Andy warhol was gay

LGBTQ stories: Andy Warhol's unlikely spirituality

One of America’s most beloved artists kept a confidential. Something that may have shocked his friends and colleagues. Andy Warhol — pop artist and gay icon — was also a lifelong Catholic who went to mass regularly at a church in Modern York City’s Upper East Side.

Warhol grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His family were Slovakian immigrants — their imaginative name was Warhola. And every week, his mother took him to a Byzantine Catholic Church.

“Andy grew up in a religious and hardworking household, and I think that applies to his career and grown-up life,” said Jose Diaz, a curator at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.

Diaz came to New York last year to position together an exhibition on Warhol’s spiritual life at the Brooklyn Museum — with curator Carmen Hermo. Carmen walks me through a room in the museum full of Warhol trinkets.

“There are sweet works that he made as a child, gorgeous little painted Jesus statue that he made at ten years old,” Hermo said. “As a student at Carnegie tech, reproducing images of the family crucifix … There are tiny kind ephemera items of the Warhola family.”

Like saint cards, the

Dandy Andy: Warhol’s Queer History

Join musician educators for Dandy Andy, a monthly tour that focuses on Warhol’s gender non-conforming history. While his sexuality is frequently suppressed or debated, Warhol was a gay man who had several partners throughout his animation. Warhol’s boyfriends, including Edward Wallowitch, John Giorno, and Jed Johnson, were also his colleagues and collaborators, helping to shape and characterize his career as an artist. This tour traces Warhol’s romantic relationships and queer identity against the backdrop of the historical same-sex attracted rights movement in the United States. Tours meet on the museum’s seventh floor.

Andrew van der Vlies

In a 1963 ARTNews magazine interview with the critic Gene Swenson, Andy Warhol famously stated – apparently in all seriousness – that ‘everybody should be a machine’. The same interview included other pithy responses: everyone ‘should like everybody’, and pop art was, in essence, about ‘liking things’.[1] Warhol’s personal reputation as reticent and fond of gnomic or evasive answers, and his professional reputation as an artist fascinated with commodification, mechanisation, seriality and the surface, have long relied on soundbites such as these. And yet the published account of this interview omitted, apparently at the behest of a bigoted editor, a crucial framing context. Swenson had opened with a leading question: ‘What do you say about homosexuals?’[2] In the full transcript, Warhol’s responses can thus more fully be seen for what they most likely were: performatively affectless statements, offered in a knowing, ironically horizontal manner, cultivated to subvert the art world’s predilection for exaggeratedly straight (and straight-talking) male musician personae.

The full transcript also includes interventions from three associates, including studio assis

Happy birthday, Andy! The after time artist would have been 71 today. One of the 20th century's best-known painters, he is ironically most famous for his quote about being celebrated (for 15 minutes). But still, there are many simple facts about the man's life that the ordinary person may not know. I thought I'd share some.

He was gay. It's obvious now, but it wasn't to the public at large during Warhol's life. Keep in mind that in the '70s and early '80s, most Americans were unknowing about gay signifiers; limited even guessed that the Village People were queer , much less Andy Warhol.
He was bald. Even I didn't know for years that his funky silver-white hair was, in proof, a wig. Warhol went bald in his initial twenties.
He was celibate. Though gay, Warhol claimed never to have engaged in any sexual intercourse. It was reported in an early biography that he lost his virginity at 25 to his first boyfriend, but I've establish no accounts of him consummating any of his subsequent relationships.
His real last name was Warhola. Warhol was the son of Czech immigrants. He dropped the "a" at the end of his surname early in his career.
He almost never lived apart from his mother. Even during