matter was "relatively passive" and that what matters most in his work is the extent to which it addresses the "painting process." Indeed, trying to relate Warhol's paintings to such contemporaries as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, Morphet found it "paradoxical that an art so concerned with process should need to involve figurative images." Thus, he concluded, "the flagrant reproduction of banal images in a painting was a means of ridding the process of openly expressive intent in order to give a new directness of effect to the act of making a mark on a canvas." Warhol was therefore seen essentially as an "abstract" artist, and one wonders what he must have felt, being informed by powerful European critics, that the only thing shared by Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Onassis was their "banality." Here one senses the sheer force of obliterative homophobia at work in contemporary Pop Art criticism and throughout sixties Anglo-American high culture.

In the course of the seventies, European critics became far more interested in the Flower pictures and the Disasters, which they could safely regard as Goyaesque. Hence the incomparably strange critical incarnation of Andy Warhol as a warrior of the class struggle in the interpretive work of many critics. To imagine that one might find some hidden subtext of revolutionary socialism in the work of Andy Warhol must have struck many other gay men like myself as particularly absurd and fanciful. And, ultimately, insulting, insofar as it sustained a continued refusal to engage with the most glaringly obvious motif in Warhol's career—his homosexuality.

Before the emergence of Gay Liberation in the United Kingdom in 1971, Warhol was one of only a handful of cultural exemplars who represented a public face of queerness. He was transparently queer, especially to a generation that in Manchester or Malmo or Manhattan had grown up weeping to Now Voyager on Sunday afternoon TV matinees or who rushed home from school to hear Dionne Warwick's latest record on the radio. All of us doing more or less the same thing, in total isolation from one another, doing our best to make sense of our queer feelings in a world that relentlessly denied our existence or dismissed us as monsters. In this respect, Warhol is second to none in the pantheon of twentieth-century American queer heroes. It is important to remember that in 1969, very few people in Britain or elsewhere in Europe were familiar with the names of Johns or Rauschenberg. Yet everyone knew about Andy Warhol. Hence the typically vicious and vengeful homophobia of the U.K. press in its reporting of his death.

Above all else, Warhol was camp. From Susan Sontag to Andrew Ross, critics have tended to regard camp as if it were an entirely voluntary stance, a conscious cultural posture. But this seems to me largely to miss the point about queer experience, especially in childhood. As for countless others, Andy's campness was a fundamental survival strategy. But it was no more a matter of conscious volition than his queerness. This comes out very clearly indeed from Victor Bockris's invaluable biography, which begins with a very terrible story of a Pittsburgh child, a little boy who desperately wanted to be a little girl, terrorized by his father and brother, dominated later by his peasant mother, who effectively lived an authentic medieval life in late-twentieth-century Manhattan. Such contradictions were constitutive of Andy Warhol, as he came to eclipse Andrew Warhola. There is a whole, much-needed book to be written on the subject of the relations between Andy and Andrew.

This serves only to reinforce the point on which psychoanalytic criticism will insist—that even at the best of times, childhood is a very dangerous place, whatever else it may also be. Yet Warhol also exemplifies the type of the precociously talented, intuitive artist whose gifts were identified in earliest childhood. Modernist art criticism has great difficulty thinking about artists' childhoods. Early-twentieth-century critics such as Kandinsky and Roger Fry retained a late Victorian notion of childhood...