GLR July-August 2024

Sanctuary GLR k

July–August 2024

A LFRED C ORN Warhol’s Factory: Refuge, Asylum W ILLIAM B ENEMANN

There Once Was a Gay Haven Off Nantucket A NNE C HARLES A Lesbian Art Colony Bloomed in St. Augustine L UCAS B ELURY When a Bar in San Antonio Fought Back Edward Albee’s Marital Woes BY A LLEN E LLENZWEIG Glitter & Doom in ’70s New York BY A NDREW H OLLERAN

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Andy Warhol

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The Gay & Lesbian Review July–August 2024 • VOLUME XXXI, NUMBER 4 WORLDWIDE

Editor-in-Chief and Founder R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review ® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118

C ONTENTS

Sanctuary

Literary Editor M ARTHA E. S TONE Poetry Editor D AVID B ERGMAN Associate Editors S AM D APANAS P AUL F ALLON J EREMY F OX M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ Contributing Writers R OSEMARY B OOTH D ANIEL A. B URR C OLIN C ARMAN A NNE C HARLES A LFRED C ORN A LLEN E LLENZWEIG C HRIS F REEMAN P HILIP G AMBONE M ATTHEW H AYS H ILARY H OLLADAY A NDREW H OLLERAN I RENE J AVORS J OHN R. K ILLACKY C ASSANDRA L ANGER

F EATURES

“Everybody Was Somebody There” 10 A LFRED C ORN

Was the Factory a haven or a stage for Warhol’s pop culture parody?

Tuckernuck May Call You 16 W ILLIAM B ENEMANN

On an island off Nantucket in the 1870s, there arose a gay oasis

Find Your Muse Here 20 A NNE C HARLES

The Pagoda was a lesbian art colony in Florida from 1977 to ’99

Safety on Trial in San Antonio 23 L UCAS B ELURY

The SA Country was an LGBT bar that got raided once too often

The Double Life of Albee’s Woolf 26 A LLEN E LLENZWEIG

That rumor about George & Martha started with anti-gay critics

Almost Famous 29 A NDREW H OLLERAN

Guy Trebay was the Zelig of NYC’s hip art scenes in the ’70s

R E V I E W S

Whitney Strub, ed. — Queer Newark 33 J OHN D’E MILIO David Wojnarowicz — Dear Jean Pierre 34 S HANE B UTLER

A NDREW L EAR F ELICE P ICANO J AMES P OLCHIN J EAN R OBERTA V ERNON R OSARIO Contributing Artist C HARLES H EFLING Publisher S TEPHEN H EMRICK Webmaster B OSTON W EB G ROUP WebEditor A LLISON A RMIJO ______________________________ Board of Directors

P OEMS & D EPARTMENTS C ORRESPONDENCE 4 I N M EMORIAM — Christopher Durang, Satirist of Everything Holy 6 J ORDAN S CHILDCROUT BTW 9 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . P OEM — “A Passionate Connection to the Natural World” 22 M ARY M ERIAM A UTHOR ’ S P ROFILE — Poet Sjohnna McCray Left Us Rapture 32 L ESLIE A BSHER A UTHOR ’ S P ROFILE — Keith Haring in the Hands of Brad Gooch 36 C LAUDE P ECK P OEM — “White Gorilla” 45 M ICHAEL C HANG A RT M EMO — Allen Barnett Was Everywhere, But Not for Long 46 W ALTER H OLLAND C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 47 A RT M EMO — What a Queer Institution Was the Castrati 48 L EE L ANZILOTTA Carvell Wallace — Another Word for Love: A Memoir 35 R OSEMARY B OOTH JadAdams— Decadent Women: Yellow Book Lives 38 F ELICE P ICANO Reginald Shepherd — The Selected Shepherd: Poems 39 R EGINALD H ARRIS B RIEFS 40 Guillaume Dustan — Nicolas Pages 42 A LLISON A RMIJO José Luis Serrano — The Worst Thing of All Is the Light 43 H ANK T ROUT Jonathan D. Katz — About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Queer Art 43 J OHN R. K ILLACKY June Thomas — A Place of Our Own 44 A NNE L AUGHLIN Madonna’s Celebration Tour . Mary Gabriel — Madonna: A Rebel Life 50 C OLIN C ARMAN

A RT C OHEN ( CHAIR ) E DUARDO F EBLES R OBERT H ARDMAN S TEPHEN H EMRICK H ILARY H OLLADAY D AVID L A F ONTAINE J IM J ACOBS A NDREW L EAR

R ICHARD S CHNEIDER , J R . ( PRESIDENT ) T HOMAS Y OUNGREN ( TREASURER ) S TEWART C LIFFORD (C HAIR EMER .) W ARREN G OLDFARB ( SR . ADVISOR EMER .)

