The Andy Warhol Diaries Is An Illuminating Queer Diary That Goes Beyond Soup and Into the Sauce

March 18, 2022
TOMMY

So much is known about the man Andy Warhol, but it just hit me recently how little I really know about him. I know I love his art, and I know that I think I understand his global importance, but if I’m being honest with myself, I really don’t know very much about him. Which is why when I heard a new documentary series was coming out on Netflix about Andy, I leapt at the chance to do a deep dive. So much is known about who Andy was, but very little was ultimately known about what Andy thought about Andy. As my friend Kareem put it Andy is, “ubiquitous but still a mystery to me.” I wanted to learn more about that duality.

The Andy Warhol Diaries, a new six-episode documentary from producer Ryan Murphy, expands on the book of the same name (not to be confused with The Andy Cohen Diaries) and includes interviews from Andy’s closest inner-circle. Everyone knows the artist, and everyone has heard lore of the famed Studio 54 parties with Liza, Keith Haring, 54 founder Steve Rubell, and an infamously well-hung Victor Hugo, but we know so little about the rest of who Andy was at his core (or at least I do). For a man who was so clearly gay, Andy was notoriously “not out” to the world. It wasn’t so much that he was closeted, per se, but he made a bit of a game of dodging the questions and playing with the media. After all, “playing with the media” was his whole angle. This documentary is the first time we really hear first account perspectives what Andy was like as a lover and a boyfriend, and how those co-mingled with him as a proud gay man who was also riddled with self-doubt and internalized homophobia.

This internalized-homophobia was the decidedly the most surprising thing to me, because somehow I figured Andy Warhol, Queen of Alt Pop Art, would somehow be above the shame of The Velvet Rage, and that therein lay his artistic genius. It certainly drove his genius, and no doubt acted as an internal and subconscious muse for him, but above it he was not. At one point in the documentary, Andy says something to the effect of, “I don’t want to talk about sissy gays, and gays in makeup…” and it oozed of shame. Yet in another scene later, he’s wearing full eyeshadow, lipstick, and glitter. Any was clearly nothing if not wildly complex.

For a man so profoundly on the “inside” of the global zeitgeist, it’s so fascinating to see how rooted in his persona being an “outsider” really was for him. Like so many less masculine-presenting gay men, it should come as no surprise that Andy was bullied a lot as a child. From a young age, he was an outsider looking in. But like so many artistic geniuses, he found a way to disarm his bullies with his art. Andy started drawing portraits of the neighborhood boys, which for the 1950s Pittsburgh was a very fay thing to do.

Something that really made this documentary shine was the casting Bill Irwin. For those of you not familiar with Irwin, first of all shame on you and you disgust me. Okay, fine…that was aggressive. But Irwin has been in everything from Sesame Street (Mr. Noodles), Interstellar (voice of SARS), and currently on Hulu’s The Dropout as board member and professor, Channing Robertson. He also bears a strong resemblance in both face and voice to Andy Warhol. The producers of this documentary teamed up with Resemble AI to recreate Andy’s voice to have his diary entries as voice over narration of the diaries. Director Andrew Rossi brought in Irwin to record a number of lines in Warhol’s voice, which helped the AI software learn the correct intonation and inflection. It’s also perfect that they use this AI software to recreate Andy’s voice, because Andy was notorious for saying he wished he were a robot instead of a human. “Machines have less problems,” he’s been quoted as saying. “I’d like to be a machine, wouldn’t you?” It should be noted that Rossi has permission from the Andy Warhol Foundation to recreate his voice and also includes a disclaimer saying as much in the series.

I always assumed Andy’s work was a specific rejection of heterosexual “norms” and a mocking of capitalism/pop culture, but it’s really not. It’s a response. It’s a dialogue. It’s also very clearly a longing. What becomes clear in this documentary is that Andy very much loved Americana and heteronormative lifestyles. He may be commenting on consumerism with his famous Campbell’s Soup paintings, but as this doc points out, his favorite meal growing up was Campbell’s Soup and a cheese sandwich. Warhol isn’t a rejection of someone like Norman Rockwell, but rather is Norman Rockwell on poppers and covered in makeup. Hell, as we're reminded of late in the docuseries, Warhol goes on Saturday Night Live, as well as acts on CBS's The Love Boat. He completely leaned in to the culture on which he was commenting.

