Andy Warhol’s Queer Catholicism — The Revealer

Andy Warhol is one of the world’s most famous artists, widely known for his iconic paintings of soup cans and Hollywood celebrities. But Warhol’s religious beliefs remain shrouded in mystery. In the last few years, right-wing pundits have increasingly tried to co-opt Warhol’s vast cultural impact by falsely claiming the gay pop-artist as a religious fundamentalist. They seem to be motivated by the fact that Warhol is highly celebrated, and gay—so revising his legacy would constitute a kind of cultural victory for the right.

Conservative news outlets have repeatedly spread fake news about Warhol. Inaccurate headlines have asserted Warhol’s “secret Catholicism” and “secret piety.” The right has tried to depict the famed artist as a “Catholic traditionalist.” Reactionary bloggers have disseminated the lie that Warhol practiced strict celibacy. One propagandist even outrageously described Warhol as a precedent for Donald Trump.

It might be true that Warhol’s experimental films often relished in petty drama and practically invented the reality-television format that enabled Trump’s rise. But these attempts to “Make Andy Great Again” warp the art-world super-star out of all recognition—as if putting Warhol through a kind of historical-revisionist, anti-gay conversion therapy. They deny the reality of Warhol’s life and art, in an effort to re-write history and turn one of the country’s most consequential gay artists into a prop for Christian nationalism. This re-writing of history is part of an overall effort to erase queer and trans people.

For decades, art historians have debated the truth about Warhol’s spirituality, and biographers have explored the impact of his religious beliefs on his sexual and artistic practices. Some have suggested that Warhol had a “complicated” relationship with Catholicism. Others have proposed that Warhol’s religious views evolved, or that Warhol became more religious after 1968 (when Warhol was shot, declared clinically dead, and saved by surgeons).

Carefully looking at Warhol’s life, however, shows that he was always sexually active, and that he developed his own idiosyncratic kind of Catholic belief. Warhol attended church in the same way he attended Studio 54—not at all secretly, but as a place to socialize and network. And he hated and subverted Catholic teachings on sex, and used the church for his own artistic ends, in ways that could resonate with today’s anti-MAGA and anti-authoritarian activism.

Who Started the Rumor that Warhol Lived like a Nun?

Right-wing accounts of Warhol’s religious beliefs all draw upon the same, unreliable source: a eulogy delivered at Warhol’s funeral in 1987 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City. Of course, funerals call for sentimental platitudes. And at Warhol’s service, the art-historian John Richardson gave a misleading speech.

Richardson pretended to reveal to the public what he called “a side of [Warhol’s] character that he hid from all but his closest friends.”

Years later, Richardson admitted that his eulogy grossly mischaracterized Warhol’s life. In a saccharine hagiography, Richardson sugar-coated Warhol as “innocent” and “saintly.” He declared that Warhol attended Mass “more often than was obligatory” and “regularly helped out at a shelter serving meals to the homeless.”

And in a final attempt to purify Warhol in death, Richardson suggested that Warhol remained “devout and celibate… in his heart.” But whatever the content of Warhol’s heart, all serious historians agree that Warhol frequently used his body to make gay love.

Despite its inaccuracies, Richardson’s eulogy has sustained the fiction that Warhol secretly subscribed to repressive views on sex and gender. This fiction gained traction with Jane Dillenberg’s 1998 book, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol, which reprints Richardson’s eulogy in full. Dillenberg didn’t arrive at any firm conclusions about Warhol’s sexual practices. Instead, she gathered circumstantial evidence for thinking of Warhol as a religious painter. Dillenberg noted that, along with the well-known Campbell’s cans and Marilyns, Warhol also made copies of Renaissance religious paintings, and she suggested that all of his paintings were in some way inspired by religious iconography.

But seeing Warhol as a religious painter has obscured the gay and campy content of his work. In 1954, for example, Warhol collaborated with his mother on an illustrated book called Holy Cats. Warhol dedicated this book to his deceased pet, “Little Hester, who left for pussy heaven.” Dillenberg ridiculously suggests that the book expressed a sincere concern for heaven and holiness. Every page, however, confirms that Warhol, who wore drag and whose closest friends were trans women and sex workers, relished in jokes about “pussy.”

Sexy Priests and Photo Ops

On a daily basis from 1976 to 1987, Warhol made a morning phone call to his collaborator Pat Hackett. Warhol recounted his activities from the previous day, and Hackett took dictation. This became the basis for the Warhol Diaries, published in 1989 after the artist’s death. It’s a mammoth tome of over 800 pages, filled with Warhol’s scathing insights and eccentric day-to-day rituals. Reading Warhol’s Diaries demonstrates that he saw church attendance principally as a means to socialize, make business deals, and meet cute guys.