P OEM — “Hot Day” 49 W ILLIE E DWARD T AYLOR C ARVER J R .

The Gay & Lesbian Review/ WORLDWIDE ® (formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscription rates : U.S.: $41.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $51.70(US). All other countries: $61.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” ISSN: 1077: 6591 © 2024 by Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. W EBSITE : www.GLReview.org • S UBSCRIPTIONS : 847-504-8893 • A DVERTISING : 617-421-0082 • S UBMISSIONS : Editor@GLReview.org

July–August 2024

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Summer Escapes: ‘Sanctuary’ FROM THE EDITOR

T HE IMPULSE for any minority to seek out safe spaces or sanctuaries exists in proportion to the oppression they suffer in their social world. From the Catacombs of Rome to the colony of Plymouth, the upshot of this quest is well attested. Members of sexual minorities have undoubtedly been forming their own private communities for centuries— would Plato’s Symposium be an early example?—but it was only in the 19th century that sexual identity became a criterion for forming associations of like-minded individuals. Most of the early associations of LGBT people arose in large cities like New York, London, and Paris. An exception is explored here by William Benemann, who takes us to a small island called Tuckernuck off the coast of Nantucket, which it self is the “far out” island for Bay Staters. There, a wealthy physician named Sturgis Bigelow built a summer home in 1871 and turned it into a retreat for men who shared an interest in the arts and exotic travel and each other. The island’s isolation pro vided a perfect spot for both quiet contemplation and manly in teraction of all kinds (including sports!). A century later, in the 1970s, a community for lesbians called the Pagoda was taking shape in St. Augustine, Florida. The Pagoda provided a similar kind of refuge from the outside world, like Tuckernuck attracting people who were focused on the arts. The colony was initially purchased by members of a dance company called Terpsichore that expanded their mission Correspondence

to include theatrical and musical training and performance. They also expanded its living capacity to fourteen cottages in addition to a large main building. A more famous example of an artists’ commune was Andy Warhol’s Factory, whose name implies that it was a hive of in dustry for Warhol’s art. And while art was certainly produced there, Alfred Corn makes the point that most of the Factory’s denizens were not there to work. Many were druggies and mis fits—most were “queer” in one way or another—who sought refuge in a space that allowed them to be as crazy or creative as their situation dictated. For Warhol, they were all part of his tableau for the manufacture of pop culture parodies. Most everyone reading this has probably experienced the sense of safety and exhiliration that gay and lesbian bars and clubs have provided since long before Stonewall. The impor tance of their function as sanctuaries rises in proportion to the anti-gay hostility of the surrounding world. Thus, for example, as Lucas Belury explains here, for a city like San Antonio in the 1970s, the arrival of a club called the SA Country was a huge deal for an LGBT population living in a Texas border city with a large Army base nearby. There were frequent raids both by MPs and local police. In what became a landmark case, the SA Country sued the city for the right to safe haven, and—spoiler alert—the good guys won this time. R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .

his marginal aristocratic station. Ultimately for me, his artistic relevance is in autofic tion and the intentionally blurred facts and fictions of the “New Narrative.” Mark Timothy Hayward, Los Angeles Another Amber Hollibaugh Memory To the Editor: Thanks for John D’Emilio’s tribute to his friend, the wonderful writer, activist, and femme extraordinaire Amber Hollibaugh [March-April 2024 issue]. In 2000, Duke published her book My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home . When Amber improbably worked for the staid AARP, she curated a panel of minority speakers that included Anita Hill, Dolores Huerta, Wilma Mankiller, Buddhist priest activist Angela Oh, and me. We each had five minutes to talk. Amber had us paid $5,000 each. Peg Cruikshank, Scarborough, ME Openly Gay Art Needs to Be Seen To the Editor: I enjoyed your San Francisco-themed issue [March-April 2024], and was happy to see Ignacio Darnaude’s article on the exhibi

tion of the work of artists Paul Wonner and William Theophilus Brown. The show trav eled to Memphis from the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, where I reviewed it for Squarecylinder and the Bay Area Reporter. Curator Scott Shields and the Crocker Art Museum deserve commendation for elevat ing the profile of Wonner and Brown. We live in difficult times when LGBT people are being pushed back into the closet, or worse. And yet, blue-chip gay artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol are largely immune from at tack. Even Robert Mapplethorpe, now fully monetized, is no longer shocking. Kenji Yoshino, in his book Covering , describes how marginalized minorities adopt survival strategies of hiding and concealment. That wasn’t necessary for artists like Agnes Mar tin or Ellsworth Kelley; they lived discrete lives and worked abstractly. Artists such as David Park encoded what many read as gay imagery, but critics still generally ignore such interpretations. It is not to diminish Wonner and Brown’s art to point out that their need to hold down jobs and sell their artwork may have caused

