Up for a blowjob with 20 of your closest friends?

Calm down, moral majority – it's the celluloid version. Andy Warhol’s landmark 1964 silent film Blow Job is coming to Calgary on the evening of September 3^rd for Pride Week. It’s part of a collaboration in Calgary’s East Village between literary hive Loft 112, Fairy Tales Film Festival and Teatro Berdache, Calgary’s first professional queer theatre company.

Also on tap for Factory 112: Head Shots are screenings of films created by Queer Youth Media participants Nick Kennedy, Marisa Cupples and Shelby Adams; an exhibition of erotic photographs by Calgarian Jeff Goth; and live performances based on queer-themed Warhol films such as Kiss and Haircut.

Warhol (1928-87) revolutionized art – not only through his silkscreens of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell’s Soup – he brought an unapologetic queer sensibility to his work.

Warhol’s pre-pop drawings of the 1950s often featured gay men as their subjects, many of them Warhol’s love interests. In the testosterone-fuelled world of Abstract Expression, prominent artists condemned Warhol’s softer pop approach. "Too swish," sniped artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns when asked about Warhol’s work.

Queer voice in Warhol’s world found its strongest expression in two places: in the Silver Factory, where drag queens like Candy Darling, aspiring queer artists and rough trade mingled with gay celebrities like Montgomery Clift and Truman Capote; and then in the gay themes that dominated Warhol’s films.

Critics consider Blow Job, now residing in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, an unexpected masterpiece.

"I suspect Andy’s original intent was just to make an arty gay porn movie," says co-organizer Steve Gin, who has become a Warhol aficionado after playing him in various film and stage productions over the past decade. "But it turned out to be a stunningly beautiful film."

When the original star of the film failed to show up for the shoot, Warhol and his team frantically searched the streets for a replacement. The actor they finally cast remains uncredited to this day.

Shot on 16mm stock in low light, the film has a dreamlike, etherial quality. While no one doubted Warhol’s brilliance as an artist, they questioned his technical skill as a filmmaker. "Candy Darling would only do her scene if Andy was behind the camera," remembers fellow drag queen Holly Woodlawn.

"Well, the man put the film in backwards!"

Throughout the film’s 36 minutes, the camera remains fixed on the subject’s face – tracing it through stages of boredom, confusion, desire, arousal and submission.

"It’s what you don’t see that makes the film so incredibly erotic," observes Gin.

Warhol’s legacy also lays in mentoring emerging artists like The Velvet Underground, Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. So Factory 112’s producers are especially happy to be screening yet-unseen films from Fairy Tales’ Queer Youth Media project. And Goth, whose black and white still photographs explore the sensuality of a diverse cross-section of men, will be shooting a series of new works for a month-long exhibition at Loft 112. The photos will also be available for purchase.

Factory 112: Head Shots is the second in a series of Warhol-inspired events to take place at Loft 112. The first – held in May this year – was an exhibition of prints created specifically for the event, plus a weekend of art-making and Silver Factory-style partying. It was brainchild of Loft 112’s Lisa Murphy Lamb, Alberta Printmakers directors Carrie Phillips-Kieser and Scott Baird, and Teatro Berdache’s founder Steve Gin.

For Gin, it was natural fit. He has been playing Warhol since 2002, when he was asked to write and perform a solo show about Warhol for a pop art exhibition at the Glenbow Museum. Since then he has gone on to expand the show for The Vancouver Art Gallery, headlined the award-winning Factory Project installation for Montreal’s Studio 303, produced a tongue-in-cheek documentary about Warhol’s collecting practices, and taught numerous school programs about Warhol’s creative process and media influences. His image was once even lifted off the Internet for a Warhol exhibition poster at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Chances are good that he will be attending on September 3rd as his alter ego once again.

"The irony," he jokes, "is that I’m told time and time again that I’m too ethnic looking to be cast in mainstream theatre. But my most popular performance gig has turned out to be playing the whitest man imaginable."