STOP H8TE: right now the people of California are afforded an opportunity to watch the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals hear preliminary arguments on the validity of the ballot initiative, Prop 8, Defend Marriage.  This bit of judicial theater links together a series of seemingly disparate actions and people, but they are a pattern, a well crafted one that points to the need for artists of all types to refuse to be herded into a debate about getting heard. I am not sure that "Silence Equals Death" is the complete rallying cry this time around. What I am about to strap together is a response to a fantastic blog entry from Dawoud Bey that chronicles the day that a deceased artists was silenced once again for his status.

Hiding What Was Sought

If you don't know the tale, The National Gallery in Washington, DC has an exhibit up, "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" that is a retrospective of sorts: it reviews an era of twentieth-century art generated in a time of silence, pestilence, and medical policy abuse. From all accounts, it is a well crafted, astutely created and gutsy exhibit. One would expect the accolades to come rushing in, except that this exhibit was quietly placing these incredible artists in their proper historical context; they were centrifugal forces in the 1980s against claims that first, nothing was killing gay men, then that AIDS was god's will. After running for one month with no incident, the exhibit "threatened" to normalize the works included as simple facts the American historical past, providing a much needed opportunity for a moment of reflection on the era. That type of acceptance apparently threatened elements of the extreme far right Christian fundamentalist (and here, the fundamentalists were actually from various dogmas), but do not assume that Catholic League president William Donohue's response to "A Fire In My Belly" by the deceased artist David Wojnarowicz was a gut reaction, out of the blue, without provocation. Please. Don't.

Leviticus, Uganda, Hitler, Crucifixes, Marriage, World AIDS Day

Diamanda Galás, renowned avant garde singer and composer, had written a 1984 libretto for a mass called THIS IS THE LAW OF THE PLAGUE. Taking a passage word for word from the Old testament in the Bible, Leviticus, Chapter 15, setting it to music in her inimitable way, Galás performed it for those who were dying of "gay cancer" sentenced, according to this old "law" to die alone,without treatment intervention and maligned as creators of said "plague." "Plague Mass" as it later became known, was an inspiration to  Wojnarowicz, who used it as the score for his film "Fire in my Belly." This is where the hypocrisy gets surreal. Galás did not alter any of the words of the bible passage. Wojnarowicz merely displayed images alluded to in the scripture and, as Galás pointed out in her statement against the removal of "A Fire in my Belly:

The cross is a symbol of the CRUCIFIXION, among the cruelest tortures in the world. This is the sentence of slow and horrific death in which the spinal column breaks and the organs rupture. This is the torture for the worst of outlaws – the man who protested that the sick and the poor were not allowed into the church for the crime of being perceived as UNCLEAN, rather than "pristine," and moneyed for his advocacy that the church BE a sanctuary to the sick, rather than a citadel for the rich family man, who comes to exchange invitations for tea and other such serious matters with OTHER rich family men.

In essence, Christ was killed because he would have provided sanctuary for those dying of AIDS, disobeying the Laws in Leviticus. But Ugandans can get it right. At least that is the hope of members of The Family. They are close to getting their wishes with a bit of help from Hitler.

While gay people of Uganda were subjected to the morals of US Reps Cantor, Boehner et al, rather than go for fragmenting the hive mind that generates these ideas, we lefty types sent out missives to the press, set up blogs and made phone calls to organizations that ultimately had no political currency to redirect the debate. Why did they have no currency? Because the entire movement was based on a very odd revisionist history of Hitler and Nazis.

We don't do too well with this level/type of confrontation, especially when the "facts" are often interpretations of partially substantiated occurrences. Confabulations are to be ignored, right? 

Swing back to Silence Equals Death. You know the now famous pink triangles that AIDS activists began to wear, an icon pulled from Nazi Germany: homosexuals, no matter their genetics, once discovered, were forced to wear a pink triangle and were eventually sent off to the gas chamber. In the version promulgated by  Scott Lively and The Family, Hitler himself and ALL his top men were rabid homosexuals who perpetrated their crimes against humanity as extended sex crimes. To allow American Gay Right activism to spread globally would be to reinvigorate this horrible moment in history as homosexuality clearly leads to deviant behavior, so the logic goes.  

