Get Used to It: Ep. 23, "Defunding Homophobia"

uh [Music] so [Music] i'm sheila james welcome to another episode is this an episode i guess it is a sort of episode which is as i hope you already know uh a talk show uh concerning gay and lesbian issues our discussion today will be about issues that in my opinion are slightly larger than just the gay and lesbian community we're going to talk about the national endowment for the arts public broadcasting system and the the new contract on america which seems to want to defund not only these entities but others a question that we'll hopefully explore today is what's going on about this and in terms of the fact that it seems to many of us that our community is being used as a wedge issue on all of this defunding discussion we want to explore that as well so we hope we'll you'll stick with us through this whole thing i think it's going to be a pretty interesting show my guests today are patrick scott who is the president of the national campaign for freedom of expression patrick welcome thank you robin padalski who is a writer a columnist activist and who has a book forthcoming as i understand it with the provocative title queer cosmopolis which i think we can look forward to next year it is next year now isn't it 1996 from uh nyu press and uh tim miller who is a uh performer uh performance artist i think he used to call himself now even more broadly a performer and artistic director of highways uh in santa monica and also one i i think one of the reasons that the nea runs in uh great danger of being defunded so congratulations for that i do i think you did well patrick let me start with you uh in in terms of this uh sort of approach that we saw starting a couple of years back really with the nea and now on the front pages of all of our newspapers about the public broadcasting system hearings being held in washington about whether or not it's a good idea to fund the arts um to find even fund the humanities what do you think is going on here well it really began in in the late 80s around 1988 and there has been a consistent strategy in place by the the right uh the ridiculous right the the rigid right the radical right however you want to characterize them to trivialize uh the arts uh and to demonize artists such that over time they could control a conversation about the arts that would ultimately cause congress to withdraw federal support and the importance of federal support it's a very complex issue and you know we'll have to weave in and out of some of those complexities um in the show today but um that is accountable to the to the the mandate of of our country uh to represent all the people that are living here and so this is this is in a nutshell um what they want to do is basically turn culture over entirely to the commercial domain and to market forces and to prevent agencies such as the nea providing support for um for artists uh who are pushing the envelope of of consciousness explain a little bit and we'll i you know feel free to jump in but how does public funding work i mean i i imagine there are at least thousands if not more people watching the show who have a sort of a sense of the difference between commercial television and pbs for instance but we probably all think that it's our pledges you know that keep it going because we're always seeing pledge drives um how does public funding work well there's differences in in each each domain when we're talking about the corporation for public broadcasting which is this the entity that from to that presents public broadcasting or the national endowment for the arts or the national endowment for the humanities or for the institute for museum services each of these are government agencies that get allocations by congress that have different mechanisms for distributing the money but the the nea is uni is particularly uh remarkable in its structure for the use of artists and and people from arts institutions to make the decisions about how the money is spent so when you hear the phrase the peer panel process which has been much under attack it means that in the domain of theater theater directors would would come together to decide what theater is most important to be funded in a given year so what they've turned that into even though it's it's one of the ultimate democratic processes is an elitist um they're calling it a padded play pin for the elite as though um you know artists are giving money to artists and it's all very closed well artists have sort of always been demonized in a way i mean i think that this is an aspect too of when we talk about our own communities history in the arts and letters that uh artists are marginalized demonized and at the same time called some kind of elite it's not as though they're a power elite although maybe that's the way or maybe that's the problem why does the radical right want to do away with this kind of public art or support for artists whose work might not be supported uh by you know commercial television or a commercial stage etc the irony is really that that the image to use because we're an image-based culture not to diminish sound or words but the image is tremendously powerful and immediately available so um there is power there and the irony is that the conservatives recognize that power more immediately than have the liberals and have um have jumped on to the the potential to work that image situation to our own detriment whereas the the the liberal has liberal constituency has has had a less immediate sense of of what what this equation is all about and how it works i i've noticed that we don't seem to be doing as well in terms of creating the imagery i i've said to to some of my colleagues liberals are mumbling a lot they don't they apologize a lot they don't seem to have in mind what you know what they want to say that i think gets to um to why the right has an interest to portray art as something for the elite because actually i think that's what they want and the actual effect of defunding organizations like the nea is that it will simply be harder for artists who don't have inherited money or access to wealthy patrons to spend full time on their