Censored: while gays are well-represented at the Oscars, they're still fighting visibility battles in courtrooms and classrooms around the country.

While gays are well-represented at the Oscars, they're still fighting visibility battles in courtrooms and classrooms around the country

If the Academy Awards race were the sole criterion, gay men and lesbians would seem to have arrived in the arts. Greg Kinnear earned a best supporting actor nomination for playing a gay character in As Good As It Gets, while the film is a contender for best picture, Joan Cusack received a best supporting actress nod for playing a closeted gay man's fiancee in In & Out, and films with gay subplots, including Boogie Nights, The Full Monty, and L.A. Confidential, have racked up an impressive list of nominations. But such openness often stops with Hollywood. In many places censorship of gay content in the arts continues to thrive.

Last year, for example, the Mecklenburg County, N.C., commission voted to cut funding for the local arts council for advocating "perverted forms of sexuality." The vote came after the Charlotte Repertory Theatre, which receives financing from the council, produced two award-winning plays that have gay subject matter--Angels in America and Six Degrees of Separation.

"The record for the past year is kind of breathtaking," says Matt Coles, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project. "In most of America it remains the case that when government power is used on speech it relates to sexual orientation."

Soon the Supreme Court will join the fray. On March 31 the court will hear oral arguments in the case of the "NEA Four," a group of performance artists challenging the constitutionality of the National Endowment for the Arts' requirement that grant recipients conform to "general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public." Congress imposed that mandate in 1990.

"Decency and respect are very vague terms, but we believe they are pointed at issues that are homosexual in theme or nature, or blasphemous," says Marjorie Heins, director of the Arts Censorship Project at the ACLU. "Although the clause doesn't single out speech about gay rights, gay issues, or gay sex, that's certainly inherent in the history of how it got passed." Indeed, three of the four artists--Tim Miller, Holly Hughes, and John Fleck--are gay or lesbian. The fourth, Karen Finley, has said, "What this is basically about is that gay and lesbian artists cannot do work about what they know. In my case it's that as a woman I can't do work about women's oppression or as a straight person talking about gay rights."

A U.S. appeals court in San Francisco struck down the "decency" guidelines in 1996, but the Clinton administration appealed the ruling. "The Finley case has broad ramifications not only for artistic freedom but intellectual freedom generally," says Heins. "If the Supreme Court upholds the law, then the same thing could be applied to humanities endowments or other kinds of research grants or public libraries selecting books or public universities selecting courses."

Censorship is hardly limited to the performing arts. From libraries to the Internet, self-appointed censors continue to try to enforce silence about gay issues altogether. Despite--or perhaps because of--the gains made by gay men and lesbians over the past few years, censorship continues to flourish in a wide range of forums.

Nowhere are attacks on gay expression or content more prevalent than on the Internet. Although last year the Supreme Court struck down the Communications Decency Act for "placing an unacceptably heavy burden on protected speech," some members of Congress, along with the Clinton administration, continue to press for restrictions on children's access to certain materials.

On February 10 Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) held hearings on the Internet School Filtering Act, a bill he is sponsoring that would deny federal funding to school computer projects unless they use devices that would block "inappropriate" or "indecent" Internet sites. The National Coalition Against Censorship says such filtering devices would "screen out news and history, works of fiction including classics such as the Iliad, the Bible, and Shakespeare's play Titus Andronicus, art work like Picasso's Guernica, and depictions of the Crucifixion."

Although McCain's criteria for blocking sites is vague, it could have an impact on gay materials, preventing students from accessing gay youth sites or AIDS prevention information. "All this Internet filtering inevitably has an impact on gay sites on the Internet, whether because there's sexual content, and therefore it's going to be lumped in with pornography, or because somebody is actually cruising the sites and making a judgment," says Heins. "People making judgments are going to be making them on the basis of what they think mainstream values are, and because gay issues are controversial they're likely to be blocked."

Not all censorship activity motivated by concerns about children focuses on the Internet. School libraries and curricula remain hotbeds of controversy. Among the most recent disputes:

* The school board in Franklin County, N.C., cut three chapters from a ninth-grade health education textbook, including material about HIV and AIDS, because the book failed to.,. the state's abstinence-only standards for sex education.

* Parents in Chesterton, Ind., are seeking to remove from a high school classroom a poster of gay historical figures on the grounds that it is "propaganda." Evangelist Pat Robertson's legal organization, the American Center for Law and Justice, has offered to take up the case for the parents.

* A library in Brownsville, Pa., allowed Understanding Sexual Identity: A Book for Gay and Lesbian Teens and Their Friends to remain on library shelves after it had been challenged but allowed parents to notify the librarian if they did not want their child to take out the book.

"The grim truth is that such battles have been going on for years, playing out in communities across the nation," says Carole Shields, president of People for the American Way, a Washington, D.C.-based civil liberties group that has tracked the cases.

The attacks also allow religious conservatives to divert attention away from more pressing issues, according to Deanna Duby, the group's director of education policy. "Every session of a school board given over to a frivolous censorship challenge is a wasted opportunity to explore real reform," she said in a press release.

The education battle is hardly confined to the elementary and secondary levels. Last year Peter Boag, an Idaho State University professor, was denied a grant from a state research fund to study the history of gay people in the Pacific Northwest. Although Boag made it through the peer review process into the final round of decision-making, he was turned down, the only applicant who reached the finals to suffer such an action. "The official reason," says the ACLU's Coles, "was that the voters wouldn't like it very much."

Not all censorship efforts are directed against gay men and lesbians. Far less frequently some gays try to use the leverage of government to cut off the speech of their opponents. Coles recalls an instance in San Francisco years ago in which the city refused to underwrite a building project by the local public broadcasting affiliate because it carried the Christian Science Monitor's radio network, which some gays had deemed antigay. "If the individual wanted to tell [the affiliate] they didn't want to join it," he says, "that's fine, but it's different to harness the government."

Coles maintains that the best approach to antigay conservatives is not to shut them up but to engage their potential audience. To that end the Ten Percent Society of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a gay student group, signed on as a sponsor of a lecture given February 17 by Ralph Reed, former executive director of the Christian Coalition. The group said its cosponsorship was intended to show the university gay community's "civility and dignity;" it also staged a silent protest at the event. "We are sponsoring the silent protest to make a presence and encourage a dialogue about the issue of sexual orientation, "Ten Percent Society member Patrick Wojahn said at the time.

Coles says the effort is an example worth copying. "I love it," he says. "That's what the First Amendment is about."