When the U.S. Government Hired Male Prostitutes as Models
Some ramblings on book bans, the history of the NEA, and protest art
Dear Friends,
Book bans are nothing new. Thomas Morton, who was a bit of a libertine in the 17th century, settled on a land that was known by the Indigenous Massachusett as “Passonagessit.” Morton and his fellow colonists referred to this area as “Merrymount” (and is now what we would refer to as a residential neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts). In 1637, Morton had penned New English Canaan, a book which was critical of Puritanism and embraced pagan rituals, such as dancing around the maypole. Morton’s Merrymount was portrayed in what is one of my favorite Nathaniel Hawthorne stories (and favorite pieces of John Endecott fanfiction, a category which also includes Ari Aster’s Midsommar).
In this 1836 story (titled “The May-Pole of Merry Mount), everyone is dancing around Merrymount’s maypole until the Puritans come along and ruin everything (as they are wont to do). John Endecott then says to a newly-wed pagan youth (paraphrasing here): you have promise—which is why we are going to give you a haircut in the shape of a pumpkin. I actually have not read this story in about a decade, so some bits are fuzzy, but I do remember the pumpkin haircut vividly. In any case, much like the fictionally castigated version of Morton, the IRL Puritans didn’t like the real Morton either, and New English Canaan essentially received the honorary title of the first printed book to be banned in the United States.
And here we are, quickly approaching 400 years later, and lower-case-p puritanism is still out here banning books under the guise of moral obligation. These days, most of us view ‘book banning’ through the lens of the culture wars. According to the American Library Association, “Titles representing the voices and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC individuals made up 47% of those targeted in censorship attempts.”
And while I am here today to talk about censorship, I am not here to talk about the current book bans. Sorry to bury the lede. Contemporary discourse about book bans does provide an important framing though for what I want to talk about: that in the United States, the arts have always been impacted by people who emphasize the merging of religious and political power. It doesn’t even matter if these values come from actual religious scripture: what matters is using the idea of religious text as a perverse tabula rasa that any belief can be imprinted on in order to maintain both ‘traditional’ values and strict social order (as defined by, in particular, an evangelical interpretation of Christianity).
So what am I here to write about today? I am going to talk about the censorship of art at the highest capacity in the United States: censorship coming from the federal government. Which will lead me into discussing one of my favorite works of protest art that responded to said censorship. But first, some stage-setting:
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) came into existence during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency in the 1960s. For those who aren’t familiar with the NEA, essentially they hold grant cycles for artists (including creative writers). If you are deemed worthy, you are granted fellowship funds to continue making art toward a particular project.
As you can imagine though, the artist class has always butted heads with the bourgeois. Art has little place in the market economy, and to give working artists free money to just…make art? Not even to paint a fresco on the ceiling for the Vatican?
“It’s disgusting,” the bourgeois would say.
To make matters worse, some of these artists were making art that did not align with conservative, Reaganite values! And they were getting free money for it!
Senator Jesse Helms is the arguably the most famously outspoken figure in this fight for moral decency as far as the NEA is concerned. Helms’ efforts were to move arts funds away from the federal government into individual states—on top of an overarching goal to defund the arts altogether. This couldn’t have been further from Johnson’s original intentions:
We fully recognize that no government can call artistic excellence into existence. It must flow from the quality of the society and the good fortune of the Nation. Nor should any government seek to restrict the freedom of the artist to pursue his calling in his own way. Freedom is an essential condition for the artist, and in proportion as freedom is diminished so is the prospect of artistic achievement.
It only took fifteen years after this hallmark for Helms’ bosom body, Ronald Reagan, to attempt to abolish the NEA completely (he failed). If you know anything about the controversy surrounding NEA fellowships, you probably will recognize one of these three most well-known examples:
Robert Mapplethorpe, who on top of his homoerotic nudes, created a series that represented bondage, dominance, submission, sadomasochism, etc. One of my personal favorites is his self-portrait with a whip inserted into his rectum, protruding out almost like a reptilian tail. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, based in D.C., canceled a Mapplethorpe exhibition because of the controversy (leading to more controversy).
Andres Serrano’s notorious Piss Christ, which was a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s own urine. Serrano had received an NEA grant for $20,000 in 1989, which would be around $50,000 today if you accounted for inflation (coincidentally, the still-going NEA Literature Fellowships program offers only half of that amount at $25,000 today).
Karen Finley and the rest of the “NEA Four,” who were performance artists whose grants were vetoed by John Frohnmayer, an NEA chairperson who was appointed by President George H. W. Bush. If you’re not familiar with Finley’s body of work and unique performance style, I’m including a video of “It’s My Body” below. It’s part of A Certain Level of Denial, a performance from 1994.
