This U.S.A. Town Is Considering A Ban On All Public Art Because Some Of It Might Be LGBTQ+
November 6, 2023There’s a town in the northern United States of America now considering a most unusual idea: Banning art. Specifically, banning any kind of artwork, in any public space.
If this were to happen, it would mean an end to art exhibits in public parks. The local theatre company is also in limbo.
It's a deeply peculiar tale with several plot twists — including a surprise cameo appearance from a malevolent Mesopotamian goddess.
Littleton, N.H., is not a distant cultural backwater. It's a picturesque New England town of brick facades, bustling shops and an award-winning main street, called Main Street. It's about an hour's drive from Quebec — so close that some store signs are in French to cater to weekend visitors.
The town also happens to sit at a cultural meeting point, where red America and blue America bump into each other. It's a place where, in the last election, Donald Trump and Joe Biden won a near-identical number of the town's 3,100 votes.
The president of the local theatre company, Courtney Vashaw, describes it as a politically “purple” town where, for the most part, residents tend to take a “live and let live” approach.
But now, as in much of the country, the intersection of opposing views has created fertile ground for a culture war.
After a town councillor complained about a mural at a public meeting this summer, the town manager, Jim Gleason, decided to contact the municipality's lawyers about the possibility of restricting certain art in public places. That consultation is ongoing and a public art ban remains a live possibility, he says.
Image Credit: Canva
While the town has not cited specific grounds for its potential restrictions, the discussion has clearly targeted art with LGBTQ+ themes.
But, according to ‘CBC’, the council has a problem: its legal options are limited when it comes to banning certain types of artwork. Clear discrimination against LGBTQ+-themed art could invite potentially costly constitutional lawsuits.
So its few remaining options include the nuclear option: ban everything, in every public space.
The municipal council will have to make a final decision, Gleason says.
“Then their decision is, 'All right, does it bother you enough that you want to ban, then, all art?’” he said. “Or is it like, 'OK, it bothers me, but I don't want to get into a constitutional legal fight and spend taxpayers' dollars and go through on this?'
“That's the decision the [town council] will have to make.”
This story begins with a mural alluding to LGBTQ+ themes.
Local organisations, including a Pride group, used funds from a United Way diversity program to commission paintings for a brick wall outside a Chinese restaurant. The paintings, unveiled this summer, included a rainbow-hued colour wheel, trees and flowers, and they were given titles like, “We Belong.” An area newspaper ran a story about the new diversity mural.
“That's when the uproar started,” said Kerri Harrington, an acupuncturist and volunteer who helped organise the mural project.
The town’s three-member council leans conservative. And one member is especially upset by what she’s seeing.
Carrie Gendreau is a conservative Christian and Republican who also sits in the state legislature. She has said her policies are guided by biblical scripture, and recently told the Boston Globe: “Homosexuality is an abomination.”
She complained about some of the art appearing in town, during a council meeting in August. She urged residents to do their own research into its symbols, such as the rainbow outside the Chinese restaurant and, in another local work, the sun depicted as an eye.
Gendreau elaborated to the Boston Globe that she follows the work of Jonathan Cahn — a doomsday prophet who says Donald Trump is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy.
While Gendreau did not respond to multiple interview requests, different people in Littleton told CBC News she has spoken to them enthusiastically about Cahn's work, which calls rainbows and eyeballs demonic symbols.
Cahn's writing is hardly standard Sunday school fare: to him, the Stonewall riots of 1969, which launched the modern gay-rights movement, opened the floodgates to another realm, allowing ancient pagan deities to spill back onto Earth, including the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, who is resentful at being marginalised for thousands of years and is now seeking vengeance against Christianity.
He pieces together odds and ends from ancient writings that refer to jewels and colours and concludes that the pride emblem, the rainbow, empowers Ishtar.
“It's crazy-making. Mind-boggling,” said Harrington.
She said she was raised Catholic and knows the Bible well but, in this case, religion is being distorted into something unrecognisable.
She says she’s always been on friendly terms with Gendreau. She calls Gendreau smart and says she's done good things for the community. However, when they recently crossed paths, Harrington challenged her about Cahn’s writing.
So have other town residents, including Vashaw of Theatre UP. She spoke at a town meeting in September and said: “I am a queer woman. I am married to a woman. And I have not been indoctrinated by Satan or demons.”
Art, she said, has helped Littleton thrive, drawing younger, wealthier, more educated residents — and these people won't keep coming if they see bigotry here.
Now the theatre group has been tossed into this simmering pot of uncertainty.
It's been preparing to present La Cage Aux Folles, the classic play best known in English as the Robin Williams comedy The Birdcage, about a gay couple pretending to be straight as they meet a son's future in-laws.
But shortly after Vashaw's comments at the town meeting, members of the theatre group got a shock.
They received three pieces of bad news at a meeting with town officials on Oct. 10. First, their plan to renovate the heritage building they lease from the town hit a snag. They were preparing a $10,000 (approximately £8,000) study into potential improvements, and were hoping the municipality might fund one-quarter of the cost, but the town's involvement appeared to be shelved.
Second, they learned that they could be booted from that historic building, their home for the past decade, after their current lease expires in May.
Finally, they were told the art ban is under real consideration.
“We were all so floored,” Vashaw said in an interview.
The town manager, Gleason, was at that Oct. 10 meeting.
He confirmed the theatre group's basic takeaways: a majority of the town board, he said, would prefer not to see it in the old opera house. Gendreau has since suggested holding a referendum so residents can decide the issue.
Amid all this, the town manager is wrestling with his own feelings.
Gleason's job doesn't allow him to decide policies. He's a civil servant and his job is to execute the decisions from elected politicians on the council.
And he's grateful for this job. He says the town took a chance on him despite what he refers to as his personal baggage, offering a three-year contract that ends next year.
He held a similar job in Florida, his home state. He said there were policy disagreements with the acting mayor, and it degenerated into an ugly confrontation at a council meeting. He was briefly accused of battery, before the charges were dropped.
Seeking a career reset, he moved north. Yet culture war has followed him from its tropical American epicentre, in his home state of Florida, site of Gov. Ron DeSantis's hotly debated bans regarding talk of race and sexual orientation.
There's another piece of his past stirring inside him. It's the memory of his son, Patrick, who died seven years ago of cancer.
Patrick was gay. A town resident raised this fact recently in the most cruel possible way.
The town manager shared a story at the end of last week's council meeting. He went from officiating the meeting to joining the residents lined up at a microphone.
He said a town resident came pleading with him to cancel the theatre production of La Cage Aux Folles.
Gleason replied that he couldn't, that there are laws guiding freedom of speech, and the constitutional protections of the First Amendment.
He told the resident she was free to respond by protesting; she could refuse to buy a ticket, he said, or even stand outside the theatre and urge people not to enter.
He recalled the woman's parting words as she turned around on her way out of the office and said, “I hope your son … is happy in hell with the devil, where he belongs.”
The crowd at the council meeting gasped in shock. Gleason concluded his remarks by urging residents to be thoughtful of each other's feelings.
“What's going on in this town does hurt. It does cause pain,” Gleason said.
“I've had to come [into work] and wonder: How do I go forward? How do I focus on my job, which is supposed to be potholes, sidewalks, police and fire, when I've got people in this community telling me my son is in hell — because he was gay? He didn't choose to be anything.
“He was born gay, and I loved him.”
As he finished, he drew a vigorous ovation. After all, this is a very nice town.
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