Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill into law Thursday afternoon that will restrict public drag show performances in Tennessee, making his state the first to do so and the internet was not having it..
Apparently this is now illegal in Tennessee pic.twitter.com/QXGSl2tOHU
— Building Back Betterer (@DmitrysPlane) March 4, 2023
Take heart all you FB users who get sent to FB Jail and banned for so-called explicit pictures. Facebook has FINALLY done something right and has banned blowhard propagandist and conspiracy theory loon Alex Jones and InfoWars!
Fortune Magazine reports:
Problems for Alex Jones and Infowars multiplied Monday as Facebook announced it had “unpublished” four pages run by the conspiracy theorist and radio host, effectively removing him from that platform. The announcement comes just as Apple announced it had removed the entire library of five out of six Infowars’ podcasts, saying the video and audio files had violated its policy against hate speech. Facebook cited the same reasons.
“We have taken it down for glorifying violence, which violates our graphic violence policy, and using dehumanizing language to describe people who are transgender, Muslims and immigrants, which violates our hate speech policies,” Facebook said in a statement. “All four Pages have been unpublished for repeated violations of Community Standards and accumulating too many strikes.”
Expect some major faux outrage and victim playing to come from the alt-right.
Buchanan High School in Clovis, California has abruptly cancelled a student performance of a critically-acclaimed Jean-Paul Sartre play from the 1940s ‘because it featured a lesbian character’..
Jared Serpa, the director and a senior at the school, said it was canceled purely because the play featured a lesbian character.
No Exit should have ‘never been approved’ in the first place due to its sexual themes and mature content, said chief communications director for Clovis Unified School District. Administrators claim they received complaints about its sexual themes and adult content on Friday.
However, the work of literature is included in the curriculum of an AP course at Buchanan High School and the actors even modified it to make it more appropriate.
Serpa, disagreed and said the main reason was due to the lesbian character, he claimed in a two minute Twitter video.
The senior said: ‘That just shows how cowardice the parent is for not talking to their child about reality and telling them that the world that they live in isn’t perfectly heterosexual like they want it to be.
‘Talk with your children about reality. Don’t put them in this bubble and darkness because you couldn’t find the courage to talk to your own child about the fact that people are different.’
Students have since launched a petition to bring the play back to the stage, accumulating in more than 3,500 supporters as of Tuesday afternoon.
Please follow the link above and sign the petition above.
Read more:
Student says district canceled play because of gay character – NY Daily News
Both song and video for the 1984 hit Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood were swooped on by censors in the UK and USA, because of its gay S&M bondage styling and the overtly sexual imagery of the video. The then racy lyrics, were labelled “obscene” and both the BBC and MTV banned the video. But still the song went on to become a smash hit and helped define mid-80s pop.
Watch the “banned” music video below and RELAX.
This Saturday, July 18, Brand Library & Art Center in Glendale, California presents a free screening of the yet-to-be-released documentary John Fleck Is Who You Want Him To Be which delves into the work of controversial performance artist and award-winning actor John Fleck.
John Fleck, a radical gay performance artist, gained notoriety as one of the NEA Four, a quartet of artists–Fleck, Karen Finley, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller–whose National Endowment for the Arts grants were vetoed by agency head John Frohnmayer in 1990. The artists’ works were considered by Frohnmayer (but not by the NEA’s peer review) to be offensive. This was at the height of the AIDS crisis. The NEA reversed funding to these artists who utilized body imagery and radical forms of expression to make art that confronted the government’s reluctance–fueled by fear and apathy–to deal with the AIDS crisis. Fleck and his compatriots fought back, and the face of public funding for the arts changed forever, with the Supreme Court ultimately upholding a vague “decency clause” on government arts funding that still limits our freedom of speech today. At that very different and extreme time, much concern was expressed about “the chilling effect” the decision could have on our culture.
During and after the Supreme Court case, Fleck worked in film and television, appearing in Falling Down, Waterworld, and Howard the Duck, and on the series Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek Deep Space Nine, Murder One, Carnivale, and True Blool. He also continued to create performance art, winning four LA Critics Circle Awards, eight DramaLogue, seven LA Weekly and two Backstage West awards, all for outstanding performance.
Fleck debuted his fine art in January 2014, at Coagula Curatorial in the show “Two Johns and Whor
e,” hanging his paintings across from art by queer filmmaker John Roecker whose documentary Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Gay Porn Stars… was at one point banned by Amazon. Fleck hung a series of nine paintings made by covering his buttocks and related regions with paint and pressing them on paper and canvas. The series, “Assy-Nine” provided the backdrop for an opening night performance piece involving Fleck wrapped in toilet paper–a reference to both the art work and his NEA-shocking piece–and his operatic, prophetic arias, all captured in Duffy’s film.
