The Magic Hype: Trans Visibility in the Name of Warhol

Guest lecture by David J. Getsy.

At the start of the 1970s, Andy Warhol’s brand became synonymous with trans visibility. As Flesh (1968), Trash (1970), and Women in Revolt (1971) crossed over from underground to more mainstream viewership, their notoriety was fueled by the superstars such as Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, and Candy Darling. Directed by Paul Morrissey but named as Warhol’s creations, these films offered ambivalent roles to trans actresses, with a salacious view of “drag” and street life emerging as a Warhol type.

This talk assesses this reputation as it became a foil for the downtown theater troupe of street people, the Hot Peaches, whose The Magic Hype (1973) overtly satirized the exploitation of trans stardom in Warhol’s Factory. Among the players in The Magic Hype was Wilhelmina Ross, who would later be the most frequently depicted sitter in Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen 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. Attending to the feedback in this sequence of stereotypes and critiques offers a framework for talking about both the promise and the trap of visibility presented by Warhol’s fame.

Bio

David J. Getsy writes about queer and transgender histories of modern and contemporary art and performance. His books include Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art (2022), Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (2015), and the anthology of artists’ writings, Queer, for the Whitechapel Gallery’s “Documents of Contemporary Art” book series (2016).

He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, the Terra Visiting Professor of American Art at the Freie Universität Berlin, and is currently the International Sculpture Scholar-in-Residence at the Glyptotek working on a project with their collections of nineteenth-century sculpture (debuting in March 2027). He currently teaches at the University of Virginia (USA), where he is the Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History.