Mapplethorpe Show Bumps Into a City’s Legacy of Conformity : Law: Cincinnati has a long history as a bastion of morality. There is no red light district and there are no adult book stores. Against this backdrop, the filing of obscenity charges is not viewed with surprise. : NEWS ANALYSIS

One hundred and fifty years ago, aristocrat Nicholas Longworth of this city commissioned a marble sculpture of Eve, standing naked in the Garden of Eden.

The local art critics insisted that it be covered with a calico dress.

Art appreciation in Cincinnati has not changed much in a century and a half. Two weeks ago a county grand jury indicted the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati and its director, Dennis Barrie, on obscenity charges for displaying the works of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

The exhibit, “Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment,” consists of 175 portraits, nudes and still lifes by the late photographer. The grand jury, prodded by a sheriff and a prosecutor with national anti-pornography reputations, objected to seven of the pictures.

Five of the shots show homoerotic images. Each of those pictures resulted in a separate charge of pandering. The other two pictures named in the indictment are shots of nude children. Those pictures resulted in charges of “using a minor in nudity oriented material,” a 5-year-old Ohio law that the Supreme Court of the United States held to be constitutional last week.

Barrie and the arts center are scheduled to appear before Hamilton County Municipal Judge David Albanese for a pre-trial hearing April 30. It is conceivable, though unlikely, that the case could be tried and settled before the show’s scheduled close May 26.

But even if the show ends before the trial begins the case cannot be made moot, said Asst. Cincinnati Solicitor Karl Kadon. The prosecutors can, and they have indicated that they will, seek a conviction after Mapplethorpe’s pictures are only a memory in Cincinnati.

In the meantime, thanks to an order from a federal judge at the behest of the museum, the police are prevented from seizing any of the photos or interfering with the operation of the exhibit. The pictures remain on the walls of the gallery and the crowds keep lining up to see them in record numbers.

The only interruption of the show came the day the indictments were handed down, and the Cincinnati police closed the gallery for about an hour while they videotaped the exhibit.

To outsiders, the televised sight of police officers with drawn billy clubs clearing out an art gallery may have seemed surreal. To those who have lived in Cincinnati, it seemed like business as usual.

Last year members of the city’s vice squad sat through a performance of “Equus” at the local playhouse, just to see if the award-winning play violated community standards.

There is no red light district in this city of 369,000. There are no adult book stores or movie theaters. The local video stores do not carry X-rated tapes.

It used to be said that Cincinnatians went across the Ohio River to wide-open Newport, Ky., for their sin.

But even Newport’s sordid charms are fading. There are still assorted burlesque clubs on Monmouth Street, but repeated reform movements have had a cumulative effect during the last 20 years, and now the gambling is underground and the performers have to keep their G-strings and tassels in place.

To find out why Cincinnati and its environs have come to be known as the bluenosed bastion of morality you have to go back to the 19th Century, according to Allen Brown, former counsel to the Cincinnati chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“It has been over 100 years since there was a significant foreign immigration wave into Cincinnati. There has been very little new cultural stock that would force any cultural diversity,” Brown said.

“The single biggest virtue of Cincinnati is its serene conformity and its ease of livability,” he said. But that tranquillity is combined with an almost total countywide domination by the Republican Party.

“That total domination makes it so that the leaders look for problems that offer no resistance. That way they can look effective and please the little old ladies who dominate the ballot box,” said Brown. In his view, pornography became a straw man, a villain on which society’s ills could be blamed, with no noticeable backlash.

The issue moved from one that may have been genuinely held by a core group of activists, to an issue that is now politically expedient for everyone, said Brown.

The active public policy that resulted in charges against an art museum and its director began in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the anti-pornography movements of Charles Keating. Keating, the same man now enmeshed in the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal, was then a young Cincinnati attorney full of religious zeal and a hate for “smut peddlers.”

He founded Citizens for Decent Literature, later called Citizens for Decency Through Law. He used the organization to wield a combination of legal and economic pressure against theater owners and bookstores.

By 1970, the group claimed to have 275 chapters nationwide and others abroad. By then Keating was nationally recognized as an anti-porn crusader. In 1969, then-President Richard Nixon appointed Keating to sit on the Federal Commission on Obscenity and Pornography.

When the commission issued its report in 1970, a majority of the 21 members recommended the repeal of most anti-pornography laws dealing with acts between consenting adults, and Keating blasted the report as “a Magna Carta for the pornographer” and issued a minority report that said the commission was enthralled by the ACLU.

Keating convened the leadership of the Citizens for Decency Through Law in Cincinnati to critique the commission’s majority report. CDL announced its readiness to offer legal and financial assistance to private citizens wanting to fight pornography.