Unable to "redeem the rainbow" here at home, the radical Christian right has headed to Africa to put a stop to the alleged global homosexual infestation. Now, there is a LOT of back story here, and I know you are thinking, "Anna, why oh why is this long like this and painful and scary? Aren't you going to lift us up? Give us something to cheer about?" Not yet. I am driven to give you this information like this because I believe that the strategy of conquering African countries with fundamentalist views by convincing them that Congress, yes, the US CONGRESS is more likely to give money to a government and turn a blind eye to poor governance if said country "saves" marriage and burns "the gays" at the stake, is crafted to not only prevent funding of the arts here in the US, but to classify all practitioners of the arts as social deviants, and thus, parasitic on the social body of the nation. Please do read or listen to talks by Jeff Sharlet, the journalist who broke the story on The Family, a secretive fundamentalist Christian network that has massive political clout in D.C., but let me come back to Uganda.

Fearful that their newly found friends on the Hill would abandon them, Ugandan politicians and clergy dutifully bought this version of World War II (the ones where a specific type of gay man was incinerating another type to hide their secret gay cabal). They set about to stop anti-Christian and anti-social behavior from gaining ground in Uganda through a law forbidding homosexuality. The Law of the Plague, in Leviticus, chapter 15 (yes, the same used by Galás) continues to be deployed by the christian fundamentalist right; except this time, homosexuality itself is the plague. 

At about the same time that the law was being debated there, Proposition 8, which was passed by voters on November 4, 2008, was heading into a legal battle over its Constitutionality, eventually being ruled constitutional in the State (now, its constitutionality with regard to US law is being determined, except California refuses to send anyone to speak on its behalf; Gov. Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown are positive that the law is unconstitutional so do not want to bother). Similar laws were being considered in other states, and the beleaguered "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in the military was getting support from certain far right segments of Congress.

A holy war was under way, kinda. Now that World AIDS Day was hijacked by the complaint against the National Portrait Gallery video, speech activists and artists are on the defensive, putting massive effort into reinstating the video. With all these various legal considerations that involve a practically unprotected minority, art production, art as activism serves as a lightening rod of homophobic "Family values activism." This time, getting loud and taking to the street can have the effect of looking like a massive, coordinated take over, especially when spliced and diced for Fox News viewers.

What to do?

Then, there is that nagging feeling I have that this is a set up: "let them whine and wail about this one video while we...." While we what? Well, obviously, while we cut national art funding. And then, while we lambaste art in the schools for creating teen homosexuals and alienating everyone else who would rather be taking shop anyway. Oh and while we eradicate the "vast homosexual conspiracy embedded" in our media by supporting draconian copyright law, COICA. And while we push artists who do not participate in our version of realism further to the fringe and thus, achieve the possibility of tainting each and every campaign for social justice, climate change, environmental justice, affirmative action, and educational freedom that uses the work of "fringe artists," who are all, as "we" well know, all part of the vast homosexual conspiracy.

A few weeks ago, I would have laughed at my own hyperbole.  I am not laughing now. The new equation is thus, gay=artist=waste of tax payer dollars=destruction of family values=end of US exceptionalism=gay=nicest people I've ever known. I expect that each time the news turns to the latest updates on any gay-related issue, we will hear from a Congressional member who belongs to the Family; we will find ourselves needing to save an artist who makes honest, terrifying, unflinching work. 

Artists are powerful people. YOU ARE POWERFUL PEOPLE. And CHANGE and HOPE is only possible when artists mobilize each and every individual to attain their own personal artistry. Being an artist proves personal responsibility and the ability to make a choice without dogma is not only possible, but likely the better way of inhabiting a human body. We can scream and beat pans and yell that silence equals death, or we can choose to get under the hood of this thing, reverse engineer it, then make some incredibly moving work about it that keeps hope alive, removes the shame of wanting and believing in change, and gives us some momentum again to take flight and live our wildest dreams.