At the beginning of this year, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a federal agency that provides grants to arts organizations nationwide, imposed a new requirement on grant applicants to certify that they will not use federal funds to “promote gender ideology” and banning any projects that appear to from receiving funding. The ACLU sued, and the NEA claims it has shifted its policy over the course of our litigation, but at its core, the issue is the same: the NEA now disfavors and disadvantages projects that express views about gender that the government does not like.
For impacted artists, this was an old fight in a new form.
In the 1990s, the NEA Four – Karen Finley, Holly Hughes, John Fleck, and Tim Miller – were performance artists whose controversial, socially engaged work led to a national debate over arts funding and censorship in the '90s. Their performances explored topics like sexuality, abuse, religion, LGBTQ+ rights, and AIDS, often using provocative imagery and nudity. The NEA rejected their grant proposals in 1990 under a new “decency” requirement. They sued with support from the ACLU, arguing the clause violated their free speech rights. Lower courts agreed, but the Supreme Court upheld the clause in 1998, concluding that the “decency” requirement did not impose any substantive limitation on the projects the NEA could fund, but rather imposed a new procedure to ensure that panels considering any project were sufficiently diverse.
This year, the ACLU is once again suing to protect the rights of artists. The ACLU represents several arts organizations affected by the NEA’s “gender ideology” burden, including National Queer Theater. The NEA’s policy of disfavoring projects that explore gender in a way the government doesn’t like has led some organizations to alter the scope of their artistic projects — many of which involve transgender characters, cast transgender or nonbinary actors, and otherwise celebrate and affirm transgender and nonbinary people — while others fear they will face funding repercussions.
Miller, a performance artist and one of the NEA Four, joins our client Adam Odsess-Rubin, founding artistic director of National Queer Theater in New York, to discuss the NEA’s new funding policy, the origins of artistic censorship, and how the current moment compares.
The conversation between Tim and Adam has been edited for length and clarity.
Tim Miller: Adam, could you ground us in this discussion a bit and tell us about the current fight against the NEA?
Adam Odsess-Rubin: In March of this year, National Queer Theater joined the ACLU in a lawsuit against the NEA over their gender ideology ban on funding projects that feature LGBTQ themes or artists.
We received funding from the NEA in 2023 and 2024 for our Criminal Queerness Festival, which is our flagship program, and we're really proud of our support from the NEA. It's a huge badge of pride. We joined this lawsuit really to stand up for queer and trans artists around the country, and people making queer and trans art, because we believe that this is unconstitutional. This ‘gender ideology’ language is a huge dog whistle to the far right.
We celebrate all gender identities, all gender expressions, and that's a fundamental part of our work as queer artists. Two months after we joined this lawsuit, National Queer Theater and hundreds of other arts organizations around the country had our grants rescinded by the NEA. We lost $20,000 from the NEA for our 2025 festival in a grant that had already been offered to us under the Biden administration in 2024. It's really just part of a more pervasive backlash against the trans community for just standing up for basic civil rights and basic representation.
"It's really just part of a more pervasive backlash against the trans community for just standing up for basic civil rights and basic representation."
Adam: Tim, I'm curious, how have you seen the fight against artistic censorship change since the '90s, since the days of the NEA Four, up until now?
Tim: At first, our current catastrophe felt like familiar terrain. OK, this is like the NEA Four case in the 90s Culture War.
But as this has gone on, it's gotten so much more draconian. As our NEA 4 case went to the Supreme Court in the 1990s with the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, it felt like we were still within governmental norms on some level. But of course, now it's so much more extreme, and the virtual erasure of the NEA is new terrain. As a young artist of 31 in 1990 when my grant was taken away, it was not that surprising to me. At that time, I found it helpful to see, okay, we're in familiar terrain of the McCarthy era, there’s a crackdown on progressive arts funding every 20 to 30 years. I found it useful at that time to connect with two artists that went through the McCarthy era of being censored: Bella Lewitzky, a well-known choreographer; and Rachel Rosenthal, who had also been forced to leave Paris by the Nazis as a child. It helped to see our lineage of state suppression of the arts. I did a public dialogue with them at the time much like we are doing now!
As I saw what was happening now, I wanted to continue that conversation with you, and I, and the other organizations to see how does what we went through in the late 1990s talk with what's going on now? As the NEA Four becomes the NEA 400 with all these grants taken away, and almost every program head at the NEA has resigned, the main difference is it's so much worse right now.
Credit: Tim Miller
Tim: Adam tell me about how you’ve seen artists navigate censorship at this moment, especially since the festival has been a sort of safe haven for artists around the world who faced censorship in their home countries?