The documentary also served as the obligatory stark reminder of the historical struggle Queer people have gone through. In episode 4 we hear “Andy” (Bill Irwin + AI) read his diary entry saying, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they started putting gays in concentration camps. All the fags will have to get married so they won’t have to go away to camps. It will be like for a green card.” It was the '80s and the AIDS crisis was in full swing, and the Christian right was fully in the middle of taking over the Republican Party. That proved to be a bit of an internal battle for Andy, although one he didn’t mind overcoming. While AIDs was tearing through the country, Andy went to piece of shit Ronald Reagan’s inauguration with other piece of shit Roy Cohn, because it was going to be a huge party. He caveated that he was really thankful that he was a Democrat and not a Republican. Okay. How were the hors d’oeuvres, Andy?

Diaries really succeeds in teaching the viewer about Andy as a romantic partner and sexual lover (or lack of one, as it would turn out to be). I knew zero about Jed Johnson, Andy’s most intense relationship before this documentary. My god was that young man stunning. He at once seemed so calm and in search of a Rockwell-esque home life, while at the same time completely unstable and erratic, and having an affair with architect Alan Wanzenberg, for whom he would leave Andy. I knew none of this. This is the romantic and sexual drama I want to know more about when it comes to Andy Warhol. I know the soup… I want the sauce!

Another of Andy’s lovers was Jon Gould, who was even more private about his love life than Andy. He’s described in the doc as “googly-eyed” for Gould, which was a rarity for people who knew him. At one point, writing about his time on a rowboat with him, Andy writes, “…then I thought I was Shelly Winters in ‘A Place In the Sun.’” He yearns for the normalcy and beauty from which he feels so far away. They wrote love letters to each other where they profess a profound love for one another, and yet half of their closest friends weren’t sure if the two were even fucking.

I was also surprised to learn about Andy's problematic writings in his diaries about POCs, given that he had such a deep love relationship with some Black and Puerto Rican men. For a man who was so brilliant and ahead of his time, he did write some racist shit in his diaries. It would seem that even if he was ahead of his time, he was still very much a product of it, as well. As artist Glenn Ligon points out in the 5th episode, "If you only know famous Black people, that's a very different take on the world than if you know, like...regular Black folks. And my sense is that Andy knew the famous ones. So there was a limit to his knowledge."

One way this documentary did struggle a bit, though, is that it tries to cover everything all at once. In its defense, it does a very good job of covering a ton of material. But watching it did feel a bit like an ADD documentary about an equally irregular person. They briefly address the time Andy was shot and almost murdered, but offered literally zero context about the shooting. I understand this documentary is focusing on his diaries and how Andy viewed his life, and who is lovers were, but to have zero context for what was a MAJOR event was just silly. Andy was shot by Valerie Solanas, an actress and radical feminist who had commissioned him to produce her play Up Your Ass. She was also then undiagnosed with her paranoid schizophrenia, and thought Andy and others were in a conspiracy to screw her out of her out of her future work and money. But if you only ever saw this documentary, you’d simply know “Andy got shot and it impacted him.”

Another good example of this doc being a little all over the place was how Diaries touched upon Andy’s relationship with genius painter Jean-Michel Basquiat. Diaries briefly dives into Basquiat for about five minutes, but then completely moves on to entirely different subject material and aspects of Andy's life, only to then again come back to Basquiat for an in-depth deep look at his his art, his heroin habit, and his impact on Andy. I just wanted a little bit more focus instead of jumping around like that. Once they got fully into his relationship with Basquiat, though, the series did an outstanding job of really diving into it all.

Three miscellaneous treats for me came in the forms of iconic graffiti artist Futura (Leonard McGurr), actor Rob Lowe, and Queer icon John Waters. Futura talks about how his lack of comfortability with being associated with anyone gay in the '80s caused him to “remove [himself] from a cultural moment.” He describes it as doing himself in, admitting that it was a weakness of the time. We love growth, and we particularly love artists talking about growth. It was a beautifully humble moment and I adored it. Rob Lowe, who was a friend and brief object of Andy's lust, talks with such affection and understanding about Andy, which was really wonderful. He also perfectly assesses that Andy would probably love living in today because of "the freak show that is contemporary culture." And John Waters? Well I'd pay good money to see John Waters read the phonebook. That's all I'm saying. Legend.

All in all I really loved this docuseries. It taught me so much about Andy the person, and particularly about his inner psyche. Diaries is very much a documentary built like a collage, which though I appreciate from an artistic perspective, I’m also a viewer who wants to soak in what I’m learning; I wish it was a bit more focused in approach. It could be simply an issue of editing; I don’t know. But, if you want a really great deep dive in Andy Warhol the man, I can’t recommend Netflix’s The Andy Warhol Diaries enough. Also, not for nothing... there are a ton of gorgeous men and beautiful cocks scattered throughout the series.