TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. The culture war never seems to end. My guest, Isaac Butler, takes us through part of its history in his new book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, And The Birth Of America's Culture Wars." Butler says the conflict had a transformative effect on him because, at the same time the culture wars hurdled toward their climax, art saved his life.
His new book begins in 1974 in West Virginia with the banning of many books and a county's new school curricula, with the power of the Christian right behind the ban. They were also behind the attacks on Martin Scorsese's film "The Last Temptation Of Christ" and the taboo-breaking artwork of Robert Mapplethorpe and David Wojnarowicz, who were accused of creating pornography, and Andres Serrano, who was accused of creating blasphemous art. The story continues with attacks on the NEA's federal funding for the arts.
Isaac Butler is the author of the previous books "The World Only Spins Forward," about the play "Angels In America," and "The Method," about the history of the acting technique known as the method. We recorded our interview last Thursday. On Friday, the Texas Board of Education approved a new curriculum for students grade K-12, mandating each grade to have at least one Bible passage as required reading. Many parents and teachers are alarmed as the culture wars continue. Isaac Butler, welcome back to FRESH AIR.
ISAAC BUTLER: Thank you, Terry. It's great to be here.
GROSS: So one of the main characters in your book is one of the leaders of the attacks on the artists who are in your book, and I'm thinking of Donald Wildmon. And he's one of the leading figures behind the first attack, where your history begins. So let's start with - who is Donald Wildmon?
BUTLER: Donald Wildmon is a really fascinating eccentric character who unfortunately died right as I was starting, you know, doing my interviews for the book. So I didn't get to talk to him, which is unfortunate. But Wildman was a pioneering, you know, media advocacy activist. And he was a evangelical Christian reverend in Tupelo, Missouri, who kind of found his calling - that's how he describes it in his memoir - in trying to make American culture less blasphemous and less sinful.
In the '70s, this looked like leading boycott campaigns against these conglomerates 'cause at that point, you know, like, TV studios and movie studios were owned by these companies that also owned department stores and tin mines and literally coffin manufacturers and stuff like that. So he would do these consumer boycotts to get companies to either stop advertising on shows that he disliked or to pull shows or change the content of shows that he disliked. That was where he started, and he was very successful at it and built a really, really huge mailing list.
And in the '80s, he and a sort of coalition of other evangelical Christians take on Martin Scorsese's "Last Temptation Of Christ." And they pivot from that to taking on, you know, often quite unknown American so-called high art. That's not really a division I believe in, but, you know, American high art because it was funded by the government. And that created an opening for them to say, essentially, you know, you're wasting our taxpayer dollars on blasphemy and sin.
GROSS: Well, let's go back to 1974 in Kanawha County, West Virginia, where there was new school curricula from the school board. And there was one person who held out on some of the books - on many of the books - that were in this new curricula. Her name was Alice Moore. She was married to a Church of Christ minister, and she also opposed sex education. So she's one person on the board. But how does Donald Wildmon enter the act?
BUTLER: Well, Alice Moore is a really - also a really fascinating figure. You know, the Kanawha County Textbook War, which is what it sort of came to be called, was a thing I just discovered during research. And it blew my mind because all of the factors in, you know, what was going to become the culture war are present there.
You have evangelical Christians, you know, using direct action and organizing and stuff like that to really change the direction of the government. In this case, it was a legal mandate that curricula had to be diverse and reflect diverse perspectives on American life. And they were going to approve a new, you know, K-12 curricula for the public schools to do that. And Alice Moore, who, as you said, had been elected to the school board on an explicitly anti-sex-ed platform, got them to delay that vote. And while they delayed that vote, a number of Christian organizations and churches both within the county and without came and lent their support.
And so there's, you know, sort of evangelical - the evangelical movement really comes into West Virginia. And they - the situation spirals really far out of control over the course of the year. I mean, to a point where people are starting to try to bomb schools to keep schools from opening, you know? And the end result is they actually wind up kind of, you know, vetoing this rule. They manage to cause such a fuss that, to get it to go away, the county and the school board eventually agree to not have these books come in and to change the rules about what books will be adopted. And within a few years, there's creationist textbooks in classrooms in Kanawha. So it's this - you know, that really created a kind of template that religious-right figures like Donald Wildmon would use again and again and again.