Don’t Forget, Byron Had Another Side To the Editor: William Kuhn’s Art Memo in the May June 2024 issue, “Why Lord Byron Still Matters,” takes a decorous view of Byron’s life and sidesteps the relevance of his work today. For two centuries now, Byron’s “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” mys tique formed the archetype of the “live hard, die young” ethos. For all his sexual fluidity, he never took a stand in defense of same sex attraction (Wilde), or opposite-sex at traction for that matter. Rather, he left a self-indulgent debris trail of unrequited family, liaisons and debt stretching from London to Athens. If Kuhn had no qualms about applying trauma-informed perspectives to Byron’s bi ography, then it seems only fair to view his life through privilege and the problematic escapades of Empire. Capable of both ex traordinary generosity and selfishness, Byron is most famous for being infamous, and, as a libertine expatriate, he milked his celebrity for all it was worth. His idiosyn cratic epic poems are steeped in exoticism (and eroticism) enabled by the privilege of

Continued on page 6

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nal French title, Arrête avec tes mensonges , literally “Stop with your lies,” was changed. I suggest it might be because “Lie with Me” is a much more clever and appropriate title. The English version, with its double mean ing, better reflects the double life that both characters were leading as teenagers. In my estimation, it’s simply a better title. John DeMoss, Topeka, KS A Photo Misiden ti fied To the Editor: Having done a fair amount of research on William Dorsey Swann, the African-Ameri can man documented as the first publicly recognized drag queen, I can assure your

them to pull their punches. The late Bay Area artist Richard Caldwell Brewer, roughly the same age as Brown and Wonner, grabbed the bull by the horns with explicit homoerotic imagery and paid the ultimate art world price: obscurity and erasure. Ber nice Bing, with three strikes against her— Asian, lesbian, and female—is only now getting the belated recognition she deserves. Robert Brokl, Oakland, CA Was the Transla ti onaLie? To the Editor: In his review of the film version of Lie withMe [May-June 2024], Allen Ellen zweig says that it’s not clear why the origi

readers that the photo contained in Vernon Rosario’s insightful piece in the March April 2024 issue is not of Swann. Well doc umented as he was, there is no known image of him. It is, instead, Jack Brown, an American from Virginia, in drag, dancing the cakewalk in France, in 1903. There is a wonderful clip of the dance on the web. Robb Dimmick, Providence, RI Correc ti on In the May-June 2024 issue, in a review of Soula Emmanuel’s WildGeese , theU.S. publisher should have been listed as Feminist Press (not Footnote Press, which published the UK edition).

IN MEMORIAM

that “private morality must be publicly enforced.” One of Sister’s former students, Gary, is a gay man in a lov ing relationship, but he’s still haunted by the guilt and shame instilled by his religious upbringing. When Sister accuses him of “doing that thing that makes Jesus puke,” the best he can muster is: “I don’t think I’m so bad.” In contrast, Durang’s most widely produced play, the screwball romantic comedy Beyond Therapy (1981), features a gay character more in line with the ethos of the Liberation era. Bob is upset when his bi sexual lover starts to date women, so he goes into therapy. Christopher Durang, Satirist of Everything Holy J ORDAN S CHILDCROUT P LAYWRIGHT CHRISTOPHER DURANG, who passed away on April 2, 2024, at the age of 75, was one of the American theater’s most celebrated satirists. His plays could be hysterically funny and deeply disturbing, in a style he described as “absurdist comedy married to real feel ings.” Among the targets of his Obie Award-winning works were religious dogma, psychoanalysis, and dysfunctional fam ilies, all critiqued from a distinctly queer perspective.

When the therapist learns that Bob is gay, she asks what he does in bed and then re peatedly, gleefully, screams out “ COCK SUCKER !” In response, Bob pulls out a gun, declares “It’s people like you who’ve oppressed gay people for centuries,” and shoots her several times. It turns out to be a prop pistol, but the therapist is thrilled that Bob has connected to his feelings and considers the session a success. An intriguing motif in Durang’s plays is the gay character who stumbles out of the closet by accident, not consciously in tending to disclose his sexuality. Durang himself was at first reluctant to discuss his homosexuality publicly, concerned that he would be diminished by the label “gay playwright.” However, by the late 1980s,

