Warhol's Queerness and the End of Distinction

Abstract: While Andy Warhol’s queer art and his queer identity have long been recognized, paradoxically sexuality remains largely incidental to Warhol's achievement, and utterly marginal to the general perception of his amoral, even unethical character.  Using the recently rediscovered--and very queer-- unexpurgated text of a famous 1963 interview with Gene Swenson that was ruthlessly edited to remove all references to queerness, Katz will argue the opposite, that Warhol’s work is best understood as something then quite fragile and new—a species of queer standpoint epistemology. In the process, Katz reframes some of Warhol's most recognized work as informed by a coherent program to eliminate all forms of distinction, queer and otherwise.