GROSS: So if they created a template, what was the template?
BUTLER: Well, it starts with a really intense sense of grievance or performance of grievance - that other people expressing their rights, essentially, other people's speech is oppressing you, that other people's point of view - that you're - you know, Alice Moore says this flat out. It's not that I don't want my child learning X, Y and Z. I don't want my child to even know what they are. You know? So it's this idea that's really key to the parents' rights movement that, you know, parents have absolute control over their children, and to teach them things that they don't want is a form of discrimination against those parents.
So you start with that kind of grievance, and then you move there to, you know, organizing these direct action campaigns with petitions and letters and stuff like that. The end goal is to capture a kind of non - largely nonpartisan group, like a school board or a regulatory committee or whatever it is, and staff it with people who will then use it to perpetuate your ideological goals. So that's what they're always moving towards, is capturing these - the decision-makers or pressuring the decision-makers and threatening the decision-makers in such a way that they are going to help you pursue your ideological goals.
GROSS: So what were some of the books that were removed from the curricula as a result of this pressure campaign?
BUTLER: I mean, it's - there's hundreds of them, right? And it's everything from, you know, essays by James Baldwin to - there's a picture book of "Jack And The Beanstalk" that someone objects to because there's a - you know, a Black kid and a white kid playing together on the cover. So it really runs the gamut. It's hundreds of books that they pull - anthologies, especially of poetry and essays, that are meant for, you know, the equivalent of, like, AP or Baccalaureate juniors and seniors. You know, like, upper-level people doing adult-level English literature work. That kind of stuff often has a lot of adult themes, right? And so a lot of those books wind up getting pulled, some of which are, you know, books we might take for granted today, like "The Autobiography Of Malcolm X." You know, that was one that got a lot of strikes against it.
GROSS: Do you see similarities between this 1974 case and what's happening now with the banning of books and Don't Say Gay?
BUTLER: Yeah. I absolutely do. The difference now, of course, is that they're in charge. You know, Ron DeSantis and the Republicans have a firm grip on the government in Florida. They have gotten those school boards staffed with, you know, people who are ideologically in lockstep with them. So it's much easier. You just have to pass a bill, right? But it's absolutely the same stuff, which is that, you know, we don't want our children to have to learn that there are other ways of looking at the world. That's what's really at the heart of it. And a lot of the other ways of looking at the world that they don't want their children to learn about, of course, focus on sex, gender and sexuality.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Isaac Butler. He's the author of the new book "The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, And The Birth Of America's Culture Wars." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Isaac Butler, author of "The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, And The Birth Of America's Culture Wars." It focuses on the religious right's attacks on certain books, art and film of the '70s, '80s and '90s.
So let's jump ahead to the late '80s and early '90s, when transgressive art was very popular, and it was very unpopular (laughter) on the religious right, and Donald Wildmon, again, becomes a main character in this story. So let's start with Andres Serrano, who is best known for his photograph "Piss Christ." And it was a part of a series that he called Immersions in which the images were based on body fluids, either from animals or from people. And it could range from blood to milk - in this case, urine. So I want you to describe the image. And then we'll hear an excerpt of my interview with Andres Serrano in which he talks about it.
BUTLER: The image, if you didn't know the title of the image, you would just think it was sort of this beautiful, holy, you know, tribute (laughter) to Christ and Christ's sacrifice. It is a crucifix that is angled a little bit towards the viewer, so the end of one of the arms is sort of disappearing into nothing. And it is in this murky kind of field, visual field. It's not even clear that it's a liquid when you first look at it.
And it's backlit, so it has this kind of spectral, kind of holy power to it. And I think part of what caused all the controversy is the image is so beautiful and so holy seeming. And then, you know, it's contrasted with this title that is extremely blunt and potentially, although that is not how he intended it, blasphemous. And so it's those two things happening at once that I think help give the work of art its power.
GROSS: There's something almost celestial about it because there's no ground, there's no sky. It's Christ, you know, like, on the cross, kind of blurry, who seems to be, like, floating in this ethereal space. And it's very unearthly looking.
BUTLER: Yeah.
GROSS: It's almost as if, like, Christ is rising on the cross and is kind of celestial-looking, especially, like, if you don't know how it was made.
