Artist Keith Haring’s zest for life, his iconic work and his tragic death

Keith Haring made being a nerd cool.

The guy from Kutztown, Pa., dressed like an 11-year-old, in T-shirts and chunky sneakers. He loved sci-fi and cartoons. Skinny, prematurely balding, fond of huge plastic glasses, he looked like someone who got beaten up regularly.

Then he moved to New York.

And soon, he ruled the downtown art and music scene. He hung with Madonna and hosted parties at the hottest nightclubs. When Haring died from AIDS, he was rich and internationally famous.

He was 31.

His tragically short but happy life is the subject of “Lives of the Artists: Keith Haring” by Simon Doonan. Inherently sad because he died so young, it’s also an inspirational story, of how by staying stubbornly true to himself, a young oddball ended up changing art.

Haring was born in 1958 to parents who met in high school and began dating a year after graduation. His father, Allen, was a Marine and an amateur cartoonist who worked at Western Electric. His mom, Joan, stayed home with the four children, Keith, Kay, Karen, and Kristen.

While still in diapers, Haring loved sitting in his father’s lap and drawing lines on pieces of paper. Once he started school, teachers noticed his enormous talent. “Yes, Allen Haring was undeniably artistic,” one noted years later. “But Keith had the goods to go out and do something about it.”

Soon, though, Haring was developing in ways his parents didn’t understand or maybe want to notice. He crushed hard on Davy Jones. He begged for a Ken doll. Much to his mother’s horror, his grandmother bought him one.

By the time he was a teenager, Haring was searching for something beyond Kutztown.

He explored religion, getting involved in the ’70s Jesus movement. He thought about sex a lot and tried not to. He embraced drugs.

Haring sought out boundaries and then pushed them hard.

“There was always something interesting about Keith,” Kermit Oswald, a lifelong friend, recalled after his death. “It was the way he dressed, the way he talked; it was the way he would smile, smirk, and roll his eyes.”

After high school, his parents attempted to channel his talents into something acceptable, urging him to enroll in a commercial art school in Pittsburgh. After two semesters, he dropped out.

Haring, meanwhile, attempted to channel his constant horniness into heterosexuality by finding a girlfriend. That lasted a little longer, although being gay was becoming more difficult to deny.

Eventually, he found his way back to art school, sort of, by taking a job as a janitor at the Pittsburgh Arts and Crafts Center.

It could have been a dead end. Instead, it was a beginning. When he wasn’t unclogging toilets, Haring sat in on classes and filled giant rolls of paper with quirky drawings. When the center’s director realized one of the maintenance guys was the school’s busiest artist, he gave him a show.

That gave Haring the last burst of confidence he needed. In short order, he slept with a man for the first time, broke up with his girlfriend, and moved to the Lower East Side and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts.

It was 1978, and New York felt like the city of no rules. Three-chord punk blared from CBGB. Graffiti artists covered subways in bold spray paint. Urban poets rapped out furious rhymes while breakdancers spun on their heads.

Haring embraced all of it — especially the city’s gay bars and bathhouses.

Not content with simply coming out of the closet, Haring knocked the door off its hinges. He spent his nights looking for sex and his days capturing it in art. When one teacher told him, “choose a subject and develop it,” Haring came in with 300 pictures of penises. For another assignment, he brought in naked videos of himself.

It was just his way, he explained, of “asserting my sexuality and forcing other people to deal with it.”

Some students didn’t appreciate that demand. But Haring was getting less appreciative of SVA, too. He was already making art on his own – some of it on the street, some of it at Club 57, a performance space on St. Mark’s Place. He dropped out, looking for somewhere with no boundaries at all.

He found it on the subway.

Whenever a platform billboard was between ads, black paper covered the space. To Haring, they looked like empty canvases begging for art. Subway platforms began to feel like pop-up galleries, as straphangers looked for Haring’s trippy drawings made with white chalk.

A small barking dog. A crawling, radiant baby. Jumping on and off trains, leaving his mark across the system, Haring drew 30 to 40 pictures a day.

Artistically, it was exciting. Legally, it was vandalism. In 1982, a couple of cops finally caught him in the act at Seventh Ave. and 51st St. Haring was terrified, but when he arrived at the precinct, other officers broke into applause. The kid was a pain, but you had to admire his moxie.

Haring signed with a gallery that year. The next year, he had his first European show. He began doing huge public art projects, like outdoor murals and odd intimate ones, like painting Grace Jones’ body.

In 1984, Haring celebrated his 26th birthday at the Paradise Garage, a disco. Madonna showed up in a Haring-decorated jacket and sang “Like a Virgin.” The next year, he celebrated at the Palladium, and Boy George sang “Happy Birthday.” Haring sneaked off to the bathroom and had sex in one of the stalls, his friends snapping pictures.

Haring’s appetite for art, fun, and drugs had always been enormous, but his hunger for sex often towered above them. He cruised clubs and became a regular at the Phoenix, a pick-up bar where guys danced in jockstraps.

“By 1985 and 1986, we all thought we had lost Keith,” artist pal Kenny Scharf recalled. “To fame, to his pursuit of famous people and fabulous celebrities, and by surrounding himself with these gay Puerto Rican hustlers.”

Others saw a different Haring. He volunteered for children’s charities and art projects, and was a canny businessman, too, putting his designs on posters and T-shirts.

Then, in 1987, he lost a close friend to AIDS. The plague was killing gay men at a shocking rate. Haring said he needed “to do as much as possible as quickly as possible.”

He went back to what he’d always done best: Creating art.

“When Haring is officially diagnosed with AIDS, he goes down to the East River and has a very protracted and very profound weep,” Doonan writes. “This is the moment he has been anticipating for a couple of years, but it nonetheless does him in. It is important to understand that an AIDS diagnosis at this time was no mere ordinary death sentence. It was also a moral condemnation.”

By February of 1990, he was dead.

Still, his message endures.

“The public has a right to art,” Haring wrote in his notebook after he arrived in New York. “The public is being ignored by most contemporary artists. Art is for everybody.”

He believed that. And every time he left a drawing on the subway, he made it come true.