art and actually i think that what the conservative right is after given the kind of economy that they're pushing in which there is going to be no middle class there's going to be the very rich and the very poor is to create a situation in which people who perceive of themselves as ordinary folks working people won't aspire to an artistic wife and in fact art will become the province of the elite because i think that what these folks are after is lowering poor people's expectations of the amount of joy and fulfillment and self-expression that a working person is entitled to in life so let me back up a step what's important about funding art or making air time available to more of a variety of programming don't we have plenty of programming and plenty of art what's important is that the genius kid from east l.a who's making illegal art on walls can perhaps get a chance to make a life work out of creating images that talk about what it is like to come from a working-class family in east l.a and try to survive and that kind of thing makes it much harder for the right wing to demonize that working person's family to the farmer in the midwest to the black person in bedford stuyvesant if all of these people begin to have access to expression through art which humanizes and which makes people's lives apparent to each other and including queers then that makes it harder for people to demonize us and to blame the people who are also disempowered art creates vehicles for people to understand each other and if we begin to understand each other then we may also begin to understand the reality and they may begin to be in trouble so there's a real threat as we as as we've seen with any kind of knowledge i mean the reason in my opinion that the right wing is so interested in education suddenly and controlling school boards and schools is because if you control information if you control truth as it were or the varieties of truth and make it seem as though there's only one truth or one pattern or one way to live life then in essence you have rendered invisible all other points of view but there was something else in what you said robin i want you to explore a little further this sort of this notion of stepfordness i don't know if that's an image that still makes sense to people but this you know this lockstep everybody do things the same way you want things to be invisible you want people's real lives our real lives to be invisible so that it seems that there's only one way to do things why would the right wing want that to be the result well it's it's an emphasis on decorum it's very um it's very restoration it's very 17th century and and what that was about was the restoration of an await you know it's interesting when the right wing talks about the old days and the old ways and how how they're in trouble i mean i think they really would like to get back to a time in which um as in the puritan colonies it was illegal for someone who didn't make a certain amount of money to wear two nice things i think what they're interested to recreate is a very much more rigidly stratified society in which people know their place and that means going back to some very old american values of decent people don't expect too much out of life you put your nose to the grindstone and you work very hard and in fact what they're doing to working people is they're using the best of us against ourselves because of course one wants to be responsible you want to take care of your parents you want to take care of your kids you want to earn a living and that calls for a little bit of sacrifice and after a while you don't want to be in constant pain about that well you begin to tell yourself all right a good person doesn't expect to be happy in fact a mature individual bases their personality on their ability to give up what they want to sacrifice to regard dreams to be a middle-class indulgence that decent working people don't have time for and so all that goodness and sense of community and sense of responsibility is turned into this self-regulatory mechanism that keeps people in place and why the artist is a threat is the artist is expressing a different kind of aspiration the artist is saying you know what working people aren't just these sturdy young men who go to work we even have an aesthetic sense we even have on one hand a desire for beauty on the other hand real awareness of pain and a willingness to express both those things and to care to make the world different to shape our world and that's the most dangerous thing is when people pull their nose away from the grindstone long enough to say you know what i want to reshape my whole world that is the danger yes what do you think tim well that's um where the funding has come in as well is this tiny and it's important to really remember it's been a tiny amount of money i mean it's the oft touted statistic that we spend less on the nea the national endowment for the arts than on the marine corps army band i mean literally in terms of governmental sanction we put more value on the marine corps army ban on the entire cultural life of the 50 states which is fairly shocking i mean actually it seems right in line with what uh the current administration and the congress would quite like more army bans but in fact this tiny amount of money in the last 20 25 years has created a huge cultural explosion in our society where where women um african americans latinos asian pacific islanders and of course lesbians and gay men have suddenly really claimed enormous amount of venue of voice and suddenly these these uh artists are telling their stories of their communities and their cultural identities and not only are the stories being heard they're also creating organizations that support specific cultural voice whether that's self-help graphics in east dela the mosai del barrio in the bronx in new york and literally hundreds and hundreds of other organizations who are only have only been made possible by this tiny little amount of 69 cents a year from each citizen to the national endowment and then a much smaller amount that's coming from state arts council so it's been a tiny little amount of money