Warhol never “hid” his attendance at church. Warhol’s Diaries show how he let his church attendance be widely known, in order to advance his social connections. Moreover, the Diaries indicate that Warhol believed in a subversive form of Catholic spirituality that mocked the clerical hierarchy, shrugged off the sacraments of Confession and Communion, and turned charity functions into spectacles that served Warhol’s career.

On major holidays, Warhol volunteered at a soup kitchen at the Episcopal church of the Heavenly Rest (located across the street from the Guggenheim Museum). Warhol’s Diaries show that he leveraged the church’s high-powered zip code, and that he viewed his charity work through a gay, avant-garde frame. For example, in his entry for Christmas Day, 1985, Warhol dished that he found the priest at Heavenly Rest “really cute.” The next year on Thanksgiving, Warhol expressed his disappointment—and perhaps even his envy—that the “good-looking priest” had advanced his career and moved on to an even fancier parish. The hot priest won a promotion, Warhol says, to St. Thomas’s, “that big chic church” on the more fashionable Fifth Avenue.

Warhol volunteered within a gay, New York geography of lust, power, pettiness, and decadence. He archly called the soup kitchen “overstaffed” with “one volunteer for every eater.” He did not fail to recognize that the scene included “a lot of photographers.” Politicians commandeered the event “to show they cared, in case there were people taking pictures.” Meanwhile, Warhol and a drug-addled friend brawled with “this big dykey Irish woman.” The soup kitchen, for Warhol, was not a pious occasion, but fully part of his bohemian life in the queer avant garde among the hoodlums and hustlers who inspired his work.

Despite Warhol’s fruity antics at the charity, he made clear that his own ethical commitments included a staunch critique of unregulated capitalism. “If there’s this many hungry people,” Warhol said, then “there’s really something wrong.” Warhol didn’t sentimentalize poverty as a spiritual condition. Rather, he objected to how an unjust economic system makes people poor.

As Warhol-biographer Blake Gopnik points out, Warhol’s contemporaries viewed him as “your standard, gay, lefty, party-going avant-gardist, and that was the image he chose to let loose on the world.” Warhol used the soup kitchen to amplify his image by passing out copies of his magazine Interview to fellow volunteers and members of the press.

Similarly, Warhol attended his local parish church of St. Vincent Ferrer—a place to see and be seen. Warhol called St. Vincent Ferrer’s “chic”—one of the wealthiest and poshest parishes in the country. And Warhol’s presence at this church circulated through the grapevine as part of his celebrity profile. Warhol knew very well that, when he attended the church, people saw him, and gossiped about his religiosity.

At St. Vincent Ferrer, Warhol ran into celebrities, socialites, pop stars, and sycophants. He even namedrops in his Diaries how fellow parishioners included “Mrs. Rupert Murdoch,” along with Adolfo, the Chanel designer. Hilariously, the Diaries recount how Warhol and Adolfo acted out a petty and ongoing, gay professional rivalry while praying in the pews.

Scuttlebutt about Warhol’s church attendance became part of his global brand. On a trip to Toronto in 1981, for example, Warhol met a Canadian cardinal who already knew, he said, that Warhol “goes to church every Sunday.” Most historians agree that Warhol desperately hoped to nab a commission to paint a portrait of a pope. Letting it be known that he went to Mass didn’t hurt Warhol’s chances.

Warhol celebrated the papacy with back-handed compliments. He flagrantly negated the moral authority of the pope. He took an interest in the Holy Father, only because he took an interest in celebrities. In 1978, Warhol mocked the funeral of John Paul I as “a good production.” Warhol’s snappy quip about the pope’s funeral suggests that he regarded the pope as yet one more TV star, and not a voice of wisdom.

In 1980, when Warhol met John Paul II, Warhol snidely trivialized the pope as one more superstar who “did the rounds” in front of the cameras. Forced to listen to the pope drone on “against divorce,” Warhol dismissed the sermon as “really boring.” With these queeny reads, Warhol deflated Catholic doctrine about sex and marriage as trite and irrelevant.

Warhol and Trump

Warhol’s relationship with Trump gives insight into his ethics—and also suggests how Trump’s admirers can quickly turn into his enemies. When Warhol first met the real-estate mogul in 1981, Warhol considered Trump “good looking” and “fun” (principally because Warhol hoped to sell a painting to Trump). Trump agreed to the deal. But then, Trump betrayed Warhol and backed out. Warhol held a lasting grudge. He bitterly repeated in his Diaries, “I hate the Trumps.” Warhol shows that, despite Trump’s apparent sway over his sycophants, he has the tendency to alienate even his own inner circle.

