Gay Demonstrators Close Mapplethorpe Exhibit Early

Homosexual demonstrators, chanting “We’re here, we’re queer, we’ll never be silent again,” forced police to close a private showing of the controversial Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Arts.

The two-hour showing, by invitation only, was scheduled to run from 8 to 10 p.m. Monday, but police ushered guests out of the museum about 20 minutes early after a crowd of 250 chanting protesters gathered outside the institute’s doors.

The Boston show opens to the general public today and is scheduled to run through Oct. 4.

The demonstrators Monday night, members of the Boston chapter of a gay and lesbian coalition calling itself “Queer Nation,” had marched several blocks to the institute after holding their first meeting at a nearby church.

“We’re fags, we’re dykes, we’re here, we’re queer, we’ll never be silent again!” the marchers chanted.

The group, an offshoot of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, the organization pressing for more AIDS research, said it was protesting recent incidents of gay-bashing in Boston and other forms of discrimination against homosexual men and women.

Joe Byers, one of the demonstrators, said Queer Nation hopes to use “the same kind of energy and tactics that ACT UP uses, but the focus isn’t specifically on AIDS funding and drugs.”

“AIDS isn’t all that’s killing us, bashers are,” Byers said.

The exhibit of 120 works by the photographer includes more than a dozen homoerotic pictures, which have drawn bitter public protest wherever the show has stopped.

The director of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center was indicted on obscenity charges earlier this year when the show arrived there.

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston condemned the exhibit in an editorial last week, labeling 25 of the Mapplethorpe photos as “extremely offensive sexual aberrations,” and said it flouts “the legal standards of public decency.” But the editorial, in the official archdiocesan newspaper, stopped short of calling for the show to be banned or censored.