CULTURAS IN VITRO - Book on Censorship Deemed Suitable for U.S. Eyes Only: About 30 copies of Richard Meyer's book Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art just managed to make it to his lecture last week at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre. This even though the book technically has been banned for sale in Canada and Britain by its original publisher, Oxford University Press.
No one's saying where precisely the books, which were sold after his lecture, came from, not even Meyer, an art historian at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He'd signed a deal in September, 1995 with OUP, headquartered in Britain, for Outlaw Representation, giving the publisher worldwide rights.
However, as Meyer assembled his text and cleared permissions for the 200 photographs he planned to include, OUP grew concerned about a couple of things. One was a 1979 picture of two leather-clad homosexuals, by famous U.S. gay photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, that Meyer planned to position alongside a 1953 coronation picture of the Queen and Prince Philip, taken by famous British gay photographer Cecil Beaton. The other was another Mapplethorpe picture, of a naked five-year-old boy, Jesse McBride, whom Mapplethorpe photographed at Jesse's mother's house -- she commissioned the work and was in the room when he took it -- in the mid-1980s.
In the interests at least of, ahem, good taste, would Dr. Meyer perhaps like to remove these pictures, he was asked. Dr. Meyer would not. "I mean, the whole book is about censorship, about images that are troublesome, about intellectual and artistic freedom," he said this week on the telephone from his home in California. "I just didn't think the book should end up colluding in the very thing it was exploring."