BUTLER: Yeah. I find the photograph unbelievably moving, even knowing how it's made. And, you know, like, I'm a Jew. I still - but I still...
GROSS: (Laughter).
BUTLER: ...Think that that photograph is unbelievably moving and beautiful. And, you know, Serrano was raised Catholic, considers himself, you know, a Christian. He met Pope Francis. You know, he is wrestling with his faith. And he belongs to a long history of Catholic artists - I mean, Graham Greene's "The Power And The Glory" comes to mind to me - wrestling with their faith and the symbols of that faith.
GROSS: So let's hear an excerpt of the interview that I recorded with Andres Serrano in 1993. And it starts with him describing it.
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ANDRES SERRANO: It's a very mysterious image. I think, as many people have pointed out, without the title, it would've been seen as a, you know, very reverential treatment of the crucifix and, you know, fit to hang in a church, probably.
GROSS: This was a photograph.
SERRANO: Yes.
GROSS: But the crucifix was actually immersed in urine.
SERRANO: Yes.
GROSS: Yours.
SERRANO: Yes.
GROSS: Now, when you put those two together, a lot of people see it as blasphemous.
SERRANO: Well, you know, I never saw it that way. And I remember when I first showed the work in New York that this woman - she was married to a reverend - she said to me, you know, when it comes to religion, my husband and I don't agree about anything. But we were both very moved by your picture. And, you know, that essentially was the reaction at first. No one, you know, paid much mind, except after, you know, the American Family Association got into the picture more than two years after the picture was first made.
GROSS: What were you saying about religion in that piece?
SERRANO: Well, I would say that it's probably a reflection of my own ambivalent feelings about my Catholic upbringing. Aside from that, there's nothing specific. You know, all sorts of claims have been made for that piece. And I remember at the time that I was embroiled in the controversy, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, which was the sponsor of that big, controversial grant and art show, said to me, you know, the NEA is breathing down our necks for an explanation - and can we say it's a protest against the commercialization of religion and religious values? And I said, you know, well, that's not language that I would use, but, you know, if you want to say that, that's fine.
GROSS: What was it like for you to be at the center of a national controversy, to have your art addressed on the Senate floor?
SERRANO: It was very strange. I mean, at first, I couldn't believe it when they first told me that this was going on - that thousands of people, you know, at the request of the American Family Association, were sending in protest letters to Congress. And then I saw myself being denounced, you know, on TV and in the congressional record.
GROSS: That was the artist Andres Serrano, recorded in 1993 on FRESH AIR. And my guest is Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, And The Birth Of America's Culture Wars." So it's so interesting because Serrano was, like, a total unknown...
BUTLER: Yeah.
GROSS: ...Until he was in this touring show because he was - I think he'd won a kind of competition. And all of the winners were in this group show that was touring. So he mentions in the excerpt that we just heard the American Family Association. That's Donald Wildmon's group, who we've been talking about. So how did Wildmon pick up on this?
BUTLER: I mean, it's a very weird set of circumstances. Someone saw the photograph in Richmond, Virginia, at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and they wrote a letter to the editor of The Richmond Times-Dispatch about it. And somehow, Wildmon learned about it through that letter, as far as I can tell. There's been accusations that he, you know, put that person up to it or whatever, but I've never seen any evidence of that. And so then he, you know, started turning on the outrage machine about it. He was writing his list, and they were, you know, writing to Congress and all this stuff about this artwork, which, at that point he hadn't seen, and I don't think anyone who was writing Congress about it had seen it because that show had been closed, as Serrano said, for quite some time. And, you know, it wasn't - like, the SECCA touring art exhibit (laughter) is not, like, a major art thing.
And then it got picked up by Jesse Helms - Senator Jesse Helms - who's from North Carolina, which is where SECCA was based, and was a major opponent of the arts and arts funding and was always on the lookout for stories like this to make hay out of. And then there's this weird thing where they have a copy of the catalog of the exhibit, and Al D'Amato, senator of New York, asks them to borrow the catalog, and he brings it onto the Senate floor and he denounces Serrano and he literally tears a page out of the catalog in the midst of his kind of rant about it. And after that, kind of, you know, all hell kind of breaks loose, for the NEA especially, and to some extent for Serrano, who becomes a little bit more reclusive out of it. Although he has always said that that controversy helped put him on the map. And in fact, a few years after you did that interview with him, he wrote Jesse Helms a thank you note for making him famous.
