Like Andy Warhol

by Jonathan Flatley

  “Just Alike”

  Usually most transvestites are friendly towards one another because they’re just alike.

  Marsha P. Johnson, cofounder, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR)

  In the summer of 1974, Warhol began a large series of portraits of African American and Latino drag queens. Consisting of 268 paintings, a portfolio of ten prints, and a number of drawings and collages, the works were initiated by a large and lucrative commission from an Italian art dealer, Luciano Anselmino.101 Works from the series were first shown in Ferrara, Italy, in October 1975, where it was enthusiastically received in the Italian art press and understood to be a forceful critique of racism and its intersection with capitalism in the United States.102 In the United States the series has been rarely exhibited, its critical treatment scarce (something that should change with the publication of volume 4 of the Catalogue Raisonné, which documents and reproduces the full series).103 Apparently, the theme of transvestites was suggested by Anselmino (who also provided the Ladies and Gentlemen title; around the Factory the pieces were referred to as the “drag queens” or “transvestites”). He would have known of Warhol’s long-standing interest in drag and been familiar with the significant role played in many of Warhol’s films by drag queens such as Mario Montez, Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn.

  Bob Colacello remembers that after initially resisting the proposal (worrying that if he painted Holly and Jackie, they would ask for money every time a painting sold), Warhol arrived at the idea of painting the mostly black and Puerto Rican drag queens from the Gilded Grape bar.104 “Ronnie Cutrone, Vincent [Fremont] and I,” Colacello writes, “would ask them to pose for ‘a friend’ for $50 per half hour. The next day, they’d appear at the Factory and Andy, whom we never introduced by name, would take their Polaroids. And the next time we saw them at the Gilded Grape, they invariably would say, ‘Tell your friend I do a lot more for fifty bucks.’”105 Warhol gave his own explanation of his motives in an interview published in the gay literary magazine Christopher Street in 1977: “I used to go to the Gilded Grape bar and the transvestites there were just so exciting looking. I decided to do some paintings of them.”106 Warhol’s excitement was evident in the energy he gave to the project, the products of which more than doubled the initial terms of the commission, making it among the largest series of paintings in his career. His ambitions were not only quantitative (although Warhol certainly valued quantity as a goal in itself) but formal, which is immediately apparent in the visual exuberance of the works, which are more “painterly” than most of his commissioned portraits (although they are similar to roughly contemporaneous paintings of Man Ray and of Warhol’s mother Julia). That his energy and excitement animated his bodily comportment while painting seems evident in Warhol’s active use of his fingers to spread, squiggle, and score the richly layered, vividly colored paints.

  Part of what might have made the drag queens so “exciting looking” is the combination of impressive mimetic skill and intense affective attachment to female glamour that Warhol found compelling in drag more generally. He admired the difficult labor performed by “boys who spend their lives trying to be complete girls.” These boys, he writes, “have to work so hard—double-time—getting rid of all the tell-tale male signs and drawing in all the female signs” (Phil, 54).107 This particular form of artwork is doubly demanding because it involves erasure—of male signs such as stubble, Adam’s apples, and genital bulges—and drawing, of female signs via makeup, clothes, and hairstyles or wigs. As boys who can look like girls, drag queens display a striking, self-conscious capacity for the creation of likenesses across the boundary of sexual difference, otherwise so rigorously policed. They are thus beacons of mimetic talent as well as exemplars of the commitment and courage required to defy social norms. Yet Warhol admired not only the drag queens who could “pass” (like Candy Darling) as beautiful women. He was just as fascinated by the moments when drag queens did not fully succeed in becoming the model they imitated, when “failures” in the work of erasure and redrawing instead achieved something closer to a sexual “blur” (as he put it in POPism, 224). In such moments of blurred disorientation, gender itself can seem both incredibly “real” in its affective force and radically artificial, contingent on the skill of a given performance.

