Dancing queers: Andy Warhol, Fred Herko, and the A-Men
Dancing queers: Andy Warhol, Fred Herko, and the A-Men
As with Smith’s case, this chapter demonstrates the centrality of dance and queer culture in Warhol’s artistic formation during his breakthrough years in the early 1960s. In order to tell this story, I bring into relief his contemporaneous dance world through the figure of dancer/choreographer Fred Herko at the pioneering Judson Dance Theater—and his queer social/artistic circle centering around the so-called “A-Men” (A for amphetamine). Tracing the historical links between the Theater and Warhol’s Factory, this chapter proposes another line of horizontal connection, bringing together two key sites of 1960s art that are rarely discussed under the same breath. Their overlap—and the creative thriving that it enabled—is what this twin-pronged approach clarifies, with the queer social network and refusal of (straight) artistic professionalization providing the connective tissue.
Keywords: A-Men, the Factory, Warhol and dance, Dance Diagram, Male Genital Diagram, Fred Herko, Jill and Freddy Dancing, queer virtuosity, inefficiency, Judson Dance Theater
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