Eruptions in The Heartland

By S.C. Gwynne/Cincinnati

Had Cincinnati's moral crusaders finally gone too far? Many residents seemed to think so when a grand jury last week indicted the director of the city's Contemporary Arts Center on charges of criminal obscenity for displaying the sexually charged photographs of the late Robert Mapplethorpe. While protesters chanted, "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!," police barged into the gallery, herded out 1,400 visitors, served papers and collected evidence. "It was a sad day for the city and for the arts," says gallery director Dennis Barrie, who could be sentenced to up to a year in jail if he is convicted. "It made a lot of people angry."

The Mapplethorpe show became notorious last year after a protest from North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms forced Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art to cancel it. Well in advance of its April 7 opening in Cincinnati, Citizens for Community Values, a powerful and well-funded 16,000-member organization, sponsored full-page ads in local papers and a massive letter-writing campaign. "We think the exhibit is irresponsible, and we think ((the arts center)) should be accountable," says Monty Lobb Jr., president of Citizens for Community Values. "The gallery is open to the public; it's on public land and receives taxpayers' money." As a result of the pressure, the chairman of the gallery's board stepped down from his post and another board member quit outright.

On the other side were several hastily formed organizations that circulated petitions and staged a rally that drew 1,000 people in support of the show the day before it opened. "We were sick of pressure from a small group of right- wing people," says Kymberly Henson, an artist who co-founded a group called Voice Against Censorship. "We felt we didn't have any say."

Until those demonstrations, there had been little protest against the hard- shell moral conservatism that has dominated Cincinnati for 30 years. The Queen City was a spawning ground for the national antiabortion movement and is the headquarters for the National Coalition Against Pornography. It has managed to purge from its streets the sex shops, peep shows, X-rated films and nude-dancing clubs that mar many major cities. Cincinnati has banned or otherwise hounded out of town the musical Oh! Calcutta! and such films as Vixen, Last Tango in Paris and The Last Temptation of Christ.

Though Cincinnati's reputation for conservatism is well deserved -- "Decency Central," local columnist Jim Rohrer calls it -- the city is hardly unique. Says Alfred Tuchfarber, a University of Cincinnati pollster: "Hamilton County tracks the nation perfectly on major social and moral issues." A poll released Friday by the Cincinnati Post and Tuchfarber's Institute for Policy Research showed that 58.9% of those questioned thought the Mapplethorpe exhibit should be allowed. Only 38.4% felt it should not.

Certainly the brouhaha did not hurt attendance at the exhibit. It drew 4,000 people on opening day and more than 20,000 in its first week, despite a 30- to 45-minute wait to see the notorious XYZ collection of explicit photos of gay sex acts. If the current pace keeps up -- and it shows no sign of slackening -- the display will easily break the record of 29,000 viewers set by a computer-art exhibit in 1987. After Barrie was indicted, a federal judge ruled that law-enforcement officials could not interfere with the exhibit until the gallery director's trial concludes. That is not likely to occur before the scheduled closing on May 26.