More thoughts about Andy Warhol and stuff

But I was talking about Andy Warhol, wasn’t I? I suppose I first became interested in Warhol because of the Velvet Underground, and I was interested in the Velvet Underground because of Joy Division, and how much further back do you want me to go? I was in my first year at university when he died: I remember the nascent artist/film-maker Nick Abrahams leaping out at me, hissing “Have you heard? Have you heard?” as I ambled along the High Street. I’d imagine we were both wearing Doc Martens, but that his were cooler than mine.

The following year, I took a course in writing radio drama, and one of my submissions was a sort-of-interior-monologue-cum-collage about Warhol’s last few minutes, largely drawn from his book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and back again. I vaguely recall Edie Sedgwick making an appearance as the Angel of Death (which was in turn influenced by Jessica Lange’s role in All That Jazz). The funny thing was, at that stage I knew very little about Warhol’s life, beyond the stuff he chose to make part of his public persona. It wasn’t until I read Victor Bockris’s biography of Warhol that I found out he was gay, for example.



I know, it seems astonishing now, but even in the mid-to-late-Eighties, such things weren’t as widely discussed as we might remember. There was simply an assumption of heterosexuality, the sort of thing expressed in this airline commercial.  Diehard Queen fans would get aggressive if one suggested that Freddie Mercury might not be entirely straight. John Inman and Larry Grayson, Kenneth Williams and Frankie Howerd refused to be drawn on the subject. Even the Pet Shop Boys refused to confirm or deny. Men flew Braniff because they liked the girls, unless they explicitly stated otherwise, which for the most part they didn’t. Remember this when people say Warhol made his life his art. Or was it the other way round?

It wasn’t just about sex, of course. Until I read the Bockris book, I don’t think I’d sussed that Warhol wore a wig either.

And I’m just about to post this when I realise that a few months after Warhol died, the Smiths broke up, and remember that we’ve just passed the 25th anniversary of the release of The Queen Is Dead, and I can’t think of much to say that hasn’t been said too many times already (often by me) but I’m certain that for some reason the occasion does need to be marked.

Feasting on Stephen

...and the next time someone suggests that poorly argued, badly written, self-indulgent blogs are debasing culture and making it harder for conscientious, thoroughly researched journalism to get a look-in, just refer them to this.

Jondrytay, Anton Vowl, Charlie Brooker and Michael Deacon weigh in, as do many others.

Eventually, Moir apologises, but misses the point. Her worst sin isn’t the snide fag-bashing that’s been a staple of the right-wing tabloids for decades. It’s the standard of her journalism that stinks; and it took the derided Twitterati to point it out.

PS: Another angle.

A little princess

A few days ago, I found myself on the Tube, sitting next to a group of three women and a little girl. Now, it’s obviously unfair to make assumptions about people’s sexuality based purely on their appearances, and God knows I’ve been misdiagnosed on many occasions (something to do my tendency to pout at moments of disappointment) but I’d already guessed the adults were lesbians before I clocked that one of them was wearing a “WHAT WOULD XENA DO?” t-shirt. Subsequent eavesdropping revealed that the little girl was the daughter of one of the women.

At one point, the girl asked: “What colour are my eyes?”

Her mother said: “Your eyes are green.”

“Why?” replied the little girl, not unreasonably.

“It depends on what colour your two mummies’ eyes are.”

Hang on a minute. Now, I’ve got no problem with kids being brought up in any combination of parent/carer scenarios: one daddy; two mummies; three daddies, a granny and a sword-swallower; as long as the child is loved and nurtured and protected, it’s really none of my business or anyone else’s. And in a broader sense, people should be entitled to define themselves however they bloody well want, and live by that definition. Unfortunately, biology occasionally intervenes.

Take the story of Caster Semanya, the South African runner whose gender has become a matter of international controversy. Semanya is a woman, in the sense that she was brought up as a woman, and identifies herself as female. Under normal circumstances, that should be the end of it. Unfortunately, she has chosen to take part in top-level athletics, and as such her biological identity - the configuration of her sexual organs, the nature of her chromosomes - also becomes a matter of public interest, in a way that it wouldn’t if she’d decided to be an accountant or a bus driver. The fact that she appears to possess testicles does not mean that she’s not a woman in a social sense, but it does make rather a nonsense of the idea of having separate events for male and female runners if she continues to compete as a female. In biological terms, she’s intersex, or a hermaphrodite, or a person with androgen insensitivity syndrome.

Then there’s Thomas Beatie, the man who had a baby. He’s a man, because he chose to undergo reassignment surgery and live as a man, and no-one else can or should deny him that right. However, he was, is and always will be a biological woman. The fact that he elected to keep his uterus and ovaries after surgery is beside the point; even if he’d had them removed, his biological identity would still be female.

Which brings me back to the little girl on the train. Presumably she’s being brought up by two women, and she calls them her mummies, and they are her mummies, because they love her and care for her, and she loves them back and that’s all lovely. But in biological terms, there’s a father somewhere in the equation, a man who provided his sperm to facilitate her conception. And part of the back story of her green eyes is down to that man. To tell her it’s because of her two mummies is wishful thinking, a nonsense, a lie.