Andy Warhol’s queerness, unedited

“I think everybody should like everybody” is one of Andy Warhol’s most iconic quotes. If you type it into Google image search, you get back a grid of dorm-room posters, inspirational desktop wallpaper, t-shirts, and baby onesies. Seeping into popular culture, Warhol’s quote has become a simple, cheeky mantra for how to live the good life—a reminder to get back to the basics. Wouldn’t the world be better if we all just liked one another? Even a baby knows that. It’s the sort of quote that fuels Warhol’s enduring reputation as “the great idiot savant of our time”—as the influential critic Hal Foster once put it.

However, things are not as simple as they seem. Lurking beneath the surface of this particular quote is a fraught history involving the excision of an entire, sophisticated, wistful discussion about homosexuality.

The quote comes from a defining interview Warhol conducted with art critic Gene Swenson, published in the magazine ARTnews in November 1963. As it was printed in ARTnews, the exchange between Warhol and Swenson goes like this:

Warhol: I think everybody should be a machine.

I think everybody should like everybody.

Swenson: Is that What Pop Art is all about?

Warhol: Yes. It’s liking things.

Swenson: And liking things is like being a machine?

Warhol: Yes, because you do the same thing every time. You do it over and over again.

Swenson: And you approve of that?

Warhol: Yes, because it’s all fantasy.

But that is not how the conversation really transpired. In March 2016, I uncovered an unknown, original tape-recording of the interview, stashed away in a box among Swenson’s papers. On tape, the exchange between Warhol and Swenson actually goes:

Warhol: … Well it has to be something like the idea that, uh, uh… that all Pop artists aren’t homosexual. And it really doesn’t… you know… And everybody should be a machine, and everybody should be, uh, like…

Swenson: I don’t understand the business about – if all Pop artists are not homosexual, then what does this have to do with being a machine?

Warhol: Well, I think everybody should like everybody.

Swenson: You mean you should like both men and women?

Warhol: Yeah.

Swenson: Yeah? Sexually and in every other way?

Warhol: Yeah.

Swenson: And that’s what Pop art’s about?

Warhol: Yeah, it’s liking things.

Swenson: And liking things is being like a machine?

Warhol: Yeah. Well, because you do the same thing every time. You do the same thing over and over again. And you do the same…

Swenson: You mean sex?

Warhol: Yeah, and everything you do.

Swenson: Without any discrimination?

Warhol: Yeah. And you use things up, like, you use people up.

Swenson: And you approve of it?

Warhol: Yes. [laughing] Because it’s all a fantasy…

As you can see, every reference to homosexuality and sex was expunged from the published interview, line by line. This happened across the board. Swenson begins the interview by asking Warhol, “What do you say about homosexuals?”—a question Warhol goes on to answer with great care and complexity, but is nowhere reflected in the published version. Listening to the tape, we learn that in Warhol’s “fantasy” it wouldn’t really matter whether a Pop artist is or isn’t “homosexual” because the stark division between homosexuality and heterosexuality falls away. And it falls away not because everybody celebrates his or her distinctness, but rather because everybody likes everybody and does the same thing all the time, including “sex” and “everything you do.” Warhol thus responds to Swenson’s question “What do you say about homosexuals?” with a confounding, provocative queer fantasy that undermines the distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality, thereby making room for different forms of difference.

How did these dramatic excisions happen? For the most part, we don’t know. In another recorded interview, Swenson says that it was Tom Hess, executive editor at ARTnews, who “cut out all those words.” But the details are murky, and no paper trail has surfaced charting what happened in those final edits. We also know that Swenson went on to rail against the art establishment in a series of impassioned writings and disruptive protest actions. He waged public battles against publishers and curators over their culpable willingness to abet injustice by suppressing disruptive social, political and queer content during the 1960s.

As it turns out, Warhol’s simple mantra “I think everybody should like everybody” contains a whole story of censoring and queer fantasy—a story that is far from simple.

Featured image credit: Balloon by movprint. CC0 via Pixabay.