FFE's Champions of Expression

Mary Dorman moderated. She is most famous for representing Karen Finley, one of the notorious NEA Four. The panelists included artists and a representative of the ACLU.

About 25 people attended, including FFE member and organizer Candida Royalle, best known as a producer of couples-oriented adult videos.

Everyone onstage was armed with a bottle of Evian, and a slide projector and VHS combo were set up as visual aids. The prominent FFE banner, Dorman mentioned, had debuted at that past summer's Gay Pride Parade.

The lawyer's introduction decried the "patchwork of federal legislation" that has yet to balance equality of people and equal access to forums and resources. Dorman positioned herself in this social reality as someone who had to come to grips with her own self-censorship. She pointed out that women are too often still hesitant about self-expression, and can too easily stand back and allow others to be denied the right to voice their opinions as well.

Robyn Blumner, ACLU operative and St. Petersburg Times columnist, offered an overview of the silly extremes "hostile working environment" complaints have reached. The most amusing story concerned a statue called Aphrodite and Lust. After installing it in a public building, officials in one American town first attempted to deal with complaints by covering the figures' genitalia with Post-It® notes, before shrouding the object altogether.

Barbara Alper led the artists' presentations. As a photojournalist, she has covered everything from the Gulf War to S/M dungeons and been published in The New York Times as easily as in museum catalogs. Her peculiar story hinged on the fact that there is no equivalent to the First Amendment in Britain. While there are no formal laws banning depictions of sexuality, customs officials are allowed to interpret existing laws against public erections, nonconsensual sadomasochistic activity and the like as they might impinge upon publicly viewing photographic documents of a sexual nature.

Alper's British gallery, once it had requested material be sent over, allowed customs to seize her photographs without a fight. She was left to secure the services of two lawyers, one in London and another in New York City, to rescue her work from officially sanctioned destruction.

Renée Cox's work is quite likely the most famous of that produced by the panel, on the strength of three of her photos being featured in the movie Waiting To Exhale. Yet her installations, which tend to carry names like "Yo' Mama's Last Supper" and feature her in the role of Jesus or The Virgin Mary, have been met with equally chilly receptions in white suburbia and the black academy. At one "lily-white" neighborhood show, Cox was forced to organize a walkout and to produce a catalog herself before being allowed to proceed. Afterwards, however, "a 99 year old guy" came up to her and told her, "If anybody has a problem with it, fuck 'em."

Cox, an African from Jamaica, and sculptor Ana Ferrer, who is a Cuban immigrant, have both experienced censorship while mounting installations ostensibly concerned with color lines and race relations. More peculiarly, their works were threatened with removal on the grounds that they might incite riots or vandalism. When the irony was pointed out that the women of color on the panel were being accused of inciting violence, Cox and Ferrer both noted that the phantom rioting element was never clearly identified in any case, remaining a sort of bureaucratic bogeyman for officials who did not want to rock the boat.

Dorman took that moment to compare such instances with arguments against flag burning or gays marching in St. Patrick's Day parades. The gambit is known as the "heckler's veto" and cannot stand up in court.

Ferrer added that while she was applying legal pressure to have her Colombian material shown at a college, those students who came to her aid were threatened with the loss of their campus jobs if they continued their support.

Female Bodybuilders
In
Higher Profile

National champion bodybuilder Laurie Fierstein was the last to state her case. She made an unusual example of soft censorship because she has never been formally barred from showing her material. She has rather been censored by ostracism, especially by feminists who consider female bodybuilders "wanna-be men" who deny their gender identity.

Though some artists on the panel did not name names, Fierstein noted with tears in her eyes that Gloria Steinem had rejected her and her work as politically incorrect. Undaunted, she will be co-curating an exhibition during 1998 called Picturing the Modern Amazon at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Post-presentation discussions ranged over the usual sticking points of feminism and first amendment rights like sexual harrassment and the social roles and potential dangers of visual pornography. Dorman won a laugh and a round of applause for nominating those "lady in distress" stories as more sexist and more insidious than pornography. These pulp fictions, favored in television and film, always get dramatic mileage out of showing a woman being stalked by a crazed man.