GROSS: (Laughter).
BUTLER: So, yeah, he's a mischievous guy, you know? And so that...
GROSS: His paintings were worth so much more.
BUTLER: Yeah.
GROSS: His gallery wanted to decline doing another show with him because in his previous gallery show he'd only sold, like, one photograph. But after the controversy, you know, he was selling a lot, and he was a - you know, it was a boon to his career.
BUTLER: It was a boon to his career. It reunited him with a daughter he had had previously that he wasn't, you know, in contact with. I mean, it was a really life-changing event for him. It, you know...
GROSS: But not for the NEA.
BUTLER: But not for the NEA, no. The NEA...
GROSS: I mean, it was life-changing but bad.
BUTLER: (Laughter) Yeah. Yes. It's a great way of putting it, Terry. Life-changing but bad. That should have been the title...
GROSS: (Laughter).
BUTLER: ...Of the book. But the - yeah, so what happens to the NEA at this point is that there's a huge amount of scrutiny placed on it and its grants. And the NEA had had, like, a couple of minor controversies earlier. The biggest one was over Erica Jong's novel "Fear Of Flying," but the - because of its frank discussion of sex. But, you know, for the most part, it was kind of left alone. It had, you know, bipartisan support. People didn't really care about it that much. But at that point, you know, American art is getting more purposely transgressive in response to the AIDS crisis, and the religious right is getting more and more powerful. And the territory they fight that out over is the National Endowment for the Arts and what it can and cannot fund.
GROSS: So if we flash-forward to today, how do you see the attacks on the NEA from the '80s and '90s echoing today? And what state do you see the NEA being in today?
BUTLER: Well, I'll answer that second question first, which is just to say in the current proposed budget, the NEA is being sunsetted. The current proposed budget for '27 has the NEA, the - and the NEH given sort of a token amount of money to allow them to unwind their operations over one to two years. So assuming that goes through, they're gone, you know.
In terms of how I see this kind of playbook being used again and again and again, I just see it all over the place. You know, the selective, out-of-context misrepresentation of work to anger people happens all over the place. The politicizing of what are supposed to be apolitical decision-makers within the government, I mean, I think that's sort of the story of the Trump administration. The Trump administration recently passed some rules that say, you know, something to the effect of, to get any funding at all, you have to align yourself with one of the administration's priorities.
And, you know, the other place I see it all over is this, you know, using the power of the purse coercively. A big example is all of those lawsuits against schools and law firms or the pulling of research funding from universities to get them to agree to perpetuate the ideology that you want them to perpetuate. That kind of power of the purse and discovering how coercive that can be - and often can be both more coercive and maybe more constitutional than doing it through laws - is a thing that the right really refines during the period of my story.
GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you. We have to take a break here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Isaac Butler. He's the author of the new book "The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, And The Birth Of America's Culture Wars." We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with director and cultural historian Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, And The Birth Of America's Culture Wars." He previously was on the show for his book "The Method," which is a history of the acting approach known as the method. When we left off, we were talking about some of the artists at the center of the culture wars in the 1980s and '90s because their work was considered pornographic or blasphemous.
So Robert Mapplethorpe, even if our listeners don't know his work, his photographs - one photograph he took is especially famous 'cause it's the album cover of Patti Smith's first album, "Horses." It's this iconic photo in which she's wearing a white button-down, like, men's shirt, and an untied tie is dangling from her neck. And she has, like, a suit jacket hanging from her thumb, draped over her shoulder. It's a beautiful photo.
BUTLER: I don't think anyone's ever looked cooler than Patti Smith looks in that photograph.
GROSS: (Laughter) Exactly. So true.
BUTLER: You have to go to, like, Marlon Brando in "The Wild One" or something to get someone who just looked that cool. She looked so cool. It's unbelievable.
GROSS: Yes. Absolutely. But what he became really famous for was his graphic photographs of men having sex with each other, with a focus sometimes on sadomasochism. And the characters in his photos were often Black men...
BUTLER: Yeah.
GROSS: ...Which is something that he was sometimes criticized for - for possibly, like, fetishizing Black bodies.
