Date: Mon, 21 Aug 1995 12:00:40 -0500
From: mohr richard d <r-mohr@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>

                              My PBS, My NEA

by Richard D. Mohr
(March 1995)

     A voice comes over my local NPR station urging me to write
my congressman and beg him not to zero out federal funding for
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  The reason: "NPR is
important to families, especially families with children."  The
station's self-promotion continues: "So in this era of family
values, what deserves your support more."  Say what?

     It's Saturday afternoon at the Met.  I'm excited.   I've
scribbled a bit on opera, but I've never been to its premier
American house.  A generous friend has offered to take me when I
visit New York.  I realize just how generous when he hands me the
ticket.  It reads: "_Walkure_ Balcony $150."  I gape.  Later I
read that the largest single grant from the National Endowment
for the Arts in 1995 is to the Met -- a half million bucks.  I
gape.  Kids flipping burgers at McDonald's have subsidized my
patron's tickets.

     Do gays need the CPB and the NEA?  Are gays getting value
for money from them?  Do they act justly?  Are they helping gays
win the war for the hearts and minds of America?  No.

     When Clinton was elected President and Jane Alexander became
the head of the NEA, artists, museum directors, and liberal
pundits breathed a sigh of relief.  They thought that they had
seen the end of political interventions into the NEA's peer-
review system for the evaluation of artistic merit.  Early on,
Alexander gave a heartening interview to the _Advocate_ in which
she claimed that the sort of politically-targeted interventions
made by Reagan and Bush appointees would not occur under her
leadership.  But Clinton's NEA proved no more principled than
Clinton himself.  Immediately prior to last Fall's elections, the
politically-appointed NEA oversight board reversed peer-review
decisions to fund three sexually themed projects.  One was that
of Andres Serrano, the world-class photographer whose works
include card-table size images of male ejaculates in flight.  To
work for gays, the NEA would have to be principled.  But it's
not.  And it won't be in any foreseeable future.

     The same is true for PBS.  In 1994, the six-hour gay
celebration _Tales of the City_ was PBS' most successful program,
even when success is measured at its crudest -- total number of
couch potatoes glued to screen.  But under conservative political
pressure, PBS failed to build on its success and fund the filming
of the second volume of the _Tales_ series.  In consequence, the
project died.

     The general rationale for public support of the arts is the
same as the rationale for government support to the sciences.=20
Public funds provide forums for potentially important ideas that
would not make it on their own in the market place because they
are new or abstract.  Federal funds are not needed, and should
not be used, to support and reinforce old ideas, customary
practices, and money-making enterprises.

     Now, when it comes to gay issues, does public funding do
things that the private sector does not?  Again, no.  For
example, NPR's news and commentary programming -- notably "All
Things Considered" -- is way behind the _New York Times_ in its
coverage of gay issues.  And we have FOX and ABC, not PBS and the
NEA, to thank for gradually demolishing the taboo against
depictions of same-sex affection and for portraying gays as
expected fixtures on the landscape of everyday American life.

     The chief problem with public funding, though, is not that
under political sway the federal government will fail to fund gay
performance art, photographs, and screen plays in favor of
funding Wagnerian operas and macrame.  Rather, the chief problem
is that federal funds have sinuous tendrils extending deep into
the private realm.  And these intrusions are a positive detriment
to gay progress.  For, you see, museums and other nodal points
for representation and meaning, notably universities, are hooked
on federal funds.  The result is that museums and other non-
federal institutions must be good boys and girls by federal
standards to get the goodies that will keep them from going into
withdrawal convulsions.  So as Rush Limbaugh's followers set
these standards, gay images and ideas will vanish from museums
and other federally-enticed institutions.  More than ever,
museums will censor themselves and play it safe in order to stay
hooked up to federal sugar.

     Over the next couple months as Congress takes up issues of
funding the arts and airwaves, a worst case scenario is likely to
come true.  Funding for the NEA and CPB will be reduced to a
level where nothing interesting will be produced by them.
Certainly gay art and gay programs will not be funded.  But
funding will not be reduced to the point where institutions are
free of government oversight.  If conservatives are clever, they
will not cut funding entirely.  Rather they will maintain a
trickle of federal money to museums, television stations,
universities and the like in order to extend farther into the
private sphere their surveillance and control, their manipulation
and suppression of gay images and ideas.  In these circumstances,
it will be better for gays if the NEA and CPB are terminated.

-30-