Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM by Breanne Fahs

Photo Insert

    Valerie’s father, Louis Solanas, and mother, Dorothy Marie Biondo.

    Birth certificate of Valerie Jean Solanas, born April 9, 1936.

    Left: Valerie Solanas, age fourteen, 1950. Center: Valerie’s Oxon Hill High School yearbook photo, 1954. (Photos courtesy of David Blackwell.) Right: Valerie’s University of Maryland college yearbook photo, 1958. (Photo courtesy of Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.)

    David Blackwell, Valerie’s son, discovers Warhol art at a New York gallery, 2005. (Photo courtesy of David Blackwell.)

    Linda Moran, Valerie’s daughter.

    Valerie’s play,
Up Your Ass
, was included in the 1967 edition of
SCUM
along with a reprint of her
Cavalier
magazine article from 1966. (Photo courtesy of The Dobkin Collection.)

    Valerie Solanas’s original self-published mimeographed copy of
SCUM Manifesto
, copyrighted in 1967.

    Controversial Olympia Press publisher, Maurice Girodias, who published
S.C.U.M. Manifesto
in 1968.

    Andy Warhol, prior to the shooting at the Factory on June 3, 1968. (Photo: Argenta Images.)

    Valerie’s friend and “baby brother,” Jeremiah Newton, as a teenager in New York City, late 1960s. (Photo courtesy of Jeremiah Newton.)

    Valerie held auditions for
Up Your Ass
in the spring of 1967 in the basement of the Chelsea Hotel.

    Andy hired Valerie to perform in his film,
I, a Man
, where she played a tough butch lesbian rejecting a man’s pickup lines in a stairway. (©2014 The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, A museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved.)

    Famed restaurant and Andy Warhol hangout, Max’s Kansas City, New York City, 1976. (Photo: Bob Gruen.)

    Andy Warhol and members of the Factory, New York City, October 30, 1969. (Photo: Richard Avedon.)

    Andy Warhol, artist, New York, August 20, 1969.
Andy Warhol displays his scars after recovering from the shooting. (Photo: Richard Avedon.)

    Valerie is escorted to a police car after her arrest in Times Square on June 3, 1968. (Photo courtesy of Jeremiah Newton.)

    Valerie smiles as she enters the New York Police Department building after shooting Andy Warhol and Mario Amaya. (Photo: Frank Russo / Getty Images.)

    Valerie is held behind bars on June 3, 1968. (Photo Jerry Haynes / New York Daily News.)

    Radical feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson giving a talk in 1971. (Photo: Bill Sanders.)

    Radical feminist Roxanne Dunbar (later Dunbar-Ortiz) upon her graduation from her graduate program at the University of California, Los Angeles, 1967. (Photo courtesy of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.)

    Florynce “Flo” Kennedy, famed civil rights attorney, served as Valerie’s lawyer immediately after the Warhol shootings. (Photo courtesy of Ti-Grace Atkinson.)

    Various editions of
SCUM Manifesto
: 1968 (left), 1971 (center), and 2004 (right).

    Valerie marked her own graffiti on the 1971 copy of
SCUM Manifesto
held by the New York Public Library, calling Vivian Gornick a “flea” and saying that Maurice Girodias’s version of her text was “full of sabotaging typos.”

    Valerie self-published this correct version of
SCUM Manifesto
in 1977, distributing it via mail and through local bookstores in the East Village. (Photo courtesy of The Dobkin Collection.)

    An advertisement placed in the Village Voice by Valerie Solanas on April 27, 1967. (First published in the
Village Voice
, a Village Voice Media publication.)

    Valerie printed this advertisement for her 1977
SCUM Manifest
o in the May 28-June 10, 1977 issue of the feminist newsletter,
Majority Report
. (Photo courtesy of Redstockings Women’s Liberation Archives for Action.)

    Matteawan State Hospital, Beacon, New York, 2008. (Photo: © Christopher Payne, from
Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals
.)

    Valerie after leaving prison, circa 1975.

    Valerie bathed in the fountain at the Phoenix civic plaza (photographed here in 1984 and later demolished) most nights around three in the morning during the 1980s. This is now