BUTLER: Yeah. I mean, I actually think it's unquestionable that he fetishized Black bodies. I mean, you look at the things that he said privately and you just look at the photographs of Black men, eroticized Black men, and I think the people who took offense at those photographs on those grounds were totally correct. You know, a lot of Robert Mapplethorpe's work is portraits of celebrities, which are pretty amazing. He has an incredible one of Laurie Anderson, and these almost kind of sinister and incredibly sexual-seeming photos of flowers.
But there is this, you know, couple-year period in the '70s where he is frequenting The Mineshaft, which is a gay fetish bar. And he's inviting people he meets there to come back to the studio and to photograph them doing the things that they are interested in doing sexually, which are things that people are really doing. I mean, you know, it's documenting a thing that really exists in the world, but many people find those images quite upsetting.
GROSS: Now, this is where the story interconnects with your family story.
BUTLER: Yes.
GROSS: Because after the Corcoran Gallery in Washington decides it's too controversial, they cancel their showing. They cancel their exhibit. And a group called the Washington Project for the Arts decides, we should pick it up. We should display this work. And this is where your mother comes in. Was she on the board of the WPA?
BUTLER: My mother joined the board at some point that summer. She doesn't remember exactly when. But she did say to me, the very first board meeting I went to was when we voted on whether or not to take "The Perfect Moment" at the Washington Project for the Arts. Because Jock Reynolds, then the head of the WPA, had, you know, heard a little bit in advance that the show was about to get canceled at a dinner. And he was just like, we got to take that thing. You know, it's going to be good for us. It's good for free speech. It's good for the country. Let's do it. And they did, and it was a huge, huge hit. So yeah. So my mother sort of came in a little late to the story, and she was extremely helpful in getting me in contact with people who were involved in it at that time so that I could interview them.
GROSS: Was your mother firm in her decision to vote for taking on this exhibit?
BUTLER: Yes. Yeah. My mother absolutely was. I will say my mother is not interviewed in the book. She is actually one of the most charming, extroverted, you know, incredible people in the world. But she hates being interviewed and she doesn't like that kind of public attention, so she is not interviewed in the book. But yeah. No. It was not a question to her. The - you know, most of the kind of liberal D.C. arts, you know, and intelligentsia people were fully behind this show. They just were like, obviously this show needs to be seen. This is crazy. Let's do it.
GROSS: So let's move on and talk about another artist who was condemned by the religious right for their work. And this is David Wojnarowicz, who was also targeted by Donald Wildmon, the head of the American Family Association. And he was accused of pornography, and he insisted that his sexual images were part of a larger political artistic context 'cause some of this work was in collages. So before we talk about him, I want you to say a few words about his work, and then we'll hear him describing it.
BUTLER: Wojnarowicz is a really hard figure to summarize 'cause he's such a polymath. He's a writer. He's a activist with ACT UP. You know, he's a visual artist. He does collages, installations, paintings. He really does it all, and his work is very raw. It is often, you know, fueled by a really intense rage. And much of it is in response to the reality of living as a gay man and a person with AIDS in America at a time when both of those groups are really outcasts in society.
GROSS: So let's hear an excerpt of the interview I recorded with him in 1990, and this was two years before he died of AIDS at the age of 37. And this was recorded the week he took Donald Wildmon to court and sued him for misrepresenting him and taking him out of context. And he was awaiting a verdict on this at the time that we spoke. So this excerpt starts with Wojnarowicz talking about how Donald Wildmon used his art and took Wojnarowicz's art out of context.
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DAVID WOJNAROWICZ: What he did was he excised from the images small fragments that dealt with sexual activity or depicted sexual activity that were in a political and artistic context, stripped the context from around the image and then presented that image as the full work, put my name on it. And he did this to 14 images, three of which were not sexual in nature, and sent them around the country.
GROSS: What charges were made about your art in the literature that was sent out with images from your work in it?
WOJNAROWICZ: Well, it was sent out in an envelope that was marked - warning, extremely offensive materials enclosed - or something. I don't have the envelope in front of me, so that's an approximate description of it. He left the very strong impression that my work consists of solely nothing more than a banal pornography.
GROSS: Now, you're saying that he took one component of a larger mixed media collage work.
WOJNAROWICZ: Right.
GROSS: And blew that up and presented that as being representative of your work. You've been working with mixed media images...
WOJNAROWICZ: Right.
