Sunday Brunch: Andy Warhol and William S Burroughs discuss their first sexual encounters
Artists tend to be highly open people. When you make art, you are trying to speak to someone, ignite something in them that resonates at a deeper level and is tough to ignore; you don’t get this if you keep your cards close to your chest. As such, when discussing their personal lives, Andy Warhol and William S Burroughs were happy to lay their cards on the table.
In a conversation between the two, they were talking about some of their very first sexual experiences. Rather than being a standard conversation about the birds and bees, the talk enveloped into one filled with chatter surrounding atomic bombs, sex-related party tricks and boarding schools.
“Cocteau had this party trick that he would pull,” said Burroughs, opening up the conversation, “He would lie down, take off his clothes, and come spontaneously. Could do that even in his fifties. He’d lie down there, and his cock would start throbbing, and he’d go off. It was some film trick that he had.”
It wasn’t long before the talk moved on to the two artists having a conversation about themselves. Warhol opened up the chat by asking how old Burroughs was when he first had sex. Given he attended an all-male boarding school at Los Alamos, he ended up having his first sexual encounter at quite a young age with a fellow student.
“Sixteen,” he said, “With this boy in the next bunk.” Burroughs went on to explain that the two had done “Mutual masturbation,” however, his train of thought quickly went from sex to talking about what the school he went to was famous for.
“During the war, this school, which was up on the mesa there thirty-seven miles north of Santa Fe, was taken over by the army,” he said, “That’s where they made the atom bomb. Oppenheimer [the scientist who invented the bomb] had gone out there for his health, and he was staying at a dude ranch near this place and said, ‘Well, this is the ideal place’.”
Warhol’s sense of humour comes into play at this point, as rather than ask more questions about the school, he instead opts for a crude follow-up. “Was the sex really like an explosion?” He asks before having the comment brushed aside by Burroughs, claiming it was too long ago for him to remember properly.
While Warhol lost his virginity at 25, his first exposure to a sexual act was much younger, as while the site of the act might not have been as dark as where the atomic bomb was developed, Warhol was still exposed to a moment of human cruelty. “The first time I knew about sex was under the stairs in Northside, Pittsburgh,” he said, “And they made this funny kid suck this boy off. I never understood what it meant […] I was just sitting there watching when I was five years old.”
