Join Dia Chelsea for a lecture by David Getsy on Andy Warhol, underground theater, and trans visibility in ’70s New York. The lecture is accompanied by a screening of selected Warhol films in Dia Chelsea’s program space from February 25 to 28.
At the start of the ’70s, Warhol’s brand became synonymous with trans visibility. As the films Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), and Women in Revolt (1971) crossed over from underground to mainstream viewership, their notoriety was fueled by superstars such as Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling, and Holly Woodlawn. Directed by Paul Morrissey but named as Warhol’s creations, these films offered ambivalent roles to trans actresses, with a salacious view of drag emerging as a Warhol type.
This talk assesses this reputation as it became a foil for other stage productions of the decade, including Andy Warhol’s Pork (1971), featuring Jayne County, and Hot Peaches’ The Magic Hype (1973), which overtly satirized the exploitation of trans stardom in Warhol’s Factory. Among the players in The Magic Hype was Wilhelmina Ross, who would later become the most frequently depicted sitter in Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen (1975), a series of portraits of trans women of color. This lecture speculates on the experience of Ross and other Hot Peaches members, such as Marsha P. Johnson, who found themselves both in a play about Warhol’s Faustian promise of stardom and, knowingly, posing for Warhol. The feedback loop in this sequence of stereotypes and critiques offers a framework to evaluate both the promise and the trap of visibility presented by Warhol’s fame.
David Getsy is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. His most recent book, Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (2022), received the Robert Motherwell Book Award, and his earlier books include Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (2015) and Queer, an anthology of artists’ writings (2016). He was curator of the retrospective Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York (2018–19). Forthcoming this spring is the collection Magic Episodes and Other Synchronicities: The Transhemispheric Correspondence of Scott Burton and Eduardo Costa, 1970–1989, co-edited with Patrick Greaney for Ugly Duckling Presse. He received a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship in support of his new book project Street Addresses: Performing the Queer Life of the Street in 1970s New York. He lives in Charlottesville.