However, with few exceptions, most considerations of Warhol have "de-gayed" him. Warhol's critics have usually aggressively elided issues around sexuality or relegated his queerness to the realm of the "biographical" or "private" to usher in his oeuvre to the world of high art. Or when they have alluded to Warhol's sexuality, usually without mentioning that he was gay (more often "asexual" or "voyeuristic"), it has only been in order to moralize about the "degraded" quality of Warhol's art, his career, and his friends. Despite the fact that many people "knew" that Warhol was gay, hardly anyone, at least in the world of criticism and theory, will speak of it. As Mandy Merck notes, "Out as Warhol may have been, gay as My Hustler, Lonesome Cowboys, Blow Job may seem, his assumption to the postmodern pantheon has been a surprisingly straight ascent, if only in its stern detachment from any form of commentary that could be construed as remotely sexy."

The academic disciplines, defining as they do what counts as scholarly work, have encouraged the process by which concerns around sexuality are perpetually deferred to some other body of knowledge, some other line of inquiry. As Foucault put it, "A proposition must fulfil some onerous and complex conditions before it can be admitted within a discipline," conditions that have played no small role in foreclosing the possibility of making any propositions about Warhol's queerness in relation to his rich body of cultural production. Often, some of Warhol's audiences, themes, figures, and indeed many of the works of art themselves are simply removed from the field of critical consideration. . .