GROSS: ...For a long time. Tell us a little bit about why you work in that form.
WOJNAROWICZ: I guess, emotionally and intellectually, it's the only way that I can represent what my experience in the world is, given that when we walk out in the street, we're so heavily bombarded with visual information, whether it's store signs, newspaper covers, magazine covers, advertising, et cetera, that I like to use a variety of media that somehow approximates what it's like to walk down a street or to move through space in contemporary America.
GROSS: One of the issues that brought your work into the center of national controversy was the 1989 group show called Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing, about the influence of AIDS on aesthetics, sexuality and culture. This was a group show at a gallery called Artists Space in New York. What was your reaction when after the NEA reinstated money for the show, it still refused to fund the catalog because of your essay?
WOJNAROWICZ: Oh, I found it very distressing because, one, it set a precedent in terms of funding that now single objects can be separated from a show because somebody doesn't like their political content. Two, it sent a message to institutions around the country - publicly funded institutions - that they shouldn't deal with work that might be critical in terms of politics.
GROSS: That was the artist David Wojnarowicz recorded in 1990. And my guest is Isaac Butler, author of a new book called "The Perfect Moment," which is a history of the culture wars. So can you describe the lawsuit that...
BUTLER: Yeah.
GROSS: ...Wojnarowicz was talking about?
BUTLER: Yes. So Wojnarowicz is suing Wildmon over this tactic that the right is really good at, going back to Kanawha and forward to today, which is taking excerpts of something out of context and saying that it is representative of the larger whole in order to get people angry, right? And so what Wildmon did was he took these collages that have little images that are - you know, they're rephotographed and kind of distorted and whatever from - many of which are from pornography magazines that are part of these larger collages. And he's saying, this is the work of art.
And so Wildmon sues him. His lawyer is actually David Cole, who's now one of the foremost, you know, First Amendment ACLU attorneys in the country. But David Cole is his attorney. And they sue Wildmon over a couple of fronts - copyright infringement, libel and violating this new law in New York that protects artists against their work being misrepresented and used without their permission. And it's a very funny, weird trial. It lasts one day because everyone has already been deposed, and they all agree to enter those depositions into evidence.
So it's just sort of like, David Wojnarowicz gets on the stand, Donald Wildmon gets on the stand, it's over, you know? And what the judge eventually rules is that it doesn't meet the standard of libel, but it did violate this New York state law instituted to protect artists. And so Wojnarowicz wins the lawsuit. And he is awarded an apology that the American Family Association has to send out to its mailing list and $1 in damages, which is the symbolic amount you give when you believe a harm has been done, but that it didn't actually cause any financial harm.
GROSS: This is another instance where the artist wins - in this case, actually wins in court.
BUTLER: Yeah.
GROSS: But the NEA suffers. 'Cause Donald Wildmon's goal was to just, like, get rid of the NEA.
BUTLER: Yes, yes, that is true. I mean...
GROSS: And it didn't get rid of the NEA, but with each of these attacks, I think the NEA becomes weaker.
BUTLER: Yes. With each of these attacks, the NEA becomes weaker, the NEA loses allies in Congress. It's death by 1,000 cuts, right? With each of these things that happens, you know, the NEA is either - is forced to spend political capital or the attacks on it are increasing just over and over and over again. That said, you know, the kind of immediate, quick compromises that the NEA and its allies are doing before this moment are also weakening the NEA, you know?
So there's a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't aspect to it, which is really difficult because there's so few people in Congress who are willing to just be like, you know, the government doesn't pick ideological winners and losers in choosing what to fund, and that includes the arts. And so sometimes the government is going to fund art that makes people angry. And that is OK because making people angry is actually a legitimate function of the arts.
GROSS: My guest is Isaac Butler, author of the new book "The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, And The Birth Of America's Culture Wars." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Isaac Butler, author of "The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, And The Birth Of America's Culture Wars." It focuses on the religious right's attacks on certain books, art and film of the '70s, '80s and '90s.
You write in your book that at the same time the culture wars were reaching their peak in the '90s, that you were transformed by the culture wars and by art. What do you mean by that?