as jane alexander said in congress yesterday which is amplified probably 20 fold it's very good investment because it creates all kinds of jobs other opportunities supports you know businesses and local communities because arts art money creates enormous other kinds of social energy of course it was funny the commentary i've seen on her commentary was she was trying to focus her message so that people would think even this had a commercial result so if you care so much about commerce being you know the idiot and the lifeblood of america then we're really creating jobs i mean that's sort of the magic word but it felt as though she was characterizing for her audience not that it was disingenuous but um to say we know you don't understand anything about art let me talk to you about at least the economy right well yeah i mean it's it's a strategy but i i don't think it's i think it's right on actually at the tiny little amount of yeast that goes into cultural production and the energies that are released from um a communication of arts and ideas actually does release all kinds of other intersocial events of people leaving their homes being in relation to each other going and eating at places and hanging out and and and stopping being perhaps so fearful or isolated from each other the strategy has shifted from focusing on individual artworks and demonizing the artist based on those images to saying can do we really need to afford this i mean isn't this a luxury and isn't this money something that could go uh jarvik who runs a public media think tank in new york says well choosing between food stamps and the arts of course the american public would choose food stamps as though those had any uh parity to be to be chosen one against the other so that now we are put in a position of having to make this economic argument that in fact there are more people working in the arts than in the combined rubber and steel industries in america and it's i mean it's a good thing for people to begin to see that this is is integral to our whole lives but this is the progress of the strategy from the right to defund they're less concerned about today about homoerotic images than they are about using this as portraying it as a luxury that can be cut but i think if it reflected art that they approved of they would rather lose food stamps which they also you know think are going to people that they demonize um because i think i can't remember who said it but i somewhere in some publication uh someone said and i think it was actually a member of congress congress uh it was fine when art was about truth and beauty but this art that we're seeing funded is you know some i don't know denigration of life uh some ugliness and of course by that they mean our ugliness in among other kinds i think um do you do you think that's an aspect of it well what robin said earlier about shifting that even though they used the term elitism to to to negatively characterize the world of the arts that this threat now is bringing out the large institutions for for their own survival and so you hear the the symphony's operas and ballets now getting into the the battle in a way they never did before when the issue seemed to be just a matter of some marginal queers first they took the jews away then they took the queers away and now they're coming to my door exactly so they you know there are a lot of republicans on the boards of trustees of um the philharmonics and the museums and that they will go and say don't you dare cut us and the result will be that all funding for individuals or rural initiatives or these these these kind of less traditional forms of dispersing funds will go by the wayside and in fact the agencies already started to cut in those areas in anticipation or in response to the the congress congressional cuts well that goes along i think with with what robin was saying before in terms of that it seems there's a difference between institutional art i mean museums in their own way at least many of them are kind of institutional art aren't they they choose to to say that which is art well sure and there's also um i mean there isn't one monolithic art world and some some of the individuals whose work has been supported through grants from the nea and other sources are people who have wound up pushing the envelope to the extent that they became a museum-based artist but only because their work was allowed to flourish at a time when they couldn't have gotten into a museum i mean i think it's true the art world generates its own institutions and then those institutions have to be confronted and people are learning from each other and changing all the time but i think part of what's going on does go to what you raised about well why what is the point of art is it just to reflect someone's idea of truth and beauty because i don't know any two people who would who would define those things in the same way you know and i i did say earlier part of part of what does for people who've been denied access is is validate an aspiration toward beauty on the part of people who who aren't called that by the dominant culture but i think it does more i think it it allows people to express what we regard to be painful and express what we think ought to be changed cornell west said this wonderful thing he said it's really interesting that in old greek drama when they dealt with the lives of quote unquote ordinary people you see them in the comedic and the bucolic you never see the lives of ordinary working people um uplifted to the level of tragedy okay because anything that we that that's complex that's heroic which means ugly which means fallible and that stirs people's deepest feelings that's that's when that's when those people get to serve as representative of the big stuff right of the cultural classical big stuff and the only the only time that people of color women lesbians and gays working people are going to get to see our lives portrayed to that degree of complexity is when we do it of course shakespeare did the same thing put all the ordinary people in co in the comedies and all the royalty in the tragedies there's there may be another message in that