Such a legal attack followed in 1972 when Keating filed a civil suit against the Cinema X Theater in Cincinnati, which specialized in sexually explicit films. Keating persuaded the judge that the films violated Ohio obscenity standards and the judge ordered the theater closed until it changed its fare. The theater went out of business.

Overt activities by Citizens for Decency Through Law seemed to fade a short time later, however. Eventually Keating left Cincinnati to pursue his business ventures in Arizona and California, but by then a new porn fighter had begun to dominate the scene.

Simon L. Leis Jr., former Marine, a former assistant federal prosecutor and son of a local judge, was elected Hamilton County prosecutor in 1971. By the time he resigned in 1983 to become a judge, Leis could boast of having run virtually every X-rated operation in town out of business.

Leis served one term as a Common Pleas Court judge before resigning from the bench in 1987 to run for county sheriff. He said at the time that he missed the front-line action of law enforcement. As sheriff he has technical authority over the whole county, although as a practical matter law enforcement in Cincinnati is generally left to the city Police Department.

But last month, when an anti-pornography group known as Citizens for Community Values complained that the Mapplethorpe exhibit was coming to town, Leis publicly announced that if the Cincinnati cops wouldn’t do their duty on the exhibit, he would.

Police Chief Lawrence Whalen, unwilling to cede any authority to the sheriff’s deputies, ordered his men to move on the exhibit.

As prosecutor, Leis has taken on Hustler magazine and its publisher Larry Flynt. The 1977 trial drew national attention because Leis used Ohio’s organized crime statute to raise a misdemeanor complaint of pandering to a felony charge that could have resulted in a 25-year jail term.

Leis won the case at trial, but it was overturned on appeal and ordered retried as a misdemeanor. In November, 1985, Leis’ successor, Arthur Ney, agreed to a settlement in which the charges were dropped but Flynt agreed to pay more than $6,000 in court costs, which was more than the maximum fine the misdemeanor carried.

But there was one other result from the Hustler case. Newsstands in Hamilton County do not carry the magazine as an act of self-censorship that keeps them from being drawn into any future organized-crime cases that the prosecutor might file.

That kind of economic enforcement is what ultimately forced most of the X-rated movies and bookstores out of town, said attorney Brown.

“The secret of Leis’ success was ignoring the law and pressing bad cases. The mere act of prosecution brings unbearable economic pressure on marginal businesses,” Brown said.

Acting as the sword arm of Leis was Lt. Harold Mills, commander of the Cincinnati Police Vice Squad. By the time he retired in 1986, Mills had become a local cult figure.

“Cincinnati is not vice free, but I think things really are different here than they are in other cities. It’s the people. They make the difference because they support the enforcement actions,” Mills said.

Mills took over the vice squad after a 1975 police scandal in which the police chief and several other high-ranking officers lost their jobs. It was Leis who prosecuted the cops for a series of corruptions that included perjury, obstruction of justice and consorting with prostitutes.

“The scandal in ’75 damn near toppled the Police Department,” said Mills. “After that, nobody wanted to be seen as soft and we went after vice 100%.

“Our attitude was, ‘if it’s a violation, we’re going to arrest, and we’re going to take it to court. And we had a prosecutor that was willing to go all the way with it,” Mills said.

That meant the hookers lolling around the statue of William Henry Harrison on Vine Street across from the public library had to move on. It meant full-time stakeouts on after-hours bars and dozens of arrests of ordinary people trying to save a few bucks by buying their liquor across the river in Kentucky.

“You move them. That’s the strategy. You can’t eliminate vice, you can just make it move some place else. We made most of it move out of the downtown area and a lot of it moved clean out of the county,” Mills said.

The Royal Theater at 7th and Vine was one such target of Mills’ interest. For years the theater had shown soft-core movies for an over-18 audience. The theater operators voluntarily cut the most explicit scenes from the films before the projectors ever got turned on, but that didn’t stop the police from putting pressure on the business.

“We never busted the theater itself, but we must have made a hundred arrests of customers in there for public indecency and stuff like that.” The attention was so concentrated that it was almost impossible for a patron to go to the lavatories without bumping into someone from the vice squad. “They gave up and finally turned the place into a parking lot,” Mills said.

Mills, who retired in 1986, said he supported vigorous vice control because he believed prostitution, pornography and the like attracted other, more serious criminal activity. But, looking back, he says now that some of the enforcement action may have gotten ahead of what the community really wanted, or needed.

“The problem is that people don’t like stuff out in the open,” Mills said. “Getting bookstores and movie theaters and prostitutes wasn’t that hard, but it got tougher with the magazines. People don’t like being told what they can read in their own home.”

The bust and prosecution of the art exhibit remind Mills of why he is glad he has retired. “It’s not a good case. It will be harder than hell to prove it in court, and they aren’t going to go out of business.

“My philosophy was get the cases into court and let the jury decide. If the people on the jury come back and say it’s OK, then it’s time to quit doing something about it.”