  Of course, such a male femininity would have been exciting for Warhol, in part because it echoed his own gender nonconformity, his own failures to correctly play the proper role. The imitation of female stars may have reminded Warhol of his own childhood scenes of liking and wishing to be like movie stars such as Shirley Temple (“I never wanted to be a painter; I wanted to be a tap dancer”; IBYM, 89) and his own ongoing, often-recounted identification with femininity, powerfully elaborated in Christopher Makos’s 1981 photographs of him in drag.108 The labor required to look like a woman that is apparent in those photographs was in some ways an intensification of the daily blemish-erasing, skin-recoloring makeup labor he describes in the opening pages of the Philosophy. (“Is my adam’s apple that big?” Warhol wonders as he looks in the mirror while he works on his face.) Warhol admired the artwork involved in drag because he was familiar with it. As a wearer of sometimes showy wigs, Warhol was also well acquainted with the importance of dazzle and distraction to drag’s effects. Gerard Malanga remembers that such a distraction kept him from realizing that Warhol was wearing a wig at all. Instead of trying to fit in with something that “doesn’t draw attention” like a “plain brown toupee,” Malanga recalled, “Andy got outrageous silver hair.” Thus, “when you looked at Andy, you didn’t think, ‘He’s wearing a toupee,’ you thought, My God, look at that guy’s hair.’”109 This seems like a paradigmatic instance of what Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt calls the “drag queen theory of art,” in which, as Neil Printz writes, “multiple points of visual interest ‘keep the eye moving’ so that it doesn’t linger on tell-tale male attributes such as large hands, an adam’s apple, or stubble from the beard.”110

  At the same time, Warhol was also familiar with the sense of shame and fear of exposure that lingered around these presentational practices. Take this passage from the Diaries: “It was a beautiful day. Walked on the street and a little kid, she was six or seven, with another kid, yelled, ‘Look at the guy with the wig,’ and I was really embarrassed. I blew my cool and it ruined my afternoon. So I was depressed.”111 The mimetic talents Warhol saw on display in the drag queens he painted may have been appealing because they seemed to be a fierce and fabulous technique for the successful management of potentially embarrassing, sometimes depressing stigma (such as having one’s wig called out or being “too swish” to be considered a “major painter”; POP, 11–12). These talents were successful in managing such stigma, inasmuch as they also created a way of being with others, one based on a shared imitation of female celebrity that radiates glamour even as it fails to achieve moviestar status.

  Just as Warhol’s Screen Tests provide a documentary of the persons who came through the Factory in the mid-1960s, offering us a view of the personalities who composed that counterpublic space, so his portraits of drag queens offer a remarkable picture of a specific collectivity of mostly black and Latina transvestites. That Warhol was excited about documenting the group as a group is suggested by the unprecedented scale of the sittings for this commission, which produced more than five hundred Polaroids of fourteen drag queens (all reproduced in the Catalogue Raisonné).112 Where the Screen Tests recorded the famous, the semifamous, and the marginal, Warhol’s portraits of drag queens document a group whose lives were likely quite precarious. As poor, black or Latina, gay, and gender-nonconforming street transvestites who earned money hustling, Warhol’s sitters were a multiply marginalized group.

  4.10 Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and others, Christopher Street Liberation Day Gay Pride Parade, June 24, 1973. Photograph: Leonard Fink, courtesy LGBT Community Center National History Archive.

  In bringing together this group, W
arhol was engaging in a representational task that finds an analogue in the work of one of his models for the series, Marsha P. Johnson. Sometimes known as “Saint Marsha,” Johnson was celebrated as a key participant in the 1969 Stonewall riots (the protest against police harassment that is generally understood to have sparked the gay liberation movement) and enjoyed something of a celebrity status on the streets of the West Village.113 In 1970, together with Sylvia Rivera (whom she had met years earlier on the streets), Johnson founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR).114 The group drew on the activist energy circulating in the wake of Stonewall and on the Gay Liberation Front’s radical efforts to remake society and “build a new, liberated life-style,” in which the old “gender-role system” would no longer be necessary, an openly utopian project in which “gay shows the way.”115 But STAR sought to address the particular concerns of street transvestites, who were not always represented by gay liberation groups.116 STAR campaigned against police harassment, for the improvement of unsafe, violent prison conditions, and more generally for transvestite (which would now be called transgender) rights.117 In 1973 Johnson spoke of STAR’s objectives: “We don’t want to see gay people picked up on the streets for things like loitering or having sex or anything like that… . Our main goal is to see gay people liberated and free and have equal rights that other people have in America. We’d like to see our gay brothers and sisters out of jail and on the streets again.”118 In addition to stressing classic civil rights such as freedom from police harassment and equal protection under the law, Johnson also asserts the right to occupy public space and engage in public sex. Moreover, she writes, “STAR is a very revolutionary group. We believe in picking up the gun, starting a revolution if necessary.” Tapping into the militant rhetoric of groups like the Gay Liberation Front and Third World Gay Revolution, as well as the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords (with whom GLF and STAR marched in 1970 to protest police repression), she made it clear that nonviolent resistance was not STAR’s strategy.119