too and that is that important stuff only happens to rich people or you know people with power it's the same as in terms of reading history history is about wars mostly and about or about uh you know westward expansion and uh the building of the railroads it's certainly not about the people who were the healers in their village or you know whatever and it's real interesting that the right wing is fighting real openly for control over um over that history of are we talking about the westward expansion in terms of the displacement of indigenous people um the silencing of women about asian labor building the railroads or are we going to continue to talk about manifest destiny i mean that's still alive that's the other thing when i when we talk about pbs too because we've talked about art which has inherent in it it seems ideas um though it's more difficult sometimes to to say you know what was the idea behind that it's much often more visceral but what about broadcasting itself in terms of words and message uh one of the you know one of the reasons you want to get a variety of messages out has something to do with critical thinking doesn't it well that's where the terrain of pbs or the attacks on corporation public broadcasting is even more outrageous in this this war we're in which is a war over images and representation and it's one of the few things pat buchanan got right at the republican convention that we you know they they declared this war on this kind of monolithic idea of what our culture is and whose voice is heard really and who gets to be the heroes and heroines of our stories as robin beautifully put but i know for me just to get anecdotal which i think is good i um came out and understood the first crucial building block where i understood who i was as a gay 14 year old in the san gabriel valley was by watching kct and seeing a trinity a trinity um theater production of a play about oscar wilde called feasting with panthers and suddenly they're on tv you know sitting in you know on the deep pile shag carpeting i'm seeing something that immediately registers wow that is me this is like there's a history there's a culture there's a tragedy because this great wrong that was done to one of you know our great queer writers oscar wilde and it was like 5 000 light bulbs going on in my head at that moment and it's you know i was actually reading i'm writing about this right now and i was reading in my journal which of course i was keeping at the 14th of course about every experience uh that's how performance artists are made but i think actually they don't want those light bulbs to be turned on and that's part of where this war is so crucial and they they're they're very canny they it's dangerous for them to build those light bulbs to be turned on by keeping marlin riggs extraordinary film tongues untied about the experience of african-american gay men an incredibly silenced and large population in our society and by keeping that off of two thirds of the markets they kept some x number of powerful light bulbs being turned off being turned on over these you know queer young black men's heads all over this country and that's an incredible and shameful victory for them because it's going to create you know massive ongoing self-esteem problems silencing closetedness disempowerment all of the things which of course are right along the right-wing agenda especially as it relates to lesbians and gay men so there's a relationship too i when i i hear all of you talking about not just gay and lesbian um artists or truths or lives or messages but silencing along a broad spectrum it's not often a connection that our community makes but is it one that you make here uh in terms of the silencing yeah absolutely well the national campaign for freedom of expression is not specifically a gay and lesbian organization but since we were founded in 1990 most of the the people that call us up that are being hassled uh by the fbi or by a church or by a school board happen to be gay and lesbian but our whole focus is is really the the the spectrum of of american culture that's being suppressed by any number of of other counter institutions that that are part of this war that's been declared and certainly schools and education i think part of why we're in such a a an intense debate is that we've had three generations now of people go through the schools with virtually no art education that that the systematic defunding of education has caused arts and other non-core subjects to be cut so you see the same pattern being played out in the school and and there's of course many many many many dedicated gay and lesbian teachers who are there to to bear witness to the history that's not in the history books critical thinking is is that factor and that that's that's under attack for very young people well it seems to me that ties in i mean when you were talking at the very beginning of the show about why is it that we want to keep these images off the air identity definitely one of them but it also has to do with when you said robin people come out of their houses oh i'm sorry tim said that um that people come out of their houses to go to these uh events or to go to a performance though we don't often have to if we're watching it you know on tv still the notion that you will know something beyond your own life and be able to measure what people are telling you in one arena against what you are seeing and hearing if there's a variety of it on the air etc that's an aspect of critical thinking and something that i would like to explore but we're going to take a very short break so please stick with us and we'll be right back to get used to [Music] it hey come here i want to talk to you okay i don't want any trouble we got a problem i'm not gonna fight you oh yeah [Music] hi i'm sheila kewell welcome back to get used to it today we're talking about the arts and broadcasting nea pbs the relationship to the gay and lesbian community and i have three wonderful guests patrick scott robin podolski and tim miller and we're talking about uh defunding all of these uh wonderful enterprises and the sort of the whys of it um tim we talked in you