In this ground-breaking and provocative book, Roy Grundmann contends that Andy Warhol's notorious 1964 underground film, Blow Job, serves as rich allegory as well as suggestive metaphor for post-war American society's relation to homosexuality. Arguing that Blow Job epitomizes the highly complex position of gay invisibility and visibility, Grundmann uses the film to explore the mechanisms that constructed pre-Stonewall white gay male identity in popular culture, high art, science, and ethnography.

Grundmann draws on discourses of art history, film theory, queer studies, and cultural studies to situate Warhol's work at the nexus of Pop art, portrait painting, avant-garde film, and mainstream cinema. His close textual analysis of the film probes into its ambiguities and the ways in which viewers respond to what is and what is not on screen. Presenting rarely reproduced Warhol art and previously unpublished Ed Wallowitch photographs along with now iconic publicity shots of James Dean, Grundmann establishes Blow Job as a consummate example of Warhol's highly insightful engagement with a broad range of representational codes of gender and sexuality.

"A whole book on one short film may seem excessive, but when the film is Andy Warhol's Blow Job—a pivotal document of the productive tensions between pop and art, pornography and avant-garde, gay and straight, visible and invisible 'sex'—one book hardly seems enough. Roy Grundmann has produced the definitive analysis from every possible perspective of this most fascinating of self-reflexive films. The amazing thing is how vital and compelling each of these perspectives seems."—Linda Williams, Director of Film Studies, U.C. Berkeley, and author of Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson

"Roy Grundmann has extended Andy Warhol's diabolical plot to make respectable 1960s film critics say a naughty expression for an illegal sex act, making an academic book title out of it forty years later! He has also done the near impossible, written a book on a single-take film, more talked about than seen for most of those forty years, that is a masterful synthesis of queer history, cultural theory, and film studies. Grundmann has deftly demonstrated the centrality of the minimalist masterpiece that is Blow Job—and of its sly author—to postwar Western avant-gardes and to the sexual and racial cultures they inhabit."—Thomas Waugh, Professor of Film Studies and Director, Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality, Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Concordia University

"Finally, the longest reaction shot in film history has found its ideal analyst. Roy Grundmann has written a thoughtful, funny, accessible, yet deeply theorized book that situates Warhol's most (in)famous film in all its polymorphous contexts. This book shows just how rich 'close reading' can be, yet it offers a window on the entire underground of a Warholian century."—Caroline A. Jones teaches contemporary art and theory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has written about Warhol in her Machine in the Studio, among other places