Warhol’s persistent use of the word “hate” encapsulates much of today’s national mood with regard to Trump. Notably, Warhol spurned the Christian commandment to “turn the other cheek” and to “love your enemy.” He paid little credence to abstract theology.

Instead, Warhol practiced a pre-Christian, classical ethics. He imminently liked whatever he understood as pleasing, and he disliked whatever he understood as displeasing. Warhol regarded fame and wealth as desirable; but he despised immoderate greed (and in his Diaries, he ridiculed Trump’s avarice). Warhol loved those who treated him well, or whom he found attractive or interesting.

Warhol especially adored athletic, handsome men as embodiments of the good, beautiful, and true. As his biographer Wayne Koestenbaum has shown, Warhol regarded gay sex as its own kind of religious devotion. Warhol made pornographic art—and he passionately pursued sexual romances with hot men—because “for Warhol, the Good was male flesh.” A principal to live by!

Disingenuously, one right-wing pundit pleads that, while Warhol attended Mass several times a week, he “humbly abstained from receiving” the sacrament of the Eucharist. This claim makes no logical or doctrinal sense. Supposedly, according to right-wing accounts, Warhol lived as a pious celibate, but supposedly, he declined to participate in Communion out of reverence. But if it’s true that Warhol had devoutly lived chaste, then he would have had no motive to refuse the Host.

In truth, Warhol rejected Communion out of defiance. He scoffed at the sacraments, as a challenge to the church’s retrograde politics. Rather than revering the sacraments, Warhol felt nothing but contempt for the Mass. He complained that the ceremony “took too long.” And he particularly loathed one part of the liturgy, the sign of peace, when congregants traditionally all shake hands. “I always cringe,” Warhol said, and “always leave before that.”

Dripping with disdain, Warhol skipped Confession. As Warhol’s biographer Blake Gopnik writes, Warhol never gave penance, because he “was sure the priest would recognize him through the screen and gossip about his sins.” Again, Warhol shrewdly recognized the church as a node within a vast, high-society rumor-mill. Taking the clergy down a peg, Warhol viewed priests as yet more gossipy queens who violated the seal of confession.

The priests of St. Vincent Ferrer did gossip. One parish father, Sam Matarazzo, remarked in an interview that he found Warhol’s lifestyle “absolutely irreconcilable” with church teachings on homosexuality. By making fun of the sacraments, Warhol undermined homophobic and hypocritical clergy like Matarazzo.

AIDS and the Last Supper

In his final series of paintings, Warhol attacked the church head-on. In 1986, Warhol finished his send-up of the Last Supper—more than 100 paintings, retooling Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece (in bright pink, overpainted with bars of color like a rainbow, and vandalized with images of ads and muscle-builders). With this series, Warhol queerly took back the Eucharist for gay men. His Last Supper paintings may even constitute a form of artistic Host desecration.

(Warhol in front of Last Supper (Yellow) (1986) in Milan, 1987. Source: Mondadori Portfolio/Archivio Giorgio Lotti/Getty)

Cloying conservative critics want us to believe that, with the Last Supper, Warhol made his final act of contrition, and expressed his “secret piety” just before his death. But the Last Supper registers a gay protest against the church, and against its cruelty toward queer peoples during the HIV/AIDS crisis.

Dillenberg had hinted at the homoeroticism of Last Supper, suggesting that Warhol identified Christ and his disciples as a gay community. More recently, Warhol expert Jessica Beck has shown that Warhol riffed off of Leonardo in order to oppose how Christians demonized people with HIV/AIDS. In the Last Supper, Warhol imagines himself and fellow gay men as analogous to the Lord and Apostles—as gay lovers who face certain death.

In the original, Leonardo painted Christ just before his Crucifixion at his final meal when he offered the Eucharist to the disciples. The bread and wine—Christ’s body and blood—embody the promise of a loving community that continues after tragic death. Warhol took up this miracle for himself and for queer people—against those who had viciously excluded him and his companions.

In the Last Supper, Judas sits at the table with the other apostles. A self-hating betrayer, Judas kissed Jesus but handed him over to the Romans for a few pieces of silver. Like Judas, today’s right-wing Christians have betrayed Warhol—by telling lies about him, and by trying to repackage and sanitize him. But Warhol fiercely maintained his faith in the artistry of the gay, lefty avant-garde, through which he transcended institutionalized, and sexually repressive religion. He’s a model for how queer people can invent our own ways to relate to traditional religion, without compromising our core selves.

A.W. Strouse, Ph.D., has written several books, including Form and Foreskin and The Gentrified City of God.