About Me
Valerie Jean Solanas was born on April 9, 1936 and was a feminist writer--most famous for SCUM Manifesto and her play Up Your Ass--cult classics. She is also infamous for having shot the artist Anddy Warhol in 1968.Solanas arrived in Greenwich Village in 1966, where she wrote a play titled Up Your Ass about a man-hating prostitute and a panhandler. In 1967, she encountered Andy Warhol outside his studio, the Factory and asked him to produce her play: intrigued by the title, he accepted the script for review. It was never returned to Solanas. Solanas appears in a scene in the Warhol film "I, A Man" (1968-1969).During this period (the late 1960s) Solanas wrote and self-published the work for which she is best known – a call for destruction of men and man-loving women, as well as the liberation of women, called the SCUM Manifesto. SCUM is generally held to be an acronym of Society for Cutting Up Men. SCUM gained Solanas a following among some feminists, who use her provocative text as a wake-up call.Later in 1967, Solanas began to telephone Warhol, demanding he return the script of Up Your Ass. Warhol admitted he had lost it.On June 3, 1968, she fired 3 shots from a handgun at Warhol after they entered his studio. She then shot art critic Mario Amaya and tried also to shoot Warhol's manager Fred Hughes, but her gun jammed.That evening, Solanas turned herself in to the police and was charged with attempted murder and other offenses. Solanas made statements to the arresting officer and at the arraignment hearing that Warhol had "too much control" over her and that Warhol was planning to steal her work. Pleading guilty, she received a three-year sentence. Warhol refused to testify against her.After her release from prison in 1971, she was regarded by some as a martyr. She persisted in stalking Warhol and others over the telephone, however, and was arrested again. An interview with her was published in the Village Voice in 1977. She denied that the SCUM Manifesto was ever meant to be taken seriously. Solanas drifted into obscurity, and was in and out of mental hospitals. During the 1980s, it is believed she was living in California, supporting a drug addiction through prostitution. In 1988, at the age of 52, she died of emphysema and pneumonia in a welfare hotel in San Francisco.A copy of the script for Up Your Ass apparently survived and is still performed today.