BUTLER: Well, you know, when I was a kid, I was - like a lot of theater kids, I was kind of a lonely, bullied, unhappy child. And I got - but I loved acting and I loved theater. And I wound up cast in this professional musical called "Falsettoland," by William Finn and James Lapine, which is a musical about what the meaning is of the American family and the AIDS crisis in its early stages - the musical takes place in the early '80s - and, you know - and what it is to be gay in America. So I played the son of a man who has left his wife for another man. And, you know, this family is trying to muddle through that while the father's lover is dying of a mysterious new illness, which is, of course, AIDS.
And so that was a real eye-opener for all sorts of reasons, which is, among other things, you know, gay liberation and the AIDS crisis became very real to me, as opposed to things that I heard about. 'Cause my parents had "The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour" on in the evening. And I was meeting gay adults. I was meeting people who had AIDS. Gay people and people with AIDS were coming to see the show and talking to me afterwards, and I just like - at this moment when art really saved me. 'Cause I was in a really bad place emotionally, personally, psychologically and, you know, being in that show really changed my life for the better. It's one of the most formative experiences in my life. And at that point, the fight for American arts and free expression, those protests were really fueled by the gay rights movement and ACT UP. So all of these contexts were overlapping at the same time.
GROSS: How do you think the AIDS epidemic, in some ways, really changed American art or aspects of American art? People who were gay and especially gay people who had AIDS were considered dangerous...
BUTLER: Yes.
GROSS: ...Outsiders, threats to our health and culture and marriage, threats to our marriage. I mean, it was that era. So it's, I think, understandable why they made transgressive art, because they were - their their way of living was considered - just being gay was considered transgressive.
BUTLER: Yeah. I mean, when you have a congressman...
GROSS: And I don't want to completely put that in the past tense 'cause that's kind of resurfaced, that sense of like...
BUTLER: Yeah, that's absolutely...
GROSS: ...It's too transgressive, you can't live that way.
BUTLER: It's especially...
GROSS: Let's withdraw legalizing gay marriage.
BUTLER: Yeah, well, and we see it even more right now with the transgender community, who are losing rights that they used to have, who are being shunned from the public square, who are, you know, faced with legal discrimination. They're finding that there's whole states within the United States that they can't really travel to because there's so many laws discriminating against them. And once again, we see a lot of the liberal establishment willing to compromise on a lot of that stuff in the hopes that it will go away. It's the exact same dynamic, really, that we saw in the original culture wars.
Yeah, when you are faced with a congressman like William Dannemeyer, who's saying that HIV-positive people emit spores that cause birth defects, which is a literal thing he said at one point, you know, how do you respond to that? If you're responding to that in your art, you know, it's probably not going to be very polite.
GROSS: I don't want to leave the left completely off the hook when it comes to objecting to art, though the left is not extreme about this in the way that the right has been. But one of the shows that you've written about is a show by Philip Guston, who was a light visual artist. And he had a show - they were images depicting the clan - members of the clan - but in kind of clownish ways. It was pretty obviously satirical work. And there were people on the left in the art world who objected to this exhibit. Can you explain?
BUTLER: Yeah. So this is a posthumous retrospective of Philip Guston that was originating in the U.K. and then touring to the United States. And actually, this exhibit and the fallout of it was the initial impetus behind my deciding it was time to write this book and try to research the culture wars. In 2020, the exhibit was kind of indefinitely delayed. It really seemed like it had been canceled, although it did eventually tour, just to be clear.
Because of these late-period paintings that Guston had done that had kind of cartoony images of the klan in them, there was the feeling that there needed to be, you know, greater - I'm going to put this in big scare quotes - "context around the art," you know, or that the art was not sufficiently condemning white supremacy or, even if it did, the mere image could traumatize someone, the mere image of a klansman could traumatize someone. And I just thought and continue to think that that's absolutely absurd. Philip Guston was a Jewish artist. He had run-ins with the klan early in his career. He was a lifelong anti-racist. Like, you really don't need anything more than putting that on a wall card to me.
GROSS: Yeah, the klan hated Jews, too. I mean, it wasn't...
BUTLER: Yes.
GROSS: ...Just Black people, it was Jewish people. It was Catholics, too.
BUTLER: Yes, absolutely. And, you know, one of his early murals that he did during the New Deal, if I recall correctly, was actually destroyed by a crowd that included klansmen. So, you know, he himself had been threatened by the klan.