  Most urgently, STAR was oriented toward questions of daily survival, especially food and shelter. For this reason, Susan Stryker writes, Rivera and Johnson “opened STAR House, an overtly politicized version of the “house” culture that already characterized black and Latino queer kinship networks, where dozens of transgender youth could count on a free and safe place to sleep.”120 Johnson and Rivera hustled for money to pay rent and provide for food and clothing, and also hoped to use the space in the East Village (which lasted for less than a year) as a makeshift school to educate the kids, many of whom had been forced to leave home and school at young ages.121 Thus, STAR’s was a concrete group practice, oriented toward collective survival in a hostile, homophobic, transphobic, and racist environment, but also toward a radical transformation of that environment. Its praxis was queer in the utopian, anticipatory sense that Muñoz powerfully stressed; it aimed to make a world in which people like STAR’s members would be valued. In the formal practices that characterize the Ladies and Gentlemen series, I think Warhol engaged in an analogous task: he sought to create an aesthetic world where a collectivity such as STAR’s could find a home. In so doing, he would create a space in which he felt valued and welcome, too.

  4.11 Marsha P. Johnson, Gay Liberation Front protest at Bellevue Hospital, Fall 1970. Photograph: Richard Wandel, courtesy LGBT Community Center National History Archive.

  Looking through the Polaroids (and the photos that Ronnie Cutrone took documenting the sittings), one can easily imagine that, as Vincent Fremont said, Warhol made these sittings “exciting and special,” so that the queens could enjoy doing “their favorite poses and act[ing] glamorous for Andy’s camera.”122 The models Broadway, Easha, Ivette, Kim, Lurdes, Monique, Vicki, Alphanso Panell, Helen Morales, Marsha P. Johnson, Wilhelmina Ross, Iris, and Michele were each captured in winning star-turn poses. And when the Polaroids are transformed into paintings, drawing, and prints, we see that Warhol has assisted and amplified the drag queens’ self-presentation by excising those male signs (along with other blemishes or unattractive details) that the drag queens had not themselves managed to get rid of. In the paintings, he dramatizes the female signs by drawing our attention to lips, eyes, hair, and clothes with bright hues, mimicking the eye-catching work of makeup and wigs with his paint. In his drawings, such as the depiction in figure 4.12 of Wilhelmina Ross (who emerges as something like the star of the series, the model Warhol depicted more than any of the others), Warhol repeats and appreciates the double work of drag by lavishing the attention of his pencil on such details as her eyelashes, eyes, full lips, and the design of the scarf wrapped around her head and by simply not drawing whatever male signs might have been present in the Polaroid on which the drawing is based.123 As Wilhelmina leans on her hand, long nails dangling, framing her chin and drawing our attention again to her mouth (while partially concealing her neck), we are dazzled by her glamour. Warhol performs in these portraits a version of the work he regularly did in his commissioned portraits, where he erased wrinkles, cut off double chins, altered skin color, removed zits, and made eyes brighter and lips fuller.124 Indeed, the labor of drag (in its doubled tasks of erasure and redrawing) could be seen as a paradigm for his portraits more generally, a connection further highlighted when we remember that his portraits, in their stylized brilliance, did not refer to a “real” face so much as to an ideal model, the “star.”125 By following their work with his, Warhol’s portraiture is mimetic and methexic; he not only imitates the drag queens’ practice but participates in it.126

