Keith Haring is renowned for his humanizing of LGBTQ rights and AIDS visibility, which he accomplished with his of-the-people-style subway murals. His work is so universally easy to understand and chic, it remains popular on T-shirts all over the mainstream today.
As Artsy.net reports, the sexual libertine did create some racy work ... and one of his most famous, dirtiest murals is tucked away in a john at NYC's LGBTQ Community Center:
Haring titled the piece Once Upon a Time, a nod to the gay community’s halcyon days of free love. Over the course of several days, he covered every un-tiled surface of the bathroom with turgid, squirting penises of all sizes. Some are attached to buff male bodies tangled together in pleasure. Others float like happy clouds or hungry dragons. One impressively large specimen hovers over a line of small figures who are either dancing the conga or enjoying an orgy.
When he painted the mural, Haring was fighting his own battle with AIDS; he’d been diagnosed just a year before, in 1988. During the late 1980s, he and his community not only faced the fear of death, but also disregard and antagonization from the Reagan administration, which simultaneously laid blame on the gay community and refused to put resources towards AIDS research.
Check it out!
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