TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042390/0423106.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.8 KB | 86 lines

                B                                                              NATION, Page 26

Eruptions in the Heartland


Who says the Midwest is dull? Cincinnati is seething over
censorship

    BATTLING BLUENOSES

    Had Cincinnati's moral crusaders finally gone too far? Many
residents seemed to think so when a grand jury last week
indicted the director of the city's Contemporary Arts Center on
charges of criminal obscenity for displaying the sexually
charged photographs of the late Robert Mapplethorpe. While
protesters chanted, "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!," police barged into
the gallery, herded out 1,400 visitors, served papers and
collected evidence. "It was a sad day for the city and for the
arts," says gallery director Dennis Barrie, who could be
sentenced to up to a year in jail if he is convicted. "It made a
lot of people angry."

    The Mapplethorpe show became notorious last year after a
protest from North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms forced
Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art to cancel it. Well in
advance of its April 7 opening in Cincinnati, Citizens for
Community Values, a powerful and well-funded 16,000-member
organization, sponsored full-page ads in local papers and a
massive letter-writing campaign. "We think the exhibit is
irresponsible, and we think [the arts center] should be
accountable," says Monty Lobb Jr., president of Citizens for
Community Values. "The gallery is open to the public; it's on
public land and receives taxpayers' money." As a result of the
pressure, the chairman of the gallery's board stepped down from
his post and another board member quit outright.

    On the other side were several hastily formed organizations
that circulated petitions and staged a rally that drew 1,000
people in support of the show the day before it opened. "We were
sick of pressure from a small group of right-wing people," says
Kymberly Henson, an artist who co-founded a group called Voice
Against Censorship. "We felt we didn't have any say."

    Until those demonstrations, there had been little protest
against the hard-shell moral conservatism that has dominated
Cincinnati for 30 years. The Queen City was a spawning ground
for the national antiabortion movement and is the headquarters
for the National Coalition Against Pornography. It has managed
to purge from its streets the sex shops, peep shows, X-rated
films and nude-dancing clubs that mar many major cities.
Cincinnati has banned or otherwise hounded out of town the
musical Oh! Calcutta! and such films as Vixen, Last Tango in
Paris and The Last Temptation of Christ.

    Though Cincinnati's reputation for conservatism is well
deserved -- "Decency Central," local columnist Jim Rohrer calls
it -- the city is hardly unique. Says Alfred Tuchfarber, a
University of Cincinnati pollster: "Hamilton County tracks the
nation perfectly on major social and moral issues." A poll
released Friday by the Cincinnati Post and Tuchfarber's
Institute for Policy Research showed that 58.9% of those
questioned thought the Mapplethorpe exhibit should be allowed.
Only 38.4% felt it should not.

    Certainly the brouhaha did not hurt attendance at the
exhibit. It drew 4,000 people on opening day and more than
20,000 in its first week, despite a 30- to 45-minute wait to see
the notorious XYZ collection of explicit photos of gay sex acts.
If the current pace keeps up -- and it shows no sign of
slackening -- the display will easily break the record of 29,000
viewers set by a computer-art exhibit in 1987. After Barrie was
indicted, a federal judge ruled that law-enforcement officials
could not interfere with the exhibit until the gallery
director's trial concludes. That is not likely to occur before
the scheduled closing on May 26.


By S.C. Gwynne/Cincinnati.