The United States has always had some form of obscenity laws, going back as far as 1868. There were several other iterations of obscenity laws attempting to clarify the constitutionality (or lack thereof) when it comes to distributing or receiving explicit materials, but the most recent one compared to the time of the photograph is Jacobellis v. Ohio, with its famous “I know it when I see it” line of reasoning. Nico Jacobellis was the manager of the Heights Art Theater in Cleveland, Ohio, and he wanted to show the Louis Malle film The Lovers. Jacobellis was charged with two counts of possessing and exhibiting an obscene film and ordered to pay fines or spend time in jail (findlaw.com). Jacobellis appealed, having his conviction held up twice, before it reached the United States Supreme Court, where it was ruled that the film was not obscene and therefore constitutionally protected (findlaw.com). The judges, however, could not agree on one rationale. The most famous rationale is from Justice Potter Stewart, who said, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that” (findlaw.com). This is especially notable because the FBI had an obscenity file on Warhol and his works (pghcitypaper.com). Warhol’s works were frequently avant-garde in addition to blatantly sexual, and his workers included adult film stars, drag queens, drug addicts, musicians, and more as his work and The Factory grew more popular. Lore from The Factory was that because of how frequently their works were shut down under said obscenity laws, Warhol suspected that the script for Up Your Ass, a play by Valerie Solanas, was the police trying to entrap him (archive.nytimes.com). Solanas would attempt to assassinate Warhol a year before this picture was taken, with drastic effects on his life and eventually complicating a gallbladder removal surgery (nytimes 2017). The attempted assassination would not be the end of their encounters—Solanas would repeatedly stalk him and be repeatedly institutionalized due to schizophrenia (Solanas 1966).