know the first half just to bring people up to speed if they're just tuning in about sort of the broader picture about what the arts are for and why art and broadcasting as the public funding anyway might be under attack i want to talk a little bit more now about us about gay and lesbian people and certainly your uh performances and the funding of some of your work was an aspect of an attack on the nea early on would you talk about that a little bit right well in this this general terrain we've been talking about about you know cultural representation equity and you know and certainly for me in my little role i've played in that battle for a number of years i've explored through my my performances as well as in starting performance spaces non-profit arts organizations like highways in santa monica and ps122 in new york city but in my work itself i've really been able to explore in a really specific way my experience as a gay man my experiences also physically in my body on the the details of my life as a sexual being as a queer cultural you know being as well and all the forces that exist and there's something that actually i think freaks people out about this about partly because the culture generally is body phobic and sex phobic but then it kind of gets a little um rocket on it when it starts being attached to the the queer body or lesbian and gay men's sexuality and actual corporeality as bodies and it's part of why the the photographs of the images freak people out so much and and it of course then becomes a real easy tool for the right wing to use these images these performances to um try to detach you know lesbian and gay cultural expression from from the world as we know it and use that as a as a target to then attack a whole array of cultural but i think for us right now our our identity our images our stories are so deeply contested and and fear producing for certain um terrified straight white men a large number of them in the us congress at this point you're right when you'd see the camera panned to the right side of the house um that there's something that that it's um it's part of our power as queer people as well too is to engage people's um freak out potential and their terror of the other and i think lesbians and gay men do that almost more effectively and than any other community i mean people of color can do it as well women can do it you know for these these men well i would say that lesbians might not be as threatening but then i think about holly and her work and you know but it seemed as though we were used as the example of uh what terrible decisions this nea uh decision-making body had made to give good tax money away to do this kind of work or or uh you know the photographic images you're talking about or or any of the cultural presentations why why do you think we're such a wedge issue certainly in terms of arts funding well it i love these studies that the worst the worst thing and the most common um curse word and bad thing you could be called on a playground is you know it's like in every state of this country it's that it used to be girl girl it was more my era you know so in a way like like the training begins at like you know pre-language practically that the worst thing you can be is a queer and when you amplify that from the playground to um a larger playground of the us house of representatives it's really just a logical continuation of that slur of demonizing certain people and and we we're easy to demonize because it plays into people's fear of sex fear of um un un um bridal desire and arrows and sexuality as well of course you know it's interesting gay men talk about how we are about sex and lesbians though we are more and more in tune with being about sex talk about gender in addition i want to i want to ask you robin because i know you and i have had some of these discussions the other fear why we call people is to make certain that the boys will act like boys and not like girls and to some extent that has to do with how important it is to keep this gender separation well i think on one hand it represents a covert acknowledgement that this separation is a lot more culturally constructed than natural otherwise why this hectic effort to keep it in place i mean we weren't born wearing different clothing we weren't you know it's certainly true that most of the people who are defined as women probably have the ability to reproduce it's certainly also true that that's hardly all that we're capable of and oh one one parenthetical thing though with regard to sex what's interesting is the right wing can't always control the effects of their own behavior because in fact after the nea controversy and it dawned on lesbians that we were guarded to be much less of a sexual threat there was such an explosion of art dealing with west being sex it was like what do you mean and it actually made lesbians want to examine well wait why why are we seen as so nice why are we seen as so innocuous wait a minute and and it made us want to bring our sexual variety and diversity and badness out into the open too it's just something the right might not have predicted i mean again parenthetically it's really interesting that some of the most popular right wing videos like the gay agenda contain some of the most blatant representations of queer corporeality and public ecstasy and weather sm etc and i just don't think that they're going to be able to control the effect of those images among their own population because now now those people are going to be able to go to bed murmuring things like i don't know if you can say this on the air remaining they never knew the world almost anything on this area until they defund it let's see now i mean they're giving people now they're giving people activities to associate in a vocabulary so i mean who knows you won't keep them on the farm now of course they were never probably on the farm the problem is the secrecy of it the shame of it i mean they always try to ratify the shame well so do we have the same thing not in the only in the artistic arena but when we were talking about pbs i'm thinking about tales of the city for instance what a what a what