The New Censorship: Controversy in a ‘Smiley Face’ Culture

All last month, the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post and various talk radio shows raged against the planned opening next fall of a Terrence McNally play, “Corpus Christi,” that is said--by people who haven’t seen it--to concern a modern-day gay Jesus who has sex (offstage) with his disciples. William A. Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights said the play was “sick beyond words,” an interesting phrase in the mouth of a man who seems to have no qualms about keeping words away from the public.

The Manhattan Theater Club, which has been producing McNally’s plays for many years, at first canceled the play, saying they had received bomb threats and could not guarantee the safety of their audiences. One message they recorded singled out “Jew, filthy homosexual Terrence McNally. Because of you, we will exterminate every member of the theater and burn the place to the ground. This is a message from National Security Movement of America . . . . Death to the Jews worldwide.” McNally, in fact, is a Catholic.

Only after South African playwright Athol Fugard severed his own relations to the MTC, many other playwrights and theater people protested and several theaters volunteered their venues for the orphaned play, did the MTC do what it should have done in the first place: consult with the New York police and announce that security would be in place and the show would go on.

McNally’s play may never be seen without ideological filters: It is apparently condemned to be “the gay Jesus play,” whether for those who like it or those who don’t. But McNally is lucky. His play is apparently going to be heard over the combination of tabloid hysteria and Christian correctness. Many controversial works and exhibitions in recent years have not had the same good fortune. As the steady hum of censoriousness has grown to a roar in recent years, magnifying the roar of the protest has been the roar of the cave-in.

In 1995, the Smithsonian, after vociferous attack, gutted a planned exhibit on the dropping of the atomic bombs and went on to postpone even serious consideration of a show on the Vietnam War so that the earliest it could appear is 2002, if at all. Later that year, Library of Congress officials dismantled an exhibition about the architecture of slave quarters--a show called “Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation,” already installed and about to open--because a number of employees, mainly African Americans, were offended by it. The Library went on to remove four anti-lynching cartoons, during 1935-1946, from a graphics exhibit. They were “rather difficult images,” Jill Brett, the Library’s public affairs officer, told me at the time.

The pattern is plain throughout our culture: Since symbols get some people upset, mute them. Instead of inciting debate, run for cover. In this climate, fear roars louder than speech.

Of course, in an anything-goes culture, censorious voices have trouble figuring out just what to forbid and why. The New York Post editorialized on May 2 that “in today’s artistic climate . . . [a sexually active gay Jesus] isn’t the slightest bit brave or unusual. It is just guaranteed--and clearly intended--to outrage and offend believing Christians.” The Post thus took the position that McNally’s offense was simultaneously a) usual and b) unusual. With its privileged access into the heart and minds of fiction-writers, the Post evidently knew the intentions of an artist whose work neither they nor anyone they knew had seen, because it does not yet exist.

In this way, the paper joined the Islamic fundamentalists who, since 1989, haven’t had to read Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” while condemning it: They know blasphemy before they see it. O brave new theater, which can be condemned page unread and sight unseen!

The uproar over “Corpus Christi” follows a logic of universal censoriousness that is appallingly general these days: If Position X has been ruled out of bounds, then so must Position Y. To preserve the single standard, cut everyone down to size. Thus did the Catholic League’s Donohue rhetorically challenge intellectuals to say whether they would “rush to defend a play entitled ‘Shylock and Sambo’? Would they defend it knowing that the script calls for gay Jewish slave-masters who sodomize their obsequious black slaves? Is there anyone who would doubt what would happen if such a play were to be staged? All hell would break loose.”

Oddly, Donohue’s provocation likens the presumably loving sex acts in McNally’s play to acts of rape. More dangerously, he seems to maintain that if one voice deserves being chilled, so do others. If the right eye offends somebody, pluck out the left one, too. One censor fits all.

This current drive toward a chill-down is not McCarthyism, exactly. McCarthyism singled out one and only one set of ideas and institutions for censure and censorship. Neither Catholics nor anti-Catholics had to fear his strictures. Ku Klux Klansmen did not interest him. While the junior senator from Wisconsin and his allies were cleansing government-run bookshelves of left-wing writings, they were not also scouring them clean of right-wing books. The current atmosphere, by contrast, is chilly all around. The general principle is apparently: No Offense. This is a smiley-face theory of culture.

It seems we need to go back to square one. All beliefs maintain precious symbols--icons--and where there are icons, there will be iconoclasts. Democracy is duty-bound to protect iconoclasm, and to keep it in bounds so that people don’t get hurt along with their icons.

Of course, speech is often offensive; that is why it needs the government’s guarantee, regardless of whom it offends. That is what police are for. If somebody thinks a play bigoted, the principle of maximum speech permits them to mount their own play, or distribute leaflets denouncing the one they hate, or gather on the sidewalk to argue. If the Catholic League thinks there are too many plays about gays, they should put on their own productions about gay anti-Christs, or anyone and anything else they like. In the interests of literature, theater producers, too, should abandon political means-tests.

For how free are we when we are afraid of our own shadows? How comfortable in our beliefs when we quiver to hear their contraries expressed?