On Valentine’s Day in 1956 ANDY WARHOL first exhibited his very graphic drawings at the Bodley Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side. Warhol been working on this series of elegant line drawings celebrating queer love – a style and subject that couldn’t be less fitting to the American audience of the day. Then 24 years old was enthralled by hypermasculine ideals
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At that time when homosexuality was illegal and full-frontal male nudity was considered “obscene,” so simply looking at the male body was an act of liberation, defiance, and pure delight. Warhol was a gay man and worked with the homoerotic, and In the homophobic 1950s, this was daring and heroic. When he met a man he liked he’d d say, ‘Let me draw your cock.’ … They’d drop their pants, and Andy would make a drawing. That was it. And then he’d say, ‘Thank you.’”
