Bowing To Pressure From Catholic League Washington National Portrait Gallery Cowardly Removes David Wojnarowicz Installation Honouring Gay Love

Wednesday is the annual World AIDS Day, and, as if on cue, the Washington Post reports on the cowardly decision by the National Portrait Gallery (and the Smithsonian Institution it is a part of) to remove a work included in its Hide/Seek exhibition, a video by David Wojnarowicz, an openly gay artist who died from an AIDS-related illness in 1992, succumbing to pressure put on by the Catholic League. That video (a four minute excerpt from the original 1987 piece titled A Fire in My Belly, which runs 30 minutes in length) was created to honour Wojnarowicz’s late lover, Peter Hujar, who also died from an AIDS-related disease in 1987, the Catholic League objecting to an eleven second portion that shows ants crawling on a crucifix. The Catholic League complained that the segment was “designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians” and deemed the work “hate speech.” There is, of course, a brutal irony at work: the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, is, according to the Gallery, “the first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture," and the exhibit strives to look at "how art reflected society’s evolving and changing attitudes toward sexuality, desire, and romantic attachment,” and yet the objections to the Wojnarowicz piece is an obvious objection to the “homosexuality” of the work. Blake Gopnik writes that “This fuss is about the larger topic of the show: Gay love, and images of it. The headline that ran over coverage of the matter on the right-wing Web site CNSnews.com mentioned the crucifix - but as only one item in a list of the exhibition's "shockers" that included "naked brothers kissing, genitalia and Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts."(Through a bra, one might note, in an image that's less shocking than many moves by Lady Gaga.) The same site decries "a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show's catalogue as 'homoerotic'. The attack is on gayness, and images of it, more than on sacrilege - even though, last I checked, many states are sanctioning gay love in marriage, and none continue to ban homosexuality. And the Portrait Gallery has given into this attack.”