No Gentleman: On Warhol & Trans Visibility

Having that throwback picture of artist Sean Fader on my screen yesterday led me, via his 16yo tumblr post to an absolute barnstormer of a lecture by art historian David J. Getsy at Dia last February. Getsy spoke about Warhol and trans visibility in the 1970s, but it wasn’t so much a critique or analysis of Warhol. Warhol was a lens as Getsy laid out a complicated and fascinating narrative where the prominent but stereotypical depictions of trans Factory actresses like Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, and Jackie Curtis in Paul Morrissey’s Warhol-branded films became an object of critique by queer underground theater artists, specifically The Magic Hype, a 1973 transploitation spoof of Warhol’s Factory by the trans and street queen theater troupe, Hot Peaches. I cannot believe that’s one sentence. But the culmination, which Getsy characterizes as a feedback loop, is an even more nuanced reading of one of Warhol’s largest and least considered bodies of work, a series of portraits of trans…