Out in the Mountains which aside‘ our under- .g 9f. ‘Oi1.r....1if9sty1¢§ d ‘of each _ V H _;f_View"S 39% opinions‘ appearing in ;_fl1¢.i‘bapei do ¥i10tf.’ri¢ces§érfly‘iiepr¢sent ‘ of A f Th _s paper cannot and $0‘. 8» should _jwej _revisions.AHowe,ver,’[ ' by Hugh Coyle Censorship has been a hot topic over the past year. The photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe continue to incite protests and counter-protests; the NEA has recently denied funding to four artists whose work was deemed questionable (three of the four just happen to be gay); and earlier this year a traveling exhibiton the Holocaustran into problems with school boards because it mentioned the fact that gays and lesbians were persecuted and murdered along with the Jewish population of Germany. All of these attacks threaten the visi- bility and validation of gay concerns in contemporary society. We've made great progress over the past years in bringing these concerns into the open, so it's no wonder that our critics and enemies are seeking out ways to close us out once again — to censor not only our artwork, but to censor our lives as well. Nothing has fueled this ongoing battle more than the AIDS epidemic in the last decade. Issues of censorship play a promi- nent role as health officials grapple with the various ways of infonning an erotophobic culture about the potential health risks sur- rounding certain forms of homosexual intercourse. Posters and pamphlets aimed at the gay community now feature "ho- moerotic" visuals: two men walking with arms entwined, two naked men wrapped together in an American flag, and a whole bus-length panel of same-sex multi-racial couples kissing. As these images are aimed at educat- ing the gay community, they speak in what might be called a "gay voice." This voice is and must be sexually-oriented. To truly educate our own population, we must speak our own language, and speak of our own experiences. In order for an article on "safe Censorship and Education sex" to truly inform, it must speak frankly about sex and not avoid the topic. If it does, it weakens its own effectiveness, casts doubt as to its own validity, questions the defining essence of what it is to be gay. Such articles also serve the double purpose of educating the heterosexual community about our lives. This is an education that doesn't come comfortably to many, however, and that discomfort is re- flected in the rhetoric of censorship (i.e. words like "distasteful" and "offensive.") This discomfort is the scar of yet an- other form of censorship, one less visible yet just as insidious. In school, few of us learned that Michelangelo (the creator of that beautiful "homoerotic" masterpiece "David") was gay, or that Walt Whitman kept records of the men he slept with, or that Emily Dickinson was madly in love with another woman. That information, like the fact that thousands of gays were not re- leased with the Jews once the Americans "liberated" the concentration camps, was censored, and continues to be censored in most of our American schools. Likewise, there are few role models presented for gay and lesbian youth, and in most cases,_ not even a definition offered of the words "gay," "lesbian," and "homosex- ual" (at least not a true definition; we all learned what those words meant on the playground and in the locker room, and most heterosexuals still live by those horri- bly mistaken defrnitions). For many of us growing up in our teens, there was no such thing as a gay or lesbian community. It was kept hidden from our sight, censored from our everyday experience. We need to continue to explore and express our selves for all of society to see and hear, to know and admit and allow that (continued on page 11) ‘DESKTOP’ PUBLISHING STUDIO TYPE 8: DESIGN/WORKSHOPS/SELF-SERVICE 863-1884 ~ 187 ST PA UL STREET