As an artist, McDiarmid was attracted to the popular, the glamorous and the commercial, as well as to the critical and political, and his work engaged the visually pleasurable, perverse, camp and ironic interfaces between commercial popular culture and the high-art world, which had also animated American Pop Art. America was perhaps an inevitable destination for an artist for whom the eroticism in advertising and commercial graphic design was an enduring trope of his own sexuality and his creative imagination, as he recounted in a 1992 interview:
I constructed sexual fantasies around advertising, which was around when I was a kid. I was 11 years old when I saw a newspaper ad for Jantzen swimwear. It was 1963, and the look was American collegiate and blonde. I can still remember the pattern of chest hair on the model’s washboard and the shape of his thighs. The image stayed with me for days and weeks, until its power drove me to spend an afternoon searching through a stack of old newspapers in our garage, looking for that picture.[29]