Sex, Art, and Moral Panic

Moral panics have erupted around immigration, crime, video games, rap music, pop music, drug use, pornography, Satanic ritual abuse, and homosexuality, including panic about the spread of AIDS since the 1980s.10 Today we might add panics over contraception mandates, the specter of reverse discrimination, Muslim immigration, and threats to religious freedom. Much of his artistic work drew from human experiences of suffering, poverty, drug use, and sex, often juxtaposing various forms of visual symbols to create mythological stories.11 In the late 1980s, Donald Wildmon, the founder of the conservative Christian group the American Family Association (AFA), republished images depicting sexual acts from Wojnarowicz's larger works in flyers mailed to fellow Christian conservatives as well as to every member of Congress. Under fire, the Smithsonian pulled the film from the exhibit.15 Note again the habits of seeing revealed in this panic, specifically how the image appears to be immediately readable and transparent for some viewers, even absent its contextualization within the immediate film from which it is drawn, much less within the broader “Hide/Seek” exhibit dealing with sexual difference, the artistic world of the East Village, Wojnarowicz's life, or the social and political conditions of the United States and Mexico in the 1980s from which many images in the film are drawn. Nor of course do biblical texts provide a clear guide to sexual ethics that most modern Christians would want to adopt—consider how common incest, rape, and other forms of sexual assault appear in these texts.18 Sexual imagery is neither antithetical to biblical texts nor uncommon in the long history of Christian art, in which one can easily find medieval and Renaissance depictions of Jesus lactating into a chalice or the slit in his side refigured as a vulva.