Born in New Jersey in 1949, Durang was educated in Catholic schools, gradu ated from Harvard, and then studied play writing at the Yale School of Drama, where his collaborators included class mates Wendy Wasserstein and Albert In naurato, as well as the acting students Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver. In fluenced by the dark absurdism of Joe Orton and Edward Albee, Durang’s early plays included queer characters ranging from a conflicted and closeted priest in The Idiots Karamazov (1974) to a pair of aristocratic twin brothers who seduce de livery boys in Death Comes to Us All, MaryAgnes (1975). Durang’s first substantial hit was Sis ter Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You

a few events changed his feelings about coming out. He gained acclaim for The Marriage of Bette and Boo (1985), his most di rectly autobiographical play, in which Durang played a version of himself as the play’s narrator, and this success led to more work as an actor. When he took a small role in the Michael J. Foxfilm The Secret of My Success (1986), he met the actor and writer John Augustine, who became his lifelong partner and, in 2014, his husband. In addition to feeling more secure in his career and his per sonal life, Durang was motivated to come out by the rise of anti-gay hostility in American society and politics. In 1988, he

(1979), an outrageous satire on Catholic teachings in which a ludicrously severe nun is confronted by her former students. The Off-Broadway production, which ran for over 1,000 per formances from 1981 to ’84, drew protests from Catholic or ganizations, creating additional publicity for the play. Phil Donahue dedicated a full episode of his talk show to the con troversy, and Durang appeared as himself on Saturday Night Live to defend the play against Dana Carvey’s disapproving Church Lady. In Gay Community News , critic Michael Bron ski lauded Sister Mary Ignatius as a necessary critique in an era when religious zealots gained political power and insisted

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told The Advocate that he felt the need to be more public about his gay identity given the intense homophobia surrounding the AIDS crisis, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bowers v. Hard wick , and the Vatican’s statements on homosexuality, which he slammed as “genuinely evil.” He directly addressed these is sues in his play Laughing Wild (1987), again performing in his own work. His character mocks the religious Right’s concept of a God who created AIDS as retribution, imagining a capri cious deity who opines to Gabriel: “I hate homosexuals ... ex cept for Noel Coward—he was droll. And I hate Haitians. Anything beginning with the letter H.” Demoralized by a theater culture in which a bad review in The New York Times could close a show, Durang spent a few years focusing on his career as a performer. With Augustine as one of his backup singers, he created the successful cabaret act Chris Durang & Dawne, and he appeared onstage opposite Julie Andrews in the Stephen Sondheim revue Putting It To gether (1993). In 1994, he and Marsha Norman became co-di rectors of the playwriting program at the Juilliard School, where he would influence a new generation of queer play wrights that included David Adjmi, Tanya Barfield, Samuel D. Hunter, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. In 1999, his pitch-black comedy Betty’s Summer Vacation was hailed by critics as a comeback—and featured his most unsettling queer character: Keith, a “sensitive” young man who carries a shovel and a hatbox that may contain body parts. Keith is modeled in part on Robert Montgomery’s charming murderer in Night Must Fall , but he’s also inspired by Jeffrey July–August 2024

Dahmer and Andrew Cunanan—with perhaps a dash of Nor man Bates. Durang’s play takes the stereotype of the “homici dal homosexual” and turns it back on the audience, critiquing their hunger for tabloid sensationalism in a bloody circus of ever-increasing violence. Durang’s plays of the 21st century continued to earn criti cal praise, from the Pulitzer-nominated existential farce Miss Witherspoon (2005) to his Tony-winning Chekhovian comedy, Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (2012). This final work became one of the most produced plays of the decade, includ ing a staging in 2014 with Durang playing the role of Vanya— an aging gay playwright dismayed by the state of contemporary culture—at the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania, where he and Augustine made their home. In 2016, Durang was diagnosed with aphasia, which im paired his use of language and ultimately led to his death. Over a career that spanned four decades, Durang wrestled with the absurdity and tragedy of human suffering, and he used camp humor as both a defense and a weapon against a cruel world. With anarchic comedies that were sparked by rage, tinged with sorrow, and illuminated with compassion, Durang, borrowing a phrase from the poet Thomas Gray, in vited audiences to find pleasure and perhaps solace in “laugh ing wild amid severest woe.” Jordan Schildcrout, professor of theater at SUNY-Purchase, is the au thorof Murder Most Queer: The Homicidal Homosexual in American Theater (Univ. of Michigan, 2014).

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BTW Foxholes “I feel more masculine in the summertime ... whereas in the winter, for some reason girl mode comes out.” From this declaration by a high schooler, Fox News commentator Jesse Watters deduced that he’s spotted a new trend of young people claiming to identify as seasons, such as summer or fall. This is obviously a retread of the claim that throngs of young people were adopting animal identities, notably as cats, and coming out as “furries.” As ludicrous as these Fox-made memes may be, there’s a serious agenda here. Without uttering the word trans or transgender, the gambit is clearly meant to undermine a cornerstone of transgender rights, which is that your gender identity is whatever you declare it to be. The right to choose your pronouns is up there with freedom of the press in our time, and rightly so. The “furries” meme was a hoax that a few kids may actually have fallen for due to the power of suggestion à la The Crucible , but the message is clear: If gender identity is something that one names and claims, then why not species identity? This is reminiscent of the slippery slope argument around same-sex marriage that always ended with: “Next, peo ple will want the right to marry their pets!” That movement has yet to materialize. Turns out real people don’t want to marry their pets, and they sure don’t want to be them.

