“Gay cancer” and fear of AIDS

“Gay cancer” and fear of AIDS names a recurring climate of uncertainty in Andy Warhol’s diary: an unfamiliar illness is discussed through alarming reports, rumor, and fear of transmission, while its effects appear in ordinary decisions about whom to approach and what risks to avoid. The entries record no diagnosis of the illness for Warhol. They show instead how his existing fear of cancer met a new and poorly understood danger, and how incomplete information could make social contact itself feel threatening.

Earlier fears of illness

Warhol’s fear of cancer preceded the diary’s 1982 references to gay cancer. Pat Hackett later described going broke and getting cancer as his two greatest fears, noting that he could interpret even a headache or freckle as a possible sign of brain or skin cancer. She also observed that, in retrospect, he scarcely mentioned the health problems that truly worried him. Her examples include a lump in his neck in June 1977, which doctors ultimately declared benign, and the gallbladder problem in February 1987 that led to his death. The contrast matters: the diary’s frequent anxieties do not provide a transparent measure of what troubled him most.

The neck biopsy became a brief episode of acute uncertainty. On June 16, 1977, Warhol went with Fred Hughes to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. After local anesthesia and a half-hour procedure, he was told to return to work, but he remained worried because he did not yet know what the lump was. Four days later, he called the doctor and went in nervously for the result. The news was good: it was not what they had feared. His neck was still swollen and painful, and he went to church afterward to give thanks. This earlier experience gives context to his later attention to reports of cancer, without making the two illnesses equivalent.

A name for an uncertain illness

In 1982, the diary repeatedly uses the period label gay cancer. On May 11, Warhol recorded a New York Times article that described an illness of epidemic proportions and said that doctors did not know what to do about it. The newspaper account, as he relayed it, included claims about disease in semen and people having had several other illnesses. Warhol’s response was fear that he might catch it by sharing a glass or simply being around young people who went to the Baths. The entry documents what he read and feared; it does not verify the article’s claims or establish that casual contact posed a risk.

The diary’s language also captures how little certainty was available to him. Its account moves from a newspaper report to his personal questions about exposure, without a settled explanation that could separate demonstrated danger from speculation. The label itself ties the illness to gay men, placing fear and stigma inside the way the condition was discussed. Warhol’s anxiety is presented as real, but the entries do not turn his assumptions into medical fact.

Fear in social encounters

The fear altered Warhol’s conduct toward people he thought might be ill. At a birthday party on February 6, he wrote that he avoided talking with Joe MacDonald because MacDonald had gay cancer. The entry records a small, direct consequence: the illness changes whom Warhol is willing to approach. It offers no account of MacDonald’s experience beyond Warhol’s reason for keeping his distance.

A month later, Victor relayed a story about men in Amsterdam changing their sexual practices because they were afraid of the disease. His anecdote, delivered in a joking register, shows fear reaching beyond medical discussion and reshaping intimacy. The diary preserves the report as something circulating socially, not as verified evidence about transmission or the behavior of a wider group.

On September 19, Warhol recorded a more complicated episode involving Robert Hayes and Hayes’s boyfriend, Cisco. After seeing Hayes crying, Warhol initially suspected a breakup. Marc Balet told him that Cisco had learned he had the illness and that the news was meant to remain secret; later, Hayes told Warhol about it himself. The account says the illness was believed to have appeared three years after its acquisition, while also conveying doubt about that timeline because so little was understood. Hayes, the entry adds, had been tested and did not have it. Warhol then worried that Janet Sartin might have used the same needle on him that she had used on Hayes. He said he would not return to her, also because he felt the treatment had left him covered in pimples. The passage distinguishes reported diagnosis, another person’s negative test, and Warhol’s own fear: it records suspicion, not evidence that he was infected.

The diary as a mediated record

These episodes survive in a record produced through a daily routine between Warhol and Pat Hackett. They had previously kept a sketchy Factory log based largely on office visitors, accounts from people who attended events, and Warhol’s expenses. In 1976, after Hackett stopped working at the office but agreed to continue writing Popism with him, they shifted to accounts supplied by Warhol himself. Their weekday morning calls became both a record of his activities and, as Hackett put it, a diary; the entries also served the practical purpose of documenting expenses for tax auditors.

The method shaped what the reader receives. Hackett took notes during the calls and typed them afterward; weekends were generally covered in a longer Monday session. Warhol could add or correct details in later calls or in person. For publication, Hackett reduced an original 20,000 pages, cutting whole days and weeks as well as names and portions of individual days. The published account is therefore neither a complete transcript of every conversation nor an independent medical record. Its importance lies in preserving how fear circulated in Warhol’s social world: through news reports, secondhand stories, guarded disclosures, and the ordinary choices those reports prompted.