What Happened When Their Art Was Banned

New York Times

31-07-2025

Of the 26 executive orders President Donald Trump signed on the first day of his second term, one was billed as 'restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship,' barring the government from 'any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.' In his address to Congress a few weeks later, Trump reiterated this point: 'I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It's back.'
Free speech has long been, as NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik put it, 'an article of faith' for conservative politicians and especially, recently, for the MAGA right, which has argued that their views have been suppressed by left-leaning social media platforms and misconstrued in the mainstream press. (Some on the left have expressed similar concerns about their views.) Yet what's transpired since late January wouldn't meet a free speech absolutist's definition of unfettered discourse. Federal mandates targeting diversity or racial and gender equality have resulted in bans or attempted bans on words, ideas, books and people. Employees at NASA and other agencies were ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures. The Department of Defense briefly excised a tribute to Jackie Robinson's army service from the Pentagon website and instructed West Point to adjust its curriculum, in an attempt to purge U.S. military institutions of 'divisive concepts and gender ideology.' In March, a Turkish grad student in Massachusetts was taken off the street by plainclothes officers in masks and held without charges for weeks in a Louisiana immigration detention center, seemingly for the crime of having co-authored an opinion essay in the Tufts University student newspaper critical of the school's response to Israel's actions in Gaza.
American artists have long seen their creative freedom attacked by governments of all political persuasions. They've also been the ones to speak out when others are too frightened to do so. We spoke with several seasoned artists in various fields about their own experience with having been censored. In some cases, that censorship, decades old, feels like a relic of another political moment, of other culture wars, even as it resonates with what's happening now: same wars, new battles. It almost always affected careers and artists' tolerance for risk — but not always negatively. For censorship can also be a rallying cry, a reminder of why artists make art in the first place. — M.H. Miller
John Waters, 79, Film Director and Writer
After Waters's third feature, 'Pink Flamingos,' debuted in 1972, the Detroit Free Press compared it to 'a septic tank explosion.' The film follows a criminal named Babs Johnson (played by the drag queen Divine, a frequent collaborator of the director's who died in 1988) as she fights the Marbles, a couple who run a black-market baby ring and deal heroin to children, to retain her title as the 'filthiest person alive.' With scenes involving unsimulated fellatio and the human consumption of dog feces, the cult classic, which was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2021, nearly 50 years after its initial release, has been occasionally banned in parts of the United States, though it has never been cut to avoid an X rating. — Nick Haramis
To play a movie in a Baltimore theater back then, you had to submit it to the Maryland State Board of Censors [a three-member committee that operated for 65 years beginning in 1916]. I never did that. Instead, I screened 'Mondo Trasho' (1969) and 'Multiple Maniacs' (1970) in church basements. When 'Pink Flamingos' opened in 1972, I rented a hall at the University of Baltimore. Then 'Female Trouble' (1974) opened at a theater, and the censors had to see it. That's when one of them said, 'You can have that cunnilingus scene.' I said, 'Well, that's a man — that's not a vagina.' And that's when she said, 'Don't tell me about sex. I was married to an Italian!' She handed me scissors, and I had to cut the scene out of a brand-new print. Way later, 'Multiple Maniacs,' which she'd never seen, played in a theater. She went insane because of the rosary job [a sex act involving holy beads]. She took it to court and the judge said, 'My eyes were insulted for 90 minutes, but it's not illegal.'
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.