And There’s More This is our third report on a certain family drama, but it just keeps getting better. So far we’ve learned that Moms for Liberty founder and former head Bridget Ziegler and her husband Christian, former chair of the Florida Republican Party, are heavily into three-way sex with women, and there have been many, and that it is the Ms. who’s the instigator. While Moms for Liberty has been the main driver in the na tional campaign to ban LGBT books from school libraries, Bridget herself doesn’t banish the sex talk in newly released texts between the Ziegler couple. It was Christian who would go to bars in search of women to bring home (according to a Sarasota Police Department report), but Bridget was calling the shots. In one message she instructs Christian to furtively photograph the ladies and send her the pics, adding: “Don’t come home until your dick is wet.” The ironies multiply when we consider that Bridget helped write the infamous “Don’t say gay” bill in Florida. It seems clear from her texts that what she’s into is not so much the threesome as getting it on with another woman, albeit with hubby in the picture. It’s not the sort of thing they teach you about in school. Klansman, Transman We all love a story about a private drama set against an epic historical backdrop (think Doctor Zhivago ). The star of our story is one R. Derek Black, whose father, Don Black, was a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan while Derek was growing up, as a girl, and they never questioned the les sons of hate. Whether by accident or by design on Black’s part, they ended up attending the New College of Florida, which was known as a progressive, LGBT-friendly college. This was the environment in which Black began to question their gender as signment and to explore a change of life that would throw their ultraconservative belief system into turmoil. Their metamor phosis into a politically sane human being is detailed in a new memoir titled The Klansman’s Son , which also tells of how the college that nurtured Black is being turned into a right-wing bastion by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has appointed six super-conservative members to New College’s board of trustees. Professors and students have been fleeing in droves. In the book, Black documents their efforts to stop this “hostile takeover of a liberal college,” and their chagrin is understand able. It’s as if New College is recapitulating their transformation while a student, only in reverse. Safe Journey Just in time for this issue with its “Sanctuary” theme, a piece in LGBTQN ation.com reports on a psychedelic center tucked away in the forests of Ecuador. Described as “the only BIPOC , queer, and female-founded ayahuasca retreat in the world,” La Vida Divine Institute (LVDI) was founded by two women, Jhoselyn and Courtney Gaddy, who saw a need for a safe space for LGBT people wanting to take the journey. A stay at LVDI involves skillfully guided psychedelic trips with a botanical drink first compounded by the peoples of the Ama zon basin, plus hands-on instruction in plant medicine and Ayahuasca healing. The Gaddys are aware of the cross-cultural connection between gender nonconformity and the role of the shaman in pre-modern societies, including many in the New World. Perhaps this sanctuary in the jungles of Ecuador will allow some latter-day shamans to find their roots.

Ya Got That? If ever a picture was worth a thousand words, this would be it, am I right? And yet, the Cerne Giant in southern England has been silent on the most basic questions: How the F did this 180-foot figure get there? And who carved it into solid rock? And when? It could go back to ancient times—those naughty Romans!—or to the Vikings, or possibly to the Eng lish Civil War. Modern science

to the rescue! New dating methods have shown that the figure was carved into sediment whose layers reveal that it was cre ated over a thousand years ago, about a century before the Nor man Conquest. It was a period when the Saxons were fighting the Vikings, and “the Rude Man of Cerne” was probably carved by some Saxons after they successfully fended off their foes, sending a message that isn’t hard to interpret (an early version of the raised middle finger). That there’s something oddly “gay” about this image, a graphic message sent from one group of men to another, is a natural suspicion; let the reader decide. And a footnote: the source of this report was the family-friendly National Geographic . Readers of a certain age may recall a time when our straight classmates would pounce on every issue, as it was the only magazine where naked breasts could be seen. It’s reassuring to know that it’s still a place where kids can learn about human anatomy, all in the service of science. July–August 2024

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ESSAY ‘Everybody Was Somebody There’ A LFRED C ORN

