Yes. Andy Warhol was gay, and the Andy Warhol Museum in his hometown of Pittsburgh says so in plain words: he was "a gay man who had several partners throughout his life." What is harder to find is the moment he said it himself.
The trail starts in the 1950s. Warhol came to New York in 1949, straight out of art school at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, and spent the 1950s filling sketchbooks with drawings of young men.
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Blake Gopnik, the author of the biography Warhol, treats the question as closed. NBC News quotes him: "Anyone with half a brain realized that Warhol was gay, but he didn't actually come out." In Gopnik's account, the first public admissions came in the 1970s and 1980s, and even then Warhol made them as jokes.
Curators who study the work from the inside describe the same man differently. When the Whitney Museum in New York opened a large Warhol retrospective in 2018, assistant curator Claire K. Henry told Out magazine that researchers had spent two decades trying "to re-gay Warhol, who never was in the closet to begin with."
The two statements fit together, because they answer different questions. Did the people around him know? Gopnik and Henry agree that they did. Did he ever say it on the record? Gopnik says he never really did, apart from jokes. The best evidence for that second question is a single interview from 1963.
What You'll Discover
Why the galleries said no.
What he left out of Pop.
What happened to that 1963 interview.
Who shared his life.
What became of the rejected drawings.