censorship

When is a Jesus imagine in a museum bad and, quote, "designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians"?

The Mission of San Louis Rey in Oceanside has a crucifix I will always remember. It has a human jaw and teeth. The knees of Jesus are broken and bleeding and the hair seems real--stringy, sweaty and matted down. It is the Jesus of blood-porn, not the risen Jesus or Jesus triumphant, it is the most definite and concrete example of the Christ suffering I have ever seen.

The theology I was taught growing up is that when one feels defeated, pained, punished, rejected or alone, he should "offer it to Christ"--it is called redemptive suffering. When my father was dying, and had to wear diapers and my mom had to wipe his ass and dress his open sores, he was often reminded of this by my more religious relatives.

Much like my father, many people who died in the eighties during the AIDS epidemic at its worst. We left those suffering to die, unwilling to help them or touch them, worried we would catch it ourselves. President Reagan would say nothing as his communications director, Pat Buchannan, said AIDS was "God's revenge upon gay men." In the end, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had died before Reagan would say anything about it.

An artist (Wojnarowicz) who lost his lover to AIDS and who himself had HIV, put together a video art piece. In it, he attempts to stitch his own lips together, sew a loaf of bread together and other various metaphorical ways to demonstrate to the viewer how difficult it was for him to put his life back together--to find hope and solace--when his life was falling apart and he and his entire peer group were literally dying and left to their own suffering. Part of it involves a crucifix, on the floor, with ants crawling over it as he yells, "unclean".

As one commentator says here, better than I:

The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.

So, when is a grisly or other than ascendant Christ inappropriate and "designed to offend" as Phil Donahue and future House Majority Leader Boehner think? Apparently it's when the suffering of Christ is meaningful to gay men. In which case, instead of being art, and worthwhile, it is offensive and now pulled from the Smithsonian's showing in the National Portrait Gallery. In an exhibition which hopes to show how gay and lesbian Americans have shown their own experiences and truth through portraiture over the course of our history, when the artist's self-understanding involves Christianity, it is "offensive".

The ridiculousness of this argument is clear, and the offense we should all take at the censorship of Art by the United States Government cannot be overstated. But this is indicative of a general truth--that bigotry against LGBT Americans exists and it is not caused by religious belief, but is justified post facto by religion. If that were not the case, then Donahue and others would see that his man, in his suffering, related to Christ Suffering. Instead of being offended by his piece of Art, they would relate to him. But, because they have pre-held bigotry against gays and lesbians, the fact this man believes what they believe is offensive.

Watch the video here and explore the exhibit here.

Silence = Death. The threat of AIDS and HIV is still real, and the effects are just as traumatic. The suffering we, as a people, helped perpetuate in our recent past should never be forgotten lest we repeat our mistakes. Today, the day after World AIDS Day, we have our government, again, trying to silence the voice of the suffering and marginalized. While our Soldiers and other service members fight and die in Iraq and elsewhere to spread "freedom and democracy", here on our own shores, the government is silencing voices.