W E TEND TO FORGET that Andy Warhol was a writer, sort of. During his lifetime, he published several books, notably a: ANovel (1968), The Philos ophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B & Back Again) (1975), and, posthu mously, The Andy Warhol Diaries (1989). The Diaries ’ 807 pages were edited by his assistant Pat Hackett, who had taken down the text as Warhol dictated it by phone every morning be ginning at 9:00. The daily account begins in November 1976 and concludes in February 1987, only a week before his death. Hackett had collaborated with Warhol on an earlier book, Pop ism: The Warhol Sixties (1980), a retrospective tour of the Pop Art movement, which propelled Warhol into his greater fame. Hackett had a better grasp of grammar and spelling, which was largely ignored in the earlier books, and she was a more accu rate typist than Warhol. In her introduction to the diaries, she says she did little editing, with the aim of keeping intact Warhol’s speech patterns and tone, his “voice.” That’s a convenient segue to the biopic series The Andy Warhol Diaries , directed by documentary filmmaker Andrew of whose work deals with copies, what French cultural theorist Baudrillard terms “simulacra.” In an interview conducted for a retrospective of his work mounted in Stockholm in 1968, Warhol said: “Machines have less [ sic ] problems. I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?” He also said: “I do have feelings, but I wish I didn’t.” A robot replicating and standing in for him would be the fulfillment of that wish. Rossi’s film covers the awkward moment in 1981 when Warhol actually did have his face copied in latex so that it could be placed on a talking robot. The idea was to feature the replica in a stage work titled Andy Warhol: A No Man Show , designed to tour globally while “the real Andy” stayed home. Performances would include a Q&A segment during which the simulacrum would answer questions from a captive audience. The fact that the show never really got off the ground hardly matters. In an art scene dominated by Conceptualism, all that’s finally required is a description of the Alfred Corn is the author of eleven books of poems—most recently The Returns: Collected Poems (2022)—plus two novels and three collec tions of critical essays. Rossi for Netflix. The series is a montage of video clips shot at key moments in Warhol’s life, with voiceover text drawn directly from the diaries. The monologue is done in Warhol’s voice or, more accurately, an “im pression” (in the comedian’s sense) of it. Actor Bill Irwin read the text, which AI then remastered to sound like Warhol’s voice. This is the perfect touch for an artist much

project, not its material production. That said, with the advent of AI avatars, it will now be possible for Warhol’s project to be realized onscreen. It’s easy to understand why Warhol wanted to escape his feelings, born as he was into difficult circumstances. His mother Julia Warhola was an immigrant from Ruthenia, an East Euro pean province without any markedly individual character, tossed around like a football among several larger powers over the centuries. (The region is currently part of Ukraine.) Julia married, immigrated, and settled down with her husband in a dismally poor section of Pittsburgh. Here she brought up three sons, her resolute devotion on one hand familial, and on the other, religious. She attended the local church, which practiced a form of Catholicism heavily influenced by the Eastern Or thodox rite. Andy, the youngest and favorite son, attended serv ices with her. In fact, he never entirely abandoned churchgoing, somehow managing to square it with life as a gay man—a gay man associated with worldly success in a decadent mode. Not far along in Andy’s childhood, his father died, a dire setback to a family already scraping by below the poverty line. Andy learned to count every penny, an obsession he clung to long after mind.” It seems the IRS began auditing Warhol’s return every year after he provided a poster for the McGovern campaign. Meanwhile, whenever his poorly paid Superstars hit him up for extra cash, he made them sign a receipt saying that the sum was payment for services promoting Warhol Enterprises and thus a business expense. Warhol’s manic efforts to amass and preserve capital ultimately evolved into an æsthetic theory: Business was Art, he said—in fact, the greatest art of all. Maybe it was, but fi nancial success also calmed fears of being thrust back into the penury of his early life. Andy was a sickly child, sometimes housebound for months. He would then be nursed by his mother, who often served him soup, though they were too poor to afford Campbell’s. She would heat water, add ketchup and pepper to it and— bon ap pétit ! When he was well enough to go to school, he was ignored or else bullied as a sissy or mocked for the blotched complex ion his illnesses had caused. A better alternative was sick leave at home, where he’d be coddled by Mom. To forestall boredom, he began making drawings and watercolors, showing unusual talent for a boy his age. One of his drawings won a prize judged becoming a multimillionaire. One symptom of that obsession in his diary is his tic of recording the fare of absolutely every taxi he took, dollar figures interrupting—with comic effect—the cavalcade of glittering openings and parties. Of the diary Hackett has said: “But what ever its broader objective, its narrow one, to satisfy tax auditors, was always on Warhol’s

The Factory itself was a sort of graveyard of delusional dreams whose denizens rarely managed to achieve much outside of its precincts.