And I just felt like, what are we even doing here, people? Why are my allies on the left and in the arts pulling this kind of stuff, especially since this is all theoretical? There haven't even been any complaints. And so eventually, the show did tour and did open in the United States. Like the Mapplethorpe: XYZ portfolios, the Guston paintings were sequestered in a separate room that you had to go into surrounded by mental health literature. I mean, it's just ridiculous.
And so that was where the book actually began because I really wanted to reclaim free expression and free speech as a left-wing value, as an important part of living in a diverse, liberal democracy. And then, of course, as soon as I started working on it, all the Ron DeSantis and don't say gay stuff happened, and I started to feel like, well, also, it's just totally asymmetric.
GROSS: What do you mean?
BUTLER: Well, what I mean is, like, you know, yes, the left does stuff around expression that is annoying and sometimes has material consequences, and I don't like it, and I condemn it and I have for a long time. But it really pales in comparison to what the right does on these issues, both because the right has a lot more power currently in the United States, but it's also the way they choose to wield that power when they have it.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Isaac Butler. He's the author of the new book "The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, And The Birth Of America's Culture Wars." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Isaac Butler, author of "The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, And The Birth Of America's Culture Wars." It focuses on the religious right's attacks on certain books, art and film of the '70s, '80s and '90s.
A lot of art has become very political now 'cause we're living in such a divisive time. And there are artists who feel like art is irrelevant unless you're really speaking to the moment and to the crises that we're in. And you object to that and - you know, to the sense that, like, art needs to, like, speak to the moment and be political. Tell us about your objections to that way of thinking.
BUTLER: My objection is mainly to the viewing of it as a requirement. You know, I think it's great when art speaks to the moment, but the idea that that's the only art that's worth doing I find very depressing and narrow because art is such a wonderful, capacious, you know, part of the human experience. You know, people wrote love poems in the gulag. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, we come to the arts as the kind of dream life of the self, and sometimes those dreams are very political. Like, sometimes I have very political dreams, and sometimes I have dreams where I'm, like, flying and then I plunge into a bowl of soup or whatever, you know? So I just think that we shouldn't limit the possibilities of art to any one specific thing.
And I also feel like, you know - and I'm sure you've had this experience looking at art of whatever kind, where an artist feels that it's necessary they speak to the moment, but that's not really what they're good at or that's not really what's in their soul, and so there's something hollow and simple and didactic about the art that results. And I would just want art that is more complex and interesting.
GROSS: So if we were to extend your book to the present, what would you be writing about President Trump and the culture wars?
BUTLER: Well, the book would, you know, become infinite 'cause it seems like they pick...
GROSS: (Laughter).
BUTLER: ...A culture war about everything. Like, do I really have to do a chapter about whether it's OK that Helen of Troy is Black in the new Christopher Nolan movie? You know, like, it just seems like even breakfast cereals or whatever have become part of the culture wars now. Like, the culture wars have completely eaten America.
I will say that when Trump got elected, it was a real fork in the road for me and the book because I had decided when the book started that I was going to keep it in its own time and not comment on the present very much - you know, just in the intro and afterword, basically. And when Trump was elected, I really did have this moment where I was like, oh, God, do I need to pivot and comment on today? And I eventually decided no. And the reason why I decided no is that I wanted the work to have integrity as a work of history. And once you make it all about the present, it becomes a polemic, and that's just a different kind of beast, and I didn't want to do it. And the other reason is, like, the book would be like, 6,000 pages long.
GROSS: Yeah. And it wouldn't be finished by the time it was published.
BUTLER: Right. Not only would it not be finished by the time it was published, it would be immediately obsolete.
GROSS: Yeah.
BUTLER: You know, books are a bad art form for commenting on things that are happening right now because they take so long to make. I mean, they physically take so long to make that they're sort of outdated the second they come out.
GROSS: Well, Isaac Butler, it's been great to have you back on the show. Thank you so much.
BUTLER: Terry, thank you so much for having me.
GROSS: Isaac Butler is the author of the new book "The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, And The Birth Of America's Culture Wars."
Tomorrow on FRESH AIR, a relatively new breed of ticks spreading across regions of America. They're ready to feed on us and bringing dangerous illness and allergies that could be lethal.
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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Sam Briger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Staniszewski. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Wisler. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our cohost is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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