Warhol, Koestenbaum notes, was never comfortable in his skin, never capable of fully finding a footing in social (or romantic) situations-yet he was eternally obsessed with fame society, sex, and power. The relationships were often described as having a cold quality, with Warhol in possession of an oddness that put even those close to him off. His biographer Wayne Koestenbaum argues that, “His work’s major theme was interpersonal manipulation, sociability’s modules at war.” But despite the co-dependency between Warhol and his stars, and their obvious infatuation with and loyalty to him, few, writes Koestenbaum, seemed to have loved him. Without these accomplices to hide behind, Warhol would have had no art. The films, and the Factory and its stars, served as a constant entourage for Warhol, a crowd in which he could hide. Anyone who collaborated with or worked for Warhol during that time became a sort of avatar. The story of Warhol is the story of the Warhol stars, those who remain glittering and those nameless, erased, absorbed into Warhol himself, never making a name for themselves-or much of anything from being the pulse of the Factory in the ’60s. Warhol himself once remarked that he lost his creativity after he “stopped hanging around with creeps”. Warhol would hand the film production to Paul Morrissey, and security at the Factory became much tighter-it was no longer a place where strangers, weirdos, fame-seekers, and queers could freely come and go. His’s feverish pace of production that would cease in 1968, when he nearly died after being shot by one of his former film stars, Valerie Solanas. Blow Job was now a piece of the Warhol’s cinematic oeuvre, which by then amounted to 20 movies made in just two years. When Gidal caught the film again three years later, at the same New York cinema, in 1968, “the year of the marches to Mississippi, the anti-Vietnam protest, and not to mention Paris,” the audience was notably uneasy, making jokes, waving their hands in front of the projector. He claimed he couldn’t remember the name of the lead actor-“a good-looking kid who happened to be hanging around the Factory that day.” Or it could be, as someone else remembers it, that the five boys became impatient waiting to start, and all but one left before filming began. In interviews, Warhol famously stated that “five beautiful boys” performed the act in the film. If you were gay and metropolitan in the ’60s, you would have likely known that Warhol “went to your church,” so to speak. Gidal notes that the audience was completely silent, curious, and respectful. Instead, Warhol shows us a handsome man getting his dick sucked: his head lolls around, he stares in the the distance as one does when given to pleasure, and finally he smokes a cigarette. You never see cock, or any of the act itself.
Shown as an opener to a weekly art house film in New York City, Warhol’s black and white film is 36 minutes of a camera framing the face of a man receiving a blow job, presumably beneath the frame. In his book Andy Warhol: Blow Job, Peter Gidal writes about seeing the film in theaters as a college freshman.