[Copyright 1997 by Jim D'Entremont and Bob Chatelle. Requests to repost all or part of this article on electronic systems serving writers, artists, other creators and cultural workers, members of the queer community, and fighters for free expression are encouraged. All repostings must retain this copyright notice in its entirety. Send permission requests to us at kyp@ultranet.com.]

ARTcetera is an art show and auction held every two years to benefit Boston's AIDS Action Committee (AAC). The 1996 edition, chaired on a volunteer basis by the Fuller Museum of Art's Jennifer Atkinson, contained 325 works and hung from October 21 through 26 at International Place, one of the city's largest office buildings. The show was tame in terms of sexual images and nudity. Imagery at least as explicit is publicly on view throughout Boston. No tenant at International Place is known to have complained.

The following day, when Boston Globe coverage touched off a storm of protest, the Chiofaro Company agreed to allow eight works to be re-hung. But company president Donald Chiofaro refused to lift the ban on two photographs depicting male couples. These were Kurt. Infinity by San Francisco artist Frank Yamrus, a virtually abstract image of a couple curled up nude together on a beach, and Nan Goldin's Matt and Lewis in the Tub: Kissing. The Goldin piece comes from a tactfully posed suite of photos depicting novelist Lewis Gannett (The Living One and Magazine Beach) and his then lover. (The ARTcetera catalog mistakenly printed another photo from this sequence that was later published unretouched in the Boston Globe. At the auction it was falsely rumored that Goldin had substituted a more explicit picture in protest; the photo auctioned off is, however, similar enough to account for the confusion.)

These two photos were the only works in the show portraying same-sex couples. When Chiofaro ordered them out, the move did not surprise anyone familiar with Don Chiofaro's casual homophobia. In a 1990 Boston Globe profile, for example, Chiofaro--a scrappy self-made multi-millionaire and former college football star--said that when he allowed his "Jeep-like" physique to drop to 180 pounds, "I didn't like it. I felt like a hairdresser." Chiofaro was not about to permit pictures of kissing pansies to sully his lobby space, a magisterially kitschy habitat that has the aura of a mausoleum Hermann Goering might have ordered from the J.C. Penney catalogue. Although the art was placed so that anyone entering the building could walk from the doors to the elevators and barely know it was there, Chiofaro expressed concern for the tender--and presumably infantile--sensibilities of the 7,000 workers who inhabit the building.

In the local broadcast media, the Chiofaro Company's defenders were drawn from the nether margins of the Right, and included such stalwarts as anti-sex-education crusader Brian Camenker, who condemned the censored work as "homosexual propaganda" illustrating acts that "caused the AIDS virus."

Many were appalled by the frank homophobia behind the censorship. Frank Yamrus, who learned of the incident through friends in Boston, recalls, "At first the news just put a smile on my face, because I couldn't imagine how anyone could be offended by that picture. Then, as I thought about it, I was outraged." Photographer David Armstrong, who contributed an example of his work to the show, says he reacted with "shock, horror, and dismay. It's like something from another century." Lewis Gannett attributes the incident to "prudery and ignorance."

"As an artist, a gay man, and a person with AIDS," says former ARTcetera participant B.R. Alexsavich, "I was totally offended." Alexsavich compares the relationship of the AAC and the Chiofaro Company to "Hadassah renting from neo-Nazis."

In this case, the First Amendment is actually on Chiofaro's side. Constitutionally, Chiofaro has the right to control the message to the public conveyed by work hanging in the halls of his own building. The only way the AAC could have protected ARTcetera from interference would have been through a written contract outlining the specifics of permissible content and providing a mechanism for dealing with disputes over what could be shown.

Banned in Cambridge: a woodcut by Jerry Hooten taken out of a gay/lesbian art exhibition sponsored by Lotus. Copyright 1995 Silver Earring Graphics. Image may not be reproduced for profit.

The name of the show, Visions of Our Reality, might have more properly been Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Queer reality was the last thing heterosexual gallery manager Anna Noel wanted Lotus employees and visitors to see. Seascapes, abstracts, and still-lifes were fine. Anything affirming or even acknowledging same-sex affection was verboten. One Lotus-banned artist was printmaker Jerry Hooten, whose submitted work was appealing, queer-positive and tastefully sex-positive. Noel rejected Hooten's woodcuts showing two clothed men dancing and one man carrying another on his back as "too suggestive."

Much of the local queer community sided with Lotus. Members of LILAC--the organization of gay Lotus employees--had their careers to consider. They felt that even permitting a censored show was an act of benevolence on Lotus' part, and that it would be unseemly to expect more. Gay business and political leaders were affronted that anyone could have the audacity to criticize Lotus, which could do no wrong (and was about to reward its stockholders by merging with IBM).

It is the goal of no corporation to pursue a progressive agenda. Corporations strive to maximize profits. Some corporations benefit financially from projecting a progressive image. Hanging landscapes painted by queers in your lobby during June projects the image without frightening the horses--or, most importantly, the clients. Corporate executives typically neither know nor care very much about art, artists and their issues, minorities and their issues, or principles of free expression--and they don't want to hear about any of the above.