a radical show was it but we see this also as an aspect of what's being you know creating such horror well i mean virtually anyone sees experiences that series of books as as one of the most remarkably faithful depictions of the culture in san francisco they recognize themselves immediately but it presented a continuum where everybody had a place in a community so the the the gay and lesbian characters were not um distorted into some high-level tragedy or minimalized everybody had a place so it was a picture of remember the early campaign rhetoric about america as it as it really is that's one of the closest things uh in its own sweet way to america as it actually is played out in a mini-series over the course of a week well that sounds like a wonderful thing what's the problem well there's there's there's visibility for alternative lifestyles that that clearly the the rigid right does not want uh seen as a normal functioning participatory part of life as it's lived in this country and that brings out another important point because on one hand the right wing objects vociferously to manifestations of queer culture that they that are in fact defiance of normative gender roles and normative behavior um a maple thorpe picture which showed in no uncertain terms that a man can be penetrated the male body is not in fact inviolable metaphysically and thank god on the other hand they also object to portrayals of lesbian and gay wife which feature people who at least a lot of their aspects of their personal life are pretty happy with what's called normative culture so they don't they don't like it when they see lesbians and gays of color as tim pointed out they don't like because that means that in fact we're not a wide await they don't like it when they see lesbians and gays doing quote unquote normative activity and they don't like it when they see lesbians and gays doing sexually transgressive activity and what it comes down to is they don't want us to be in the world that's absolutely that's the same discussion that i hear when we talk about marriage for instance you say well you don't want everyone to be so incredibly promiscuous or outside you know let's have why don't they have normal families like everyone else and the answer is because you won't let them i mean you either have to have it one way or the other and what the right wing has always said about us is you may not have it one way or the other you may not exist i mean i think i think the point is is well made but is there another reason i was thinking about are we an easy target because it could be that the agenda was to do away with with public funding of the arts and broadcasting entirely anyway i often feel like we're sometimes in the crosshairs and sometimes not as it suits their purpose um you know we'll be demonized then someone else will be demonized and someone else will be demonized all seems very cynical to me because there are probably very good reasons for people who want a stepford mentality to do away with public funding altogether do you i mean people have said why don't you guys tone it down and then the whole arts uh and uh broadcasting complex won't be in such danger uh do you think we're an easy target for them oh yeah do it to ourselves or i mean especially within the the feeble kind of crawling of this this pathetic culture which i said towards some kind of cultural equity it has become you know except for reagan bush kind of the ways they could sort of be racist through commercials and stuff basically you'd be less likely to have them stand up in a campaign speech and bait an audience around around race in the overt way that virtually every um right-leaning public official feels completely comfortable to um bait people's homophobic impulses now partly because lesbians and gay men are a product of this culture and also have fed into all this internalized shame and and self-esteem junk that this culture crammed down our throats through you know the school system and family and religion let us not forget so in a way then we we also in some difficult ways participate in that that oppression so we become a really really really easy target that they almost never have to take flack for their attacks so they take so little flack it's really worth it for them because with with the with other communities other disempowered communities there have risen up um organizations and structures to to advance the the agenda of people of color whereas the most of the gay and lesbian organizations responded to the crisis of aids and so they're already those the agenda of those organizations is already involved in something that is equally repugnant to the american public and so they can easily collapse and equate gayness queerness with disease and uh and and corruption and the organizations that are largely involved in advancing the concerns of gay and lesbian people are heavily stressed just trying to deal with the economic and medical challenge of trying to deal with a plague of course glad has um some role to play in this doesn't it i mean i i found them rather effective oh yeah as an anti-defamation kind of approach and that's and i think they've they've attempted to uh incorporate the notion of just images of our lives uh deserve to be aired and just the kind of thing you were talking about just demonizing us we we need to sort of meet i mean i think your point is well taken no question well the the thing that's interesting is that that you know there was a concerted effort to have an anti-gay initiative in california and it was so clear that the the structures and organizations exist in this state to protect the rights of gays and lesbians to the degree that it was not feasible they would not have a victory and they would spend countless millions of dollars trying to promote it it's partly because of the new visibility in hollywood of of geffen and others that have put money where their mouth is on this that they found it not not a viable thing to try to pull off in this state so that you know again as you pointed out the the attacks are causing a response a response that ultimately in my belief will serve our community very well and it