Now the film, John Fleck Is Who You Want Him To Be, which intercuts archival video and current footage from a range of performances and an interview with Fleck, appears to be caught in a chilling effect because of its content, not unlike his piece in 1990. According to an email exchange between the film’s director, Kevin Duffy and Frameline San Francisco International LGBTQ Film Festival, the longest-running and largest queer film festival in the world requested a copy of the film for consideration. Just days before the festival, Duffy learned the film would not be shown, even though Frameline claimed to “love it.” Further queries by Duffy led to him to learn that that the reason was the film’s “construction.” In an interview posted on Duffy’s Facebook page, Penelope Boyer, who worked for the National Association of Arts Organizations, a co-plaintiff in the NEA 4 Supreme Court case, says:
Construction is a veiled term for content, and content in this case refers to content that was controversial and that angered and frightened John Frohnmayer, the chairman of the NEA twenty-five years ago. It is this same content that is frightening a queer film festival now.
Despite Frameline’s rejection of John Fleck is Who You Want Him to Be, Duffy has screened the film at California State University, Long Beach and California Arts Institute, and on Saturday, July 18 will showing the film, with question and answer following, at the Brand Library & Art Center, in Glendale, CA, just minutes away from Hollywood and Downtown Los Angeles. The screening marks start of a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the film’s licensing and distribution. The reception at 6:30 pm will be followed by the 7:00 pm screening and discussion with the artists. Admission is free and open to the public (18 years of age and older, due the mature subject matter). Complimentary parking is available in Brand Park adjacent to the library and an accessible entrance and parking is available on the east side of the building.
Police in Kuala Lampur have ordered gay rights activists in the Muslim-majority country to shut down the “Sexual Independence” festival has been held since 2008 because this year the festival titled themed “Queer Without Fear” focused on LGBT discrimination and acceptance.
The five-day festival which was set to start Nov. 9 at a private arts center afeatured planned musical performances of “queer anthems sung by local singers and drag divas who know what it means to love out loud and proud, and also included plans for talks on sexuality issues, a poster exhibition and a makeup workshop by a drag queen. One session was titled “Defense Against The Dark Arts: Homophobia 101.” organizers said.
After criticism by the deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin who called the event “inappropriate” and a “waste of time,” and plans by several Muslim nongovernment groups to protest, police ordered the event to be canceled.
Authorities will “prevent any function relating to the program,” deputy police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said in a statement.
“Asking us to keep quiet is asking us to take your abuse with a smile … it’s time to put a stop to all the hate and misunderstanding and abuse,” festival spokesman Pang Khee Teik said in an online statement posted Thursday before the event was banned and there has been no further statement.
Welcome to Carrollton, Georgia. A peaceful and quite southern town where its 1975, the First Admendment doesn’t exist and fascist Mayor rules with an Orwellian Big Brother type fist. At least that’s what Mayor Wayne Garner would like everyone to think after shutting down a community theater’s production of The Rocky Horror Show at the city-owned Carrollton Cultural Arts Center because he found the content of the show, “very offensive, not in keeping with the community of Carrolton, and not for any other reason.”
Because of Mayor Wayne Garner’s little Nazi like censorship problem the group which decided to stage its October 27th production at a privately-owned stage elsewhere in the city is doing its best since the play lost both its funding and use of the community theater, will now need to raise about $5000 and secure a new venue before it can go on.
Unless Mayor Wayne Garner owns the Carrollton Cultural Arts Center personally, he has no legal authority to close it down, or any other production even if he claims obscene under the “Miller test,” meaning the work is not protected by the First Amendment because even archconservative Justice Rehnquist opined during the Carnal Knowledge case that Miller intended to limit obscenity claims to hardcore porno flicks The Director and Cast of the Carrollton production of the THHPS should find a lawyer and start suing Wayne Garner because its obvious this is a case of criminal censorship.
If you have a minute visit thier Facebook page where you’ll find statements of support, up-to-the-minute updates on the situation, and links to another page with information on donating to the play fund. Every bit of support, even if it’s just dropping by to say “good luck”, is deeply appreciated. I am sure.
And as for Mayor Wayne Garner. “Don’t dream it. BE IT……Beyatch! BITCH!”