Lesbian Student’s Painting in Show After All

Responding to objections from gay and lesbian rights groups, administrators at Orange County High School of the Arts reversed a decision and Friday allowed a student to exhibit her painting of two nude women embracing.

The semi-abstract painting, by student Letitia Houston, was displayed at a senior class art show held at Rancho Santiago College, where gay and lesbian rights activists and others gathered at the college gallery to voice opposition to what they called censorship and discrimination.

Houston, 18, has said the painting and an accompanying statement are meant to address her lesbianism. The 5-by-6-foot work depicts two women, one clutching the other around the shoulders.

But the school’s executive director, Ralph Opacic, said Friday that the initial decision not to display the painting was not made because of “censorship based on homosexuality or sexuality at all.”

“To demonstrate our support of the student’s right to self-expression, we are including the work in the show,” said Opacic, reading a prepared statement on behalf of the art school.

In fact, Opacic said officials had initially disqualified the painting because it was “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, had said earlier that the painting did not fit Houston’s submitted theme: her struggle with Catholicism.

But Houston said her lesbianism had always been integral to her theme and that the concept of homosexuality as a sin was “part of my experience with religion.”

Houston’s original artistic statement--which school officials earlier had also insisted she change--was posted on a gallery wall.

In the first statement, which she said expresses her experiences as a Roman Catholic and explains the theme of all four of her works in the show, she wrote: “I don’t want to live with the fear of going to hell because of loving another woman.”

In a reworded statement negotiated before the school reversed its decision, she said, the words “another woman” were replaced by “another person.”