Decision to Drape Nude Painting Is Overturned : Art: After protests, a high school senior is allowed to exhibit abstract showing women embracing. School officials deny trying to censor gay expression.

After objections from gay and lesbian rights groups, officials with the Orange County High School for the Arts reversed an earlier decision and on Friday allowed a student to exhibit at a senior class art show an original painting that depicts two nude women embracing.

The painting, by student Letitia Houston, was displayed Friday at Rancho Santiago College while gay and lesbian rights activists gathered at the college gallery to show support for the student. The activists had earlier urged the school to show the work.

Houston, 18, has said the acrylic on canvas and its accompanying statement are meant to address her lesbianism. The 5-by-6-foot abstract depicts two bare-breasted women, one clutching the other around the shoulders.

High school executive director Ralph Opacic said Friday that the “press” had “misrepresented” the issue and that the initial decision was not made because of “censorship based on homosexuality or sexuality at all.”

Reading a prepared statement on behalf of the art school, which is based on the campus of Los Alamitos High School, and the Los Alamitos Unified School District, Opacic said: “We are including the work in the show . . . to demonstrate our support of the student’s right to self-expression.”

Opacic said the painting had been disqualified earlier because it had been “turned in late, unfinished and with a last-minute change in the agreed-upon subject content.”

Nancy Melbourne, director of the high school’s visual art department, said Thursday that the painting did not fit with Houston’s submitted theme: her struggle with Catholicism.

For that reason, Melbourne said, she first wanted to remove the painting from the show but later agreed that it could be included--provided that it was entirely hidden behind a cloth drape, a “compromise” she said she reached with students after Houston and others indicated that they would withdraw from the show if the work was draped.

Opacic said: “We fully support Mrs. Melbourne’s rights as a student art evaluator to reject work that does not meet timelines and keep with agreements about the assignment.”

In a news story Friday, The Times quoted Houston, several students and their art teacher, Adi Yekutieli, as complaining that Melbourne’s action amounted to “censorship.”

Other students were also quoted as saying they planned to drape some of their own art to draw attention to what they too perceived as censorship.

Yekutieli, whose class presented the exhibition, said Melbourne asked him whether Houston is gay and quoted Melbourne as saying the work might be found offensive by high school board members and harm the school’s relationship with Rancho Santiago College.

Commenting on Opacic’s assertion that Houston’s work was disqualified because it was late, Yekutieli remarked Friday that some of the other students whose works were displayed had submitted their work even later than Houston, some by several days, and that some students were just finishing their work moments before the show opened. Some had not shown their works to Melbourne until Friday, he said.

Houston said that she did not change her theme, as Opacic and Melbourne contend, that her lesbianism was “always” integral to her theme and that the concept of homosexuality as a sin was “part of my experience with religion.”

She said she’s glad she stood firm. “Who knows how far (censorship) can go?” she asked. “If you sweep one thing under the carpet, (you create) overwhelming fear--like I have to censor myself all the time, not only in my art but in my life.”

Houston’s original statement--the wording for which school officials had also insisted that she change--was posted on a gallery wall.

The original statement, which she said expresses her experiences as a Roman Catholic, says: “I don’t want to live with the fear of going to hell because of loving another woman.”

In the reworded statement, “another woman” would have been replaced by “another person,” she said, if she had done as Melbourne ordered.

Yekutieli applauded the decision to show the work. “I think it really secures the freedom of education and freedom of expression,” he said.

Rancho Santiago Community College District Trustee Charles W. (Pete) Maddox said the college board never addressed the exhibit issue, but he also approved of showing the work, calling high school officials’ explanations for their initial decision merely “excuses” that “don’t wash.”

“College campuses seem to be the one place of refuge for ideas, and we can’t censor those ideas because we don’t agree with them,” Maddox said.

Jehan Agrama, co-president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation/L.A., said Friday that her organization had tried to reach the school’s officials and faxed them a letter expressing concern over the school’s “censoring” of art and “urging them to reconsider their decision.”

“This issue goes beyond us” in the gay community, Agrama said. “If one person is denied their rights, who’s next? It’s time for us to realize, especially in light of recent events in this country and this city (Los Angeles), that unless we realize one person’s rights denied is everyone’s rights denied, the situation is going to get worse for all of us.”

Before the decision to unveil the painting, a representative of Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, a prominent alternative gallery in Los Angeles, said it wants to display Houston’s painting.