Adam: Working on the Criminal Queerness Festival, I'm seeing all these artists around the world coming up with creative strategies to combat censorship. I'm thinking about a writer we worked with from Pakistan who staged the first lesbian play there as a tour around the country, even with censors coming to performances. I'm thinking about an artist from Kenya we've worked with who is staging gay play readings in secret and messaging people via WhatsApp secret locations for the readings just 30 minutes before. We worked with an artist from Lebanon who changed the pronouns in her one-woman-show about her ex-girlfriend – she performed it in Lebanon talking about her ex boyfriend – but everyone knew she was a lesbian, so people knew what she was talking about. I'm also thinking about, on the more difficult side, an artist we worked with from China who said that censorship was so pervasive in China that he just never even wrote queer characters, because he knew that it would never be produced in China. So he decided to come to the U.S., and now he's finishing at Juilliard.
What I'm seeing in the United States, especially talking to my colleagues in more conservative states, is there's this pervasive chilling effect where theaters are programming less queer art, creating less opportunities for queer artists, and people are complying in advance, which is exactly what we're not supposed to do to allow fascism to continue to spread in our society.
Now is the time to look outward to find what strategies are going to work for us. Are artists going to create work in defiance, where they're going to fight censorship directly? Or is it going to be something more roundabout, where artists are creating work that's a nod and a wink to get around government censorship. I don't think we have the answer yet, but I'm collecting good ideas from any artists that have been through this before to create a roadmap for the work ahead.
Tim: It was a catchphrase of the '90s censorship decade, the so-called “chilling effect," which now feels like a quaint, user-friendly notion of how censorship works. Like, it's a little chilly, so you need an anti-homophobia scarf or something around your neck. And the chilling effect was real then, just as it's much more real now. I lost gigs, especially at universities, and the usual menu of death threats and protests outside my shows came my way. But let's face it, the chilling effect right now is 1000 times worse. Now, it's this icy avalanche of the whole state and governmental norms collapsing under the Trump regime.
"...the chilling effect right now is 1000 times worse. Now, it's this icy avalanche of the whole state and governmental norms collapsing under the Trump regime."
You spoke so eloquently, Adam, about what we can learn globally from people who have been dealing with this. But within that, it's powerful to see how resistance functions in a modest state university in North Carolina, or in Iowa, or in Alabama. I've performed, taught, done projects and created queer representation in 47 of the states. So far this year, when I've gone to a university somewhere in the southeast, I am already seeing that chilling effect.
Even as grim as I find this time – it weighs on me much more than what I was going through – I'm even more inspired by what young artists here are doing. I can look to Alabama, Iowa, North Carolina, or Georgia, and see how their resistance is strong, fierce, and is making their queer voices rise up.
Credit: Tim Miller
Adam: We're talking specifically about the arts, but just to contextualize this fight that's happening right now, it's within the broader context of an all-out assault on the humanity and the civil rights of trans people in America. Arts is just one manifestation of this attack. You can look at bathroom bills, you can look at attacks on gender affirming care, you can look at bans on trans people in the military.
As artists, it's our job to talk about all this and to support a diversity of artists, including trans artists. And I think this attack on our rights is so dangerous because not only does it impact trans artists, it impacts any artist who may want to cast a woman as Hamlet, or stage a production of Kinky Boots in Illinois, or do a Drag Queen Story Hour.
Adam: Tim, what advice do you have, selfishly for me, but any artist fighting censorship?
Tim: Adam, you’re already doing it. You’re already not shying away from anything judging by your NQT Criminal Queerness Festival. I think we just need to dig as deep as we can, continue to claim agency over our lives, over our sexuality, over our bodies, bravely and energetically, and do not let this coercion win by self-censoring. That crucible that occurs in performance – where there’s connection between artists and audience – our feistiness, our bravery, leaps forward. For us to really keep claiming that space is going to be more important than it’s ever been.
"I think we just need to dig as deep as we can, continue to claim agency over our lives, over our sexuality, over our bodies, bravely and energetically, and do not let this coercion win by self-censoring."
Adam: I feel crazy having to remind people that we have freedom of speech in this country as our constitutional right to express ourselves. If we allow ourselves to censor ourselves and censor each other, we're basically giving up that right, and it's a scary path.
Look at the folks who are producing countercultural work right now and support their work. You can follow them on social media, engage with them online, buy tickets to their shows, or buy their art. Speak about this on your different platforms, and talk to your friends about this. Think about how the world would be if we didn't have free artistic expression – if even Netflix was censored. When we do have positive queer representation in the media, it supports our young people so much to have better self esteem, better mental health, more of a sense of community, a sense of recognition.