How ‘The Andy Warhol Diaries’ Depicts the Queer Side of the Pop Art Icon

In Netflix’s five-part docu-series The Andy Warhol Diaries, writer-director Andrew Rossi peels away the layers of the artist and pop culture icon who had an indelible influence on American culture during the 20th century and beyond. Turning to Warhol’s writings published in 1989 by his collaborator and friend Pat Hackett (to whom Warhol dictated his diaries from the mid-1970s to his death in 1987), Rossi sought to discover the human being behind the public persona of pop artist, celebrity and provocateur. The series uses Warhol’s own words — and a version of his voice, as he provides “narration” with the help of AI technology and readings from actor Bill Irwin — to offer a side of Warhol little seen (or heard) outside of his circle of collaborators, employees, superstars and hangers-on at the famed Factory in New York.

“I grew up in New York City, and Andy Warhol and his artwork loomed large in my imagination,” Rossi tells THR. “The diaries felt like a critical pathway to understanding the man behind the myth. It was almost a work of literature that I thought could be decoded, and that Andy as a character would emerge throughout the course of the 1,000 pages.”

The characters that also emerged from the diary pages were those of interior designer Jed Johnson and Paramount executive Jon Gould, two men with whom Warhol had vital romantic relationships during his life. “The biggest myth [that’s] perpetuated is that Warhol was asexual,” says Jessica Beck, Milton Fine Curator of Art at the Andy Warhol Museum and whose scholarship on Warhol’s personal life and its relationship to his work provided additional analytical context for Rossi. “For me, that’s essentially a kind of inherent homophobia. And there are still issues until this day of looking at the work in connection to this queer identity and this sidelining the work that is overtly about queer desire. That’s the importance of what comes out in the diaries, and what Andrew did as well, because Warhol is writing so clearly about love, emotion and desire.”

Yet there are many in the Warhol world — both Warhol scholars and his personal acquaintances — who diminish or simply ignore his queerness in a public fashion. “It’s the great paradox that Andy was out in some ways, and yet wasn’t personally perceived as someone existing in a queer space,” Rossi continues. “He occupies … a unique cultural space where he transcends a sexual identity and is a sort of guru-like figure, an alien and robotic [persona] to protect himself from falling into the categories of ‘gay man’ and ‘queer artist.’ Today, there are still some who feel being labeled as ‘a queer artist’ is limiting — that it’s actually somehow derogatory to be narrowed down to that identity. It really just is so sad that that persists because when you don’t factor in Andy’s love life and his humanity — which is driven in large part by his romantic dimensions — you missed so much of the meaning.”

Warhol’s most popular pieces, themselves replications of pop-culture imagery, include the ubiquitous depictions of the likes of Marilyn Monroe and the Campbell’s soup cans. But his own struggles with desire and sexuality — particularly during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, during which the Catholic Church in which he was raised played a role in antagonizing and demonizing those affected by the epidemic — are present in his work from the era. “You can get so much more meaning from his paintings when you think of Andy as a queer figure, who is looking for his place in the world,” Rossi says. “In the end, his artistic practice is a form of validation and searching.”