And here we are, thirty years later, in the aftermath of SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade….
In the great network of roots that stretch out forming a history of arts censorship in the United States, you can find links between the aforementioned artists and what is happening now with book bans. There is a suppression of minoritized sexuality, of gender, of race…. There is also the subterfuge of finding the most extreme, shocking forms of arts as a means to prohibit funding all of the arts in its entirely.
However, where there is prohibition, there is rebellion.
Philip-Lorca diCorcia, a photographer whose work blurs the line between documentary and elaborately lit tableaux, also received a grant by the NEA during this controversial time period. Between 1990 and 1992, diCorcia approached male prostitutes1 in Los Angeles, asking them what they charged for sex. DiCorcia then paid these sex workers—with NEA-funded money—that same amount to pose for photographs.
What I love about this gesture is the dexterity of the fuck you. The content of the photographs themselves are nowhere near as controversial as the work of the previously mentioned censored (and censured) artists. They are beautifully composed and immaculately lit portraits. Yet, we have federal money sent to a man who used said money to pay male sex workers for their time. The symbolic act is there.
In a retrospective collection of these photographs published as a book by David Zwirner (twenty years after the project ended), diCorcia includes a written coda. He stated that when he received the money it came "a proviso attached which requested [diCorcia] not trangress "American" values." DiCorcia stated it was an attempt to beat Helms at his own game using mendacity. As in, if you are going to deceive the public into buying into a dissolution of funding for the arts, then I will use your funding in the very manner you would despise.
The titles of the photographs as a type of census are no coincidence either. In the way that one might provide an estimated budget for a grant application, these photographs communicate to Helms’ and his ilk just how exactly the money was spent. There’s something deliciously bureacratic about it.
The photographer would work with his assistant in the vicinity of Santa Monica Boulevard, selecting cheap motels, abandoned parking lots, or fast food locations as the settings for these photographs. Then, diCorcia would go cruising, in a sense. He asked the hustlers what they charged for sex, and then asked if he could photograph them for that same amount. He wrote that he doubted if most of the hustlers believed him at first.
As time went on, he built up a congregation of portraits: sixty-nine in total. To this day it remains one of my favorite works of protest art, clean and sharp as a polished knife.
I would be remiss not to mention the time period of NEA censorship overlapping with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, an epoch that wiped out an entire artistic class. While diCorcia is not gay, his brother was. There’s no way to paraphrase the end of diCorcia’s coda without losing the impact of his own words, so here they are, preserved in their entirety:
Wondering what became of the sixty-nine guys who appear in this book is futile. Twenty years later they probably have come to a bad end, or they wouldn't have been there to begin with, on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, Home of the Stars. Did I ever see where even one of them lived, in the typical journalistic method of the time? No. But that was part of the point: these were men who portrayed themselves as a product, in a city that sells fantasy, violence, and sex. As if they were one more thing to be consumed, in a country that says we are the freest on Earth, especially if that's what you desire: fantasy and violence and sex. Preferably all at the same time. During that period, 1990-1992, the government officially condemned homosexuality, while AIDS made death commonplace. My brother, Max Pestalozzi diCorcia, died of AIDS on October 18, 1988.
How much is too much? My brother was very free. I loved him for it. Freedom has its price, and we never know at the onset what the toll will be. He died uncessarily. I dedicate this book to him.
Was Max's death the reason I did this work? Really, no. I had the money, I had the time, and I had the idea. Photography is an exchange. The original title for the project was Trade: as in the street word for prostitutes, as the exchange of services for money, as the role reversal which voyeuers indulge and photography provides, as the desire to be anybody but you.
You're supposed to have all the freedom that our Constitution allows, except the freedom to choose your freedom. None of those guys were free—they charged for their services, for a faked sense of what passed for intimacy in the realm they left behind. They barely found a place to sleep or get high afterwards, but they accomplished the most sublime trade: their artistry. Nothing for Nothing. That's what was so perfect for me. It summed it all up.
— Philip-Lorca diCorcia, 2013
As a final (unrelated, personal) note, I will be teaching an online class at The Center for Fiction in June. It’s an eight-week class called “Writing Through the Strange and Uncanny,” so visit their site if you’d like to learn more.
Until next time,
JD
Primarily male prostitutes. Champagne is one of the few non-men in the Hustlers series. The photograph of her just happens to be one of my favorites in the entire series, which is why I’ve included it here. There is no intent to misgender, only to reflect the photographic series using its original language.