might want us some powerful allies it's really interesting to me that the president chose and seemed to think that it was politic to join the chorus of attack on hollywood and it's interesting that these folks may be pushing the industry um to defend itself and i'm not sure that they're going to find that was a really smart thing to do i was really fascinated to see um to see i think it was the lincoln awards that what was the big award the pete seeger got the kennedy center the kennedy center awards um you always were mixing up kennedy and lincoln i noticed yeah well i don't know i went to a public school and they taught you history but it was it was really interesting to me that in front of this really interesting mix of industry in washington and liberal people when arlo guthrie chosen his musical tribute to pete seeger to include a statement against proposition 187 the wave of spontaneous relieved and joyous applause he received it's real interesting to me that garth brooks who's the quintessential really roots heartland american artist chose very bravely to um put a lot of effort behind the song which celebrated all kinds of diversity racial and with regard to sexual orientation it makes it quite clear that he loves his blood sister who's the lesbian that he's not about to attack her for anyone i think that they might learn that if if they're going to attack not only what's regarded to be high art but also entertainment and the industry and all that um these are people who are going to fight back and who um who who are just as adept at the language of representation as they are well it's interesting to me because people who are not engaged in high art still with some apology sometimes consider themselves artists country western singers who are singing i think better than anyone else just basic bare truth of people's lives i mean that's what i love about country western music think that they are engaged in art communication entertainment sure but some kind of truth telling about regular people's lives and it is the case i think with a lot of independent filmmakers and we have more of those now than ever since the studios have sort of broken up that these people will be wonderful allies for us you don't find entertainers and other artists uh whether they're just sort of pop culture artists attacking us very much you find them slowly coming to the conclusion that we're all in some big group together and that they're a little a little outraged by this don't you think do you think that people who are commercial artists feel threatened by this defunding stuff or do they see themselves as very separate well the the if the argument hasn't really successfully been made between how this amount of money going to this small population actually impacts the whole culture uh certainly this the the film industry has been slow on the uptake to to recognize that their talent comes from the arts in large part and the healthier that that that climate is the better it is going to be for the food chain of the entertainment industry um so you know i haven't really heard that argument being successfully made but there are certainly highly visible people in the industry who who have been involved in the gay and lesbian community and aids and those related that nexus that do get get it and you know will be going to congress during the month of february and uh and protesting the defunding of the nea yeah on the other hand though i think that if anyone's going to be raising the issue of homophobia and erotophobia it's going to be us it's not going to be anyone other than queers because what we learned with the first round of this stuff when robert mapplethorpe's work was very much at issue that there were some people who thought we can't touch this with the ten foot anything and what we ought to do is simply wrap ourselves in the flag call it a censorship issue you know refer to freedom of speech and call it a day and and that didn't work and in fact we saw that the right wing has an amazing unlimited ability to co-opt anything and they started screening censorship anytime anyone ever disagreed with them denied them a venue sought to enlarge the canon sought to enlarge what could be put on television they started screaming this is politically correct censorship and they took that terrain back i think that at some point we're going to have to acknowledge yeah you know to an extent this is an argument about values and if we put a value on for instance relationships based on yes some degree of personal happiness and fulfillment for the people involved who don't need the excuse of procreation if we say that that's a value and it's not something for the middle class elite it's something that any person ought ought to have in their life that's about that's a battle well it's been historic hasn't it the sort of anti-pleasure approach of any entities that wish to control large groups of people whether they're governments or churches i'm not exactly sure why i suppose is it possible that pleasure is somehow related to critical thinking we don't locate them in the same places in the body it's well they're hard to control i mean any impulse that sets people's ecstasy free whether it's the brain or the genitals is actually really threatening to a control impulse and controlling people's bodies and sex is probably as important as controlling their hearts and their minds and that's part of i think the since we seem to move around those three neighborhoods as queer people with with a particular ease sometimes i think that makes us particularly dangerous i'm reminded of a situation in oregon there when channel 1 this commercial entity trying to put television into classrooms presented a little show that had the image of michelangelo's david in it the parents went crazy they didn't care that their kids were being sold mars bars in the classroom and that that television was being used as a as a way to get their pocketbook they were concerned about the image of of this highly sensuous icon that has been identified as homosexual so there you have that pleasure crisis right right which is actually like 20 feet off beach boulevard in orange county