At a time of shrinking government support for the arts, when the battle for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been all but lost, artists and arts organizations large and small are being pushed toward private, usually corporate patronage. But those who accept the largesse of Exxon, Time Warner, or AT&T may find to their dismay that strings are attached, especially for minority artists. For the most part, corporations are no more tolerant of cutting-edge art than Jesse Helms. Philip Morris, which has funded both Jesse Helms and the Brooklyn Academy of Music's avant-garde Next Wave Festival, showed its true colors not long ago when it threatened to pull support from arts organizations that failed to oppose a New York anti-smoking ordinance.

Corporate-sponsored work deemed inconsistent with a corporation's image can be made to disappear. After a flurry of right-wing protests, Apple Computer ordered The Lost Pardner, a poem by an anonymous gay cowboy, deleted from an educational CD-ROM called Who Built America? When the software company that produced the CD-ROM refused, Apple stopped distributing the disk.

Corporate censorship can also operate through punitive withdrawal of support, as when Dial Soap distanced itself from an exhibit perceived to contain "flag desecration," or through tacit prior restraint. Herbert I. Schiller observes in Culture, Inc. that "Corporate sponsorship of museums leads inevitably, as does advertising-supported television, to self-censorship, with the result that public awareness of social reality is continually diminished." Collaborations between institutions like New York's Metropolitan Museum and companies like Bloomingdale's can stunt expression and enable a boutique aesthetic to prevail. When Boston's Museum of Fine Arts lends major exhibition space to a Donna Karan-sponsored retrospective of the slick, celebrity-infested photographs of Herb Ritts, the museum is a step away from devolving into a shopping mall.

Anyone censored by the public sector is in a far better position to fight back on First Amendment grounds. When a Cambridge, Mass. city councilor demanded that a 1994 city-sponsored art exhibit be shut down because of phallic imagery, the Cambridge Arts Council had no trouble keeping the show open to the public. Texas-based gay artist David Swim was able to sue Austin City Hall successfully when his body-cast male-nude sculpture The Heart was censored by city officials. When conceptual artist Michael Lebron was forbidden to install a political poster on rented billboard space in New York's Pennsylvania Station, he sued and eventually won on the grounds that Amtrak, technically a private company, was created by Congress and behaves like a government agency.

Reluctant to criticize an AIDS fund-raiser--and fearful of being shut out of an important showcase for their work--many Boston artists in the show complained about the censorship privately and publicly fell silent. Others remained supportive of ARTcetera but were cautiously critical of its handling of the situation. "I'm not going to question or judge International Place's esthetic," says artist Paul Richard, whose Tin Man was among the ten originally censored works, "but I would invite ARTcetera to rethink their venue."

Artists based outside Boston were mostly unaware of the flap until it was over. Neither Frank Yamrus nor Nan Goldin was informed of the censorship by the AAC. "It amazes me," says Goldin, "that people who asked me to give so generously would neither inform me of what was going on nor apologize for it." Because Kurt. Infinity was part of the silent auction component of the program, removal of the piece insured that it would fetch less than its $730 value, since potential bidders were unable to view it properly. Goldin's photo, appraised at $1370, fetched $4000 at the closing live auction, the apparent result of media hype. Press coverage gave the impression that since the auction raised a record-breaking $400,000, the story had a happy ending and that the publicity worked to everyone's advantage.

Nan Goldin disagrees. "This [censorship] is the last thing I need," she says, "and the last thing I support." Goldin, an internationally respected artist, has had intermittent brushes with censorship since the 1970s. In 1989, at New York's Artists Space, she was curator of Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, a groundbreaking group show for artists responding to the AIDS crisis. Witnesses was temporarily de-funded by Republican NEA chair John Frohnmayer, an event that inspired the founding of the resource organization Visual AIDS and brought fame to the late David Wojnarowicz. Goldin points out that notoriety produced by such circumstances is at best a mixed blessing. "I don't believe censorship does artists or anyone any good," she stresses. "It can be personally damaging, and it contextualizes the work in the wrong way."

Goldin rejects the notion that censorship that arguably benefits a worthy cause can be ignored. "I'm alarmed that no one went to bat for the work," she says. "Boston has a history of Puritanical provincial censorship, and that an AIDS organization would cater to that is shocking to me."

"Any time a group has decided to show artists' work," adds NCFE Seattle Office Director Jean Fallow, "it's incumbent upon that group to defend that work. Every time an act of censorship goes unopposed, it becomes easier for another act of censorship to spring up down the line. To say that the censorship benefited someone is both wrong and strategically impractical."

Many American activists fail to see how freedom of speech can be the linchpin of their activism. After a 1994 court victory over Boston's MBTA, which had sought to ban AAC ads promoting condom use, Kessler stated, "To the courts, the issue was one of free speech. To us, it was literally a matter of life and death." It seems not to have occurred to Kessler that free speech is a matter of life and death, especially for an organization dedicated to saving lives through the eradication of ignorance. The AAC needs to remember that corporate as well as government censorship equals the silence that equals death.