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seems, though, that this second relationship was one-sided, with Warhol showering presents and money on Gould, who was only occasionally available to spend time with Warhol. Physical de tails about Warhol’s relationships don’t seem to have been recorded. Warhol and his two partners, now dead, never spoke publicly about what went down. § E VERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW about Warhol has already been discovered, or nearly so. We can now see reproductions of his early commercial work: highly stylized pictures of shoes and other fashion accessories, rendered with pinprick pointiness and a faux-Edwardian whimsy that recalls drawings The New Yorker often published in that era. It was in that magazine that Warhol discovered Truman Capote, the only writer that he seems to have cared much about. He courted Capote (by mail) with notes and little booklets of his drawings, hoping they would capture the writer’s interest. But, no, he was brushed aside along with so many other starry-eyed wannabes. Another influence on Warhol at that time was the fanciful nostalgia on show at the uptown dessert place Serendipity 3, a favorite haunt of gay New Yorkers in the 1950s. Serendipity pioneered the revival of Tiffany lampshades and devised a jaunty, chichi ambiance well suited for the drawings that management allowed Warhol to dis play on its walls. Meanwhile, his butterflies, high heels, and winged cupids found a ready reception in fashion magazines and often won industry awards. Despite his success as a commercial graphic artist, Warhol wasn’t satisfied. Ambitious young rebels like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, who were just beginning to emerge around 1960, thought what he did wasn’t real art, just swish commercial stuff. The new generation had become dissatisfied with the dominant orthodoxy of Abstract Expressionism and its transcendental ambitions, a program cut off from contemporary America and from our brand of ironic humor. Johns’ flags and targets and Rauschenberg’s assemblages were a frontal assault on the tenets of the older movement and its methods. Since Warhol didn’t do abstraction, he must have seen these new ini tiatives as a step in his direction. In 1961, he assembled a win dow treatment for Bonwit Teller that incorporated some graphics drawn from comic strips—Popeye, Olive Oyl, and company. Soon thereafter, Roy Lichtenstein produced his first comic-strip paintings, but he claimed he hadn’t seen Warhol’s window. Maybe Pop sensibility was just filtering into the at mosphere of the day. Early in 1962, Warhol asked a friend named Muriel Latow what he should do. She replied: “Paint something you love.” He asked what that might be and was told: “Money.” So he began painting a two-dimensional grid of dollar bills, each slightly dif ferent from the last. She also said: “Paint some familiar object that’s so ordinary nobody pays attention to it.” That’s when he settled on the Campbell’s soup cans theme, a step up from his mother’s ketchup substitute. From there he went to Coca-Cola bottles and Brillo boxes. Warhol had probably seen Johns’ sculptures titled Painted Bronze . These were bronze casts, first, of a Savarin coffee can and then of Ballantine ale cans, which were shown at the beginning of the ’60s. Why not go there? Pop, bang, shazam went a new art movement, the most influ ential of the decade—so much so that elements of it are still

At the Factory: Warhol, Chuck Wein, and Sandy Kirkland. From Factory Andy Warhol Stephen Shore.

by the German Expressionist George Grosz, though its deliber ately grotesque imagery was repellent to everyone else. During those early years, Andy also fell under the spell of Hollywood and its iconic stars. One way to understand his mature work is to see it as an effort to make trashiness kind of glamorous, and glamour kind of trashy. The first category of subjects is raised up, and the second pulled down, so that everything ends up on the same plane. As for personal psychology, in his teens Andy realized that he was attracted to boys, a predisposition most people regarded as a private disaster in the years before Gay Liberation. The best available remedy was to go to the metropolis. So, after getting his degree in graphic design, Warhol set out for New York. The apprentice’s lean years soon gave way to a successful career in design, a decade of doing stylish graphics for fashion houses and dressing windows for department stores. No doubt he had, even during the repressed 1950s, brief sexual encounters and longer affairs, but little information about them has surfaced. Warhol never spoke publicly about sex, staying resolutely in the closet even as it slowly went transparent around him. He didn’t have to come out; everybody knew. When asked, he claimed to be uninterested in sex, since it brought with it emotional stresses that he didn’t care to endure. The closest he comes to forth rightness is in the Philosophy book’s chapter titled “Love (Se nility),” in which he says that sex as an adult is really a nostalgic effort to recapture the first encounters experienced in youth. In other words, sex is nostalgia for sex. The diary gives no facts about love affairs, but the TV series establishes that he did have two long-term relationships at the height of his fame—first, with an office assistant named Jed Johnson, and later with the Paramount executive Jon Gould. It

