Well, folks, we made it to 100 episodes and we wanted to give you what your love best, queer true crime. Today’s story is the infamous rivalry between lesbian, feminist Valerie Solanas and gay, artist Andy Warhol. Which culminated in the attempted assassination of Warhol by Solanas in 1968. But who was Solanas and what led her to shoot one of the most prominent artists of the time? We’re so glad you asked. In some ways, Valerie and Andy had a lot in common yet their journeys were very different. Aside from the fact that they were both the children of immigrants, their childhoods could not have been different. Warhol’s family had arrived from Austria-Hungary during World War I and settled in Pennsylvania. While the Solanas family had immigrated from Spain first to Montreal until eventually settling in New Jersey. For his part, Andy grew up in a stable home though he did lose his father to an accident at age 13. He was also afflicted with a nervous disorder (Sydenham’s Chorea), which caused his limbs to twitch involuntarily. Still, in 1945 he graduated from high school winning a Scholastic Art and Writing award and enrolled in Carnegie Mellon University. Valerie’s story was very different. Her father sexually abused her regularly and though her parents eventually split, Valerie didn’t care much for her stepfather either. For a while she was sent to live with her grandparents, but her grandfather was an alcoholic who beat her. By the time she was 15 she was living on the streets, a truant student, and at 17 she became pregnant. The child was immediately taken from her at birth and she would never see him again. But despite the mountain of obstacles in her way, Valerie Solanas was brilliant. She graduated from high school and later graduated with honors from Maryland University and earned a degree in psychology. She toyed around with getting a graduate degree bouncing around from Minnesota to California and even taking a few courses at Berkley. The 1960s were the most formative for Warhol and Solanas. It was when they were most alike and when their rivalry began. After graduating from college, Warhol had moved to New York City where he took odd jobs at various magazines and newspapers, developing and refining his art along the way. He began exhibiting his work in the late 1950s and in 1962 his big break came when he debuted his piece, Campbells Soup Cans. Around the same time Warhol was becoming a breakout star, Valerie Solanas was arriving in New York City herself. Though once again their circumstances were very different. Despite her college degree Valerie struggled to find work and ended up using sex work, odd jobs, and begging to pay the bills. In between work and hustling, she wrote an autobiography titled, “A Young Girl’s Primer on How to Attain the Leisure Class” and a play called “Up Your Ass”. Both Andy and Valerie were gay and lived openly, something virtually unheard of during this era. And as is suspected, it brought each of them a lot of extra heartaches. Though he was becoming a prominent artist, Warhol was often excluded from his peers because of his open sexuality. Even being shut out by many fellow gay artists who feared they would be outed purely through association. In Koestenbaun’s Andy Warhol: A Biography, he prints this response written by Warhol when a critic said he had too much “swish”: There was nothing I could say to that. It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn’t going to care, because those were all the things that I didn’t want to change anyway, that I didn’t think I ‘should’ want to change … Other people could change their attitudes but not me”.[5] Valerie struggled as an outsider in her would as well. She was beginning to attract the attention of the New York feminist movement, but she had some strikes against her. For one, she openly hated men and believed the world would be better without them...