  4.12 Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen (Wilhelmina Ross), 1975. Pencil on paper, 40½ × 27½ inches. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  Warhol’s impulse toward imitation as a mode of both affirmation and participation is evident in the particular “painterliness” of the paintings in this series, and especially in his new approach to color. Printz notes that with this body of work, Warhol began “to superimpose local colors and the background over a base layer of color, uniformly spread over the entire surface of the canvas and directly on top of the primer” (CR4, 32). Warhol here abandons the aesthetic principle of white as neutral unmarked background at the level of composition; instead, like his models, he begins his artwork with a space already marked as nonwhite. It is difficult to know how the underlayers concretely affected the overall look of the paintings, what effect they exerted on the colors painted over them, but the layeredness itself is visible. The edges of brushstrokes and congealed lines and drops of paint are apparent, sometimes dramatically so, on most of these paintings. This is a surface that has been worked and covered, worked and covered. As an allegory of the work of drag, it suggests how the repeated imitations involved in acquiring the gestures and comportment of a given gender model may function like a lapidary re-covering that “perceptually reorganizes … the physical ‘givens’ of a body” even as it leaves visible, to the attentive eye, those “givens” that we now perceive differently.127

  The layering effect is dramatized by the scores through the paint Warhol made with his fingers. In many paintings, these manipulations draw together paint from different layers, bringing up paint from the “base” or mixing paint from distinct areas of the canvas. Sometimes, as in the painting of Wilhelmina reproduced here (figure 4.13, plate 5; one example among many), he has scored the thick paint so sharply that the resulting ridges interrupt the subsequent silkscreening on the surface of the painting, allowing the colors on and around the ridges to show through the printed ink. Here, like a stubborn Adam’s apple, bit of beard, or oddly colored patch of skin, a disruptive physicality peeks through and prevents the face from being fully defined. But in coming to the surface, it does not mar the painting. Instead, it brings surprising colors into visibility, which themselves form compelling points of visual attraction. Rather than expose the places where these drag queens may have failed to cover over their signs of masculinity, Warhol imitate
s and echoes them with his own painterly accidents. These beautiful and singular mistakes create points of similarity between the paintings, a reparative analogue for the way a certain “wrongness” brought together the drag queens they represent.

  4.13 Andy Warhol, Ladies and Gentlemen (Wilhelmina Ross). 1975. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 14 × 11 inches. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

  Underscoring this point is Warhol’s disruption of our expectations in his placement of color. Sometimes, faces are painted with what appear to be more or less “accurate” references to the look of the sitter’s skin. At other times, they are clearly the “wrong” colors: bright yellows, purples, greens, and blues all appear as skin surface. In many instances, across depictions of a single sitter, skin, hair, eyes, and lips change color and shift position from painting to painting, as does the silkscreen ink, which is often green or purple instead of black. Although Warhol uses bright hues like makeup, as Printz suggests, to “isolate and accentuate a selected feature of the face,” such as the mouth or eyes, these eye-drawing isolations are also often significantly off register.128 Moreover, in many of the paintings, zones of color disrupt the figure or obscure facial features entirely, giving the portraits the characteristics of a mask. Sometimes (as in many of the thirty-nine 32-by-26-inch paintings of Alphonso Panell [CR, cat. nos. 2870–2908], some of Wilhelmina Ross [esp. 2856–2861], and some of Lurdes [esp. 2831–2833]), the face is divided into distinct zones of color. Warhol’s abstract patches seem designed for painterly pleasing and seduction, as much when they amplify our perception of lips or eyes as when they are in tension with our apprehension of the face as such. In a few instances, the screened face is barely visible because the background is so similar in color. When we put all of these uses of color together, it is difficult not to notice how important color is to our ability to discern features and recognize faces (and the role it might play in making a face female, “black,” “white,” or “Latina”). At the same time, however, we see that color operates on a distinct but overlapping register from the perception of facial features and the contours of the head, one that may deface as much as (or at the same time as) it makes a face. Considered together, Warhol’s uses of color in these paintings seem to call into question the possibility or desirability of there being a “right” color.129