Warhol was also openly gay before the gay liberation movement became popular in the mid-1960s (Nickels). Much of his work focused on the relationships between gay men and other people considered to be deviants at the time (drag queens, trans women, etc.). The United States still has various homophobic laws on the books, like anti-sodomy laws that specify consensual anal and oral sex (advance.lexis.com), which are unenforceable and cannot be defined cleanly in a court of law. And as to the issue of homophobic (rules of) law, Bill Clinton would sign the Defense of Marriage Act into law in 1996, which stated that marriage was a union between “one man and one woman” and allowed states to refuse to recognize gay marriages performed in other states. This would be the status quo until it was whittled down by United States v. Windsor (2013), which declared Section 3 (defining marriage) as unconstitutional under the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment (United States v. Windsor), and Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) which declared the entire text as unconstitutional under the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment (Obergefell v. Hodges). There were other gay liberation movements beforehand, and the Stonewall rebellion would come only a few months before this photograph, on June 26, 1969. (June 26, 2015 was also the date that Obergefell was decided.)