Adman

Andy Warhol was open about his sexual identity, as a gay man, at a time when many weren’t so frank.

Today he is seen as a queer pioneer, having helped build a community around an idea of difference rather than assimilation.

Whether creating advertisements for shoes or designing window displays, Warhol’s commercial art was considered, even by those in the gay milieu like his friend Charles Lisanby, to have been ‘the very definition of camp’. Certainly, his designs were fey, whimsical and decorative – the same words once used euphemistically for gay men.

Warhol’s non-commercial work spoke even more directly to his identity: drawings of cats and butterflies, of cupids and beautiful golden boys, as well as more overtly homoerotic images. His book ‘In the Bottom of My Garden’ was referred to in Warhol’s studies, and by his friends, as ‘A Book for Fairies’.

His 1956 ‘Studies for a Boy Book’ included clearly homoerotic portraits of friends. Reviews criticised their ‘doubtful taste’ and ‘private meaning’, and referred to them as ‘highly sensitive’ – one even calling them ‘fragile impressions [of] careful studied perversity’.