Last year, while doing research for a cover story marking the 10th anniversary of the CAC’s Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition, I interviewed dozens of people involved in mounting the show and fighting the subsequent criminal charges. Many still can’t believe Cincinnatians see the Mapplethorpe controversy as a black eye instead of a victory.
But even to those who personally experienced the thrill of Director Dennis Barrie’s and the CAC’s acquittal on obscenity charges, the whole episode left a bad taste. A dark cloud overwhelmed the silver lining.
“We won the battle but lost the war,” more than one person told me.
Looking back on the big-picture effect of the Mapplethorpe exhibit and trial, many of the key players — particularly Barrie and CAC lawyers Louis Sirkin and Marc Mezibov — wondered if Cincinnati’s arts community didn’t actually step back from challenging work in the last 10 years instead of embracing it. And they wondered if local law enforcement wasn’t emboldened to prosecute obscenity cases instead of being chastened by its Mapplethorpe defeat.
It’s funny how history rewrites the meaning of events. A victory for the First Amendment and artistic freedom over narrow-mindedness and intolerance becomes an embarrassment. Controversy leading to record-breaking ticket sales and museum memberships becomes something to avoid at all costs.
The war being fought, of course, is the struggle to offer challenging, creative adult-oriented arts and entertainment fare in Cincinnati.
It’s a war that’s being lost a little bit at a time, day by day, despite scattered victories.
Some battles are lost without a single shot being fired — the latest example being the Esquire Theatre film-cutting fiasco.
The facts are known: Esquire operator Gary Goldman ordered a three-second sex scene physically cut from The Center of the World before it opened; he told neither the film’s distributor nor Esquire audiences; CityBeat reported the illicit editing, as did other local media, and the distributor yanked the film; and Goldman banned film critic Steve Ramos and CityBeat from the Esquire and Mariemont theaters in response to a Ramos column on the controversy.
The historical context isn’t as well known. Suffice to say, though, the story is much bigger than a desecrated film or a banned critic.
It’s the “big chill,” as Sirkin calls it. Fear of prosecution, he says, has left too many creative people and organizations in this town wary of crossing an imaginary, ever-shifting boundary of “community standards.”
Goldman admitted as much in his statement apologizing for bad judgment in editing The Center of the World. He said he thought the edited scene was “most likely violative of community standards” and warned that “risk of prosecution in Hamilton County increases every day as increasingly challenging films are produced.”
Sirkin — Cincinnati’s pre-eminent First Amendment lawyer — says there’s no way the Esquire could have been convicted of pandering obscenity for showing The Center of the World. The film must be taken as a whole and not reduced to a three-second scene, he says, and as a whole it’s clearly an artistic effort, which cancels out one of the three parts of the law’s definition of obscenity.
Goldman told me he wasn’t worried about being convicted for showing the film but instead didn’t want to deal with the time, money and hassle of defending the Esquire against prosecution. He’s a small businessman, he said, and would be at a huge disadvantage against Sheriff Simon Leis and company.
So 10 years ago Dennis Barrie risked jail time over the Mapplethorpe exhibit, but today organizations simply fear charges being brought against them. Which, of course, means law enforcement only has to bring charges — or threaten to bring charges — instead of actually build a winning case.
It’s a vicious cycle. Every time a movie theater secretly edits a film, the authorities’ grip gets tighter on us. And every time the city’s leading art-house theater and alternative newspaper bicker over stories and columns, the authorities grip tighter still, because no one’s watching.
Look, I harbor no ill will toward the Esquire Theatre. It’s a vital piece of Cincinnati’s too-small progressive community.
But the ongoing war over personal freedom here is too important to be trusted to the likes of Gary Goldman. When the opponents are as well-armed as Cincinnati’s ultra-conservative army is, we can’t afford to shoot ourselves in the foot.
Perhaps Goldman should emulate fellow small business owner Elyse Metcalf, who, with Sirkin’s help, was recently acquitted of obscenity charges against her store, Elyse’s Passion. Asked if she regrets any of the time, money and hassle of defending herself in court, she says no.
“I’d have been untrue to myself if I hadn’t done it,” Metcalf says. “My only regret is that others won’t follow. The Esquire should have followed.”
Otherwise, Cincinnati will continue to be a chilly place.
This article appears in Jul 11-17, 2001.