Andy Warhol

“Juan came with me to Christmas to a family reunion thing for the entire family. My Father has ten brothers and sisters. It’s a Marine Corps family. All my Father’s relatives are Marines; I know that I could have been a Marine. On one side there is this really macho thing, but there is also this thing of pride in yourself and in family and in real simple things. I could have done all that, but it was even more incredible to have their respect even though I was not a Marine and even though the whole family knew, by now figuring it out, that I’m gay. Haring is their name, too, and what I’ve done makes them incredibly proud. And though we never talked about it, after coming to New York and visiting me when I was living with Juan, my parents finally accepted him as part of the family, buying him a present at Christmastime.”

-Keith Haring, 1989

This portrait-one of many Polaroids Andy Warhol took from the late 1950s until his death in 1987-depicts Keith Haring, an artist known for bringing graffiti into a fine-art context, and his lover, Juan Dubose, a New York-based deejay. Both men died of AIDS-related complications, Haring in 1990 and Dubose in 1989.