i think they grew those cypress trees high now well one thing pleasure certainly endangers is a very ruthless marketplace strategy that's based on so-called competitiveness and downsizing which means lower your expectations at home folks it means it's not going to get better for anyone but the rich and we certainly can't have you people expecting anything like pleasure well and the other thing is of course this is a commodity that haven't that haven't quite figured out how to control the market before one can seek one's own pleasure without having to go buy it normally and uh it's probably it's it's quite a problem so it's almost as though they're i was thinking when you were talking about mars bars instead of michelangelo it's a way of channeling what you should take pleasure in that's right pleasure in consumption i mean there's been an enormous drive to try to convince us that retail therapy is really the the greatest pleasure you know go shopping if you're upset and in fact consumption that's really kind of about obliterating the body that's about mars bars and maybe too much to drink and sitting in one place and watching an image all day and going to an artificial environment and buying more and more things and that's really different from pleasure that's cited in the body that's really kind of democratic i saw the two people were married in virtual reality did you see i i don't know i heard about that channel surfing you know and saw this where they actually had the kiss after the ceremony but they were about 30 feet apart now there's the ultimate right really you can fly well you could have this experience and never even be in the same town well what do you think is going to happen i mean here we are we're now in the middle of a struggle on this um are we going to lose well after you're president i think it'll be fine sheila thank you tim vote for me i'll set you free everybody said should be ourselves i think it'll get really ugly it's been ugly for some time but i think the um you know obviously it's going to get hotter again um i think ultimately um we're in an inexorable move towards more more images more cultural voices i don't think you can shut people up unless you start piling them in mass graves at least considering the the cultural tradition we're in at least as i see it right now and it's it i i like to think this is the last gasp of the mono culture that is really trying to say this this country is only for you know straight white protestant men which isn't what my public school in los angeles county was like you know 30 years ago didn't really teach us that either right tried to right but there would always be the teacher that would feel so embarrassed that that was the narrow message that she or he would say you know but on the other hand and then tell something personal right right so maybe they won't win but if they went on the defunding issue i mean it's it is a blow isn't it oh yeah it's a huge silencing i mean it means artists will not have money to create films videos performances organizations will fold it'd be a lie for me to say if the national endowment for the arts is defunded that this incredibly vital cultural revolution we're in would stop i would like it be better for me to say it because then it sounds worse but i actually think if this is is enormously big and important it would be a huge hindrance and would silence people and cause enormous pain and it legitimizes the critique too doesn't it we won the government said this is bad stuff and the government represents the real moral imperative of the country there's a horrible thought right but i think it would take more than that to um i mean we're the ones that aren't going to stay on the farm at this point and i think that's true for artists of color for for women you know who led so much of the movement towards new voices being heard from feminist art practice and stuff and then to this explosion of lesbian and gay voices well and what i mean what's a risk also is infrastructure within the arts community that that those connections among institutions and uh are is being lost in the process of of this defunding but it's happening at the same time just as these online services are are emerging so there's there is the potential for a paradigm shift and that that you know there is comfort to be had in the fact that these structures are problematic the nea does have a lot of problems and they recently cut the media arts off at the knees by by taking all of its fellowship money away which is going to be very difficult to recover from but if we can find a way to recover from it over time it may strengthen uh but you know it's a difficult uh difficult thing to to put a temperature in and pull out and find out just whether the patient's gonna make it or not yeah what's imperative in any case is that we continue to put some effort to building physical structures of community for artists and you know you know because i think you're right tim you know ultimately there can't be the silencing of all these voices and and there are big paradigms and cultural changes that are going to happen anyway but individual lives can be wounded a lot of people can be hurt a lot of kids are never going to get touched by the art that they might have in rural kentucky because of this and a lot of people in the cities of l.a are going to get broken by the effort to make a living make art make friends make a life and and so i think it's important that um that now in the in the course of fighting for funding and for whatever comes after this battle that um we built infrastructures of support um for for art that's not the official line and with that i'm deeply apologetic to run out of time but they only give us 60 minutes for this for this wonderful show so i want to thank you patrick thank you robin thank you tim this was great i want to thank you for being with us too and uh i think you should go and do something about this i think you should let your congress people know that you care about this um often they count on your silence too so you tell them get used to it see you next month [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you