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with us today. Warhol’s decision to call his East 47th Street studio “the Factory” was designed to link the making of art to capitalist in dustry. An æsthetic of machine replication aligns well with Wal ter Benjamin’s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” though it’s not certain whether Warhol ever read it. Meanwhile, his decision to cover the Fac tory’s walls with reflective tinfoil hints at his program. Art may offer a higher, purer alternative to barebones reality, but just as often it aims to mirror the world as it really is. Warhol decided that his project was to reflect who and what we are, even if the resulting picture was unexalted—commercial, money-grubbing, shallow, consumerist, hedonistic, and so on. But mirroring in Warhol’s case was complicated by his sex ual orientation and, paradoxically, his religion. One way to think of his œuvre is as the outsider’s revenge. The world that ex cluded a plain-featured gay youth who liked attending church is portrayed as amoral and vapid. There might be attractive and even profound aspects to 20th-century experience, but those weren’t going to be his subjects. Catholic theology sees us poor creatures as fundamentally flawed, irredeemable in the absence of faith. That aspect of human nature was to be Warhol’s focus,

factual, ephemeral moments whose mindlessness or humor or vanity would be captured for later inspection. Toward the end of 1964, a young unknown writer came to take one of Warhol’s “screen tests,” which consisted of three minutes of silent gazing at the camera—more an act of portrai ture than an actual audition. The young writer was Jewish, coolly attractive, and the author of an essay titled “Notes on Camp,” published a few months earlier in Partisan Review . This was Susan Sontag, who never appeared in a Warhol film. Nor does it seem she cared about his work. After all, her essay on camp was a brief departure from much more challenging discussions of politics and culture. But for Warhol, camp sensibility is cen tral, the mode he adopts in the mirror being held up to America. A mode of satire pioneered by gay men, camp goes beyond any parochial subculture. Camp humor is directed at things with ex travagant ambitions that embarrassingly don’t succeed, as well as objects or people that are mindless or insipid to the point of absurdity. Camp sensibility is often trained on cultural phenom ena that have now passed their sell-by date and hence appear overdone, vain, grandiose. Old Hollywood is fertile ground for camp, as the movie Sunset Boulevard acutely establishes in scenes like the one in which the character Norma Desmond re torts: “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” Camp is also di rected at the “pure products of America,” the middle-class banality of supermarket brands, their cutesy ad slogans and de pressingly cheery graphic design. Hence Warhol’s soup cans and Brillo boxes. He saw that “At GE, progress is our most impor tant product” and “It’s not fake anything. It’s real Dynel.” Camp satire isn’t relentlessly supercilious, though. What it does is make failed ambition or naïveté a source of pleasure. Warhol said that Pop Art was about liking things, things that are so bad they’re good, even if “good” in a way the creator or per former hadn’t intended. One can cite, for example, the singing career of socialite Florence Foster Jenkins, whose gravely in adequate vocal skills made her a camp success in New York. Giggles and howls from the audience were always louder than any wobbly note she produced. Without camp, her career would have been a catastrophe. And yet, gazing for long through the camp lens is risky because its photoshop effect begins to ex pand, ironizing and emptying out everything it overtakes. In the end, everything is camp and nothing is sacred—above all, sa cred things. Of course, camp perspective can go only so far. In the 1970s, Warhol heard a rock performance he described as “so bad it’s not good.” Compare that with a remark Gore Vidal made after seeing the New York Dolls: “Just being bad isn’t enough.” Some forms of failure can’t be rescued by a camp focus. We can won der whether Warhol’s own self-transformation from blasé so phisticate to bewigged, camp faux-naïf was fully successful. Pop strategy dumbed him down into a bubblegum American teen with a vocabulary seldom ranging beyond drawled effu sions like “Gee,” “oh wow,” “that’s gre-e-e-at,” and “oh, uh, I don’t know,” or “yeah, that’s really up there.” His faked sim plemindedness was an astute mirroring of American blah and made him less intimidating to the audience than “serious” artists. On the other hand, it also devalued him in the minds of observers who didn’t look beyond the mask. It’s not surprising that camp has flourished more in the U.S. than elsewhere. Americans with education and travel experi

At the Factory. Ugo Mulas, Andy W with “Flowers,” 1964.

not the nice side. Nor was Warhol going to restrict himself to paint and canvas. The Hollywood fan would break into film making, even if his only tool was a 16mm camera. Underground auteurs like Maya Deren and Jack Smith had opened the field, and the price of admission wasn’t prohibitive. Warhol’s early efforts were more in the category of Conceptual Art than cin ema. Sleep (1962) is simply the record of his boyfriend John Giorno’s slumber throughout one night, as filmed by a station ary camera. In Empire (1964), the same fixed camera focuses for eight uninterrupted hours on the Empire State Building, as background skies change, sunset arrives, and lights come on. Warhol planned to go further in later, more animated efforts. But the documentary obsession remained with him to the end. He brought a Polaroid camera to social events and later a portable Sony tape recorder, which he referred to as “my wife.” Image and soundtrack were preserved for their intrinsic value as

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