The Many Stages of Censorship

There have been some highly publicized and staggeringly unfair instances of censorship of sexually based art in the last few decades, but usually that censorship happens insidiously, behind closed doors. Since the culture wars began in the early 1990s, cultural institutions have been afraid to upset either their private donors or the government agencies that award them grants. They exclude controversial or edgy work and opt to play it safe most of the time.

That makes sense in terms of their self-preservation, but for an artist like me it means that I’m automatically excluded. Nobody says that I’m being censored; they just don’t include my work in their shows. And I’m left wondering if it’s because the work just isn’t good enough, or whether it’s really because of the subject matter, and not the quality of the work itself. But I can’t say that because that would sound presumptuous.

Censorship doesn’t just happen after artwork is displayed. With work like mine, there are many points along the way at which the process can be derailed. I think the only way to stop censorship is for artists— especially LGBTQ sexual artists—to keep making their work and keep finding alternative ways to show it, as I have. Mainstream arts organizations eventually will cease being shocked by it because the imagery will have become part of the mainstream without their help.

My first paid photography work was on the sets of porn films in New York City in the 1980s. I got the job because my ex-husband was the producer of a famous porn movie, The Devil in Miss Jones, back in the 1970s.

I realized from the beginning that I had access to a secret world that was closed off from most people. Because I was hired to be there, I was on the inside. I could photograph anything I wanted. That was a rush, and I gradually realized that I wanted to do a series of fine art photos about what our world was really like, especially what my friends, the porn stars, were like, without indulging porn audiences’ crazy fantasies. I wanted to break the stereotype of porn stars as sex machines and show their humanity as people just looking for love. I wanted to explore the contradictions among sex, beauty, exploitation, sadness, and silliness that are central to that world.

I took photographs on the sets of about 300 porn movies over a twelve-year period. I knew the work would make a fantastic book, so I engaged a literary agent at the beginning. He showed the project to every publisher there was, but he couldn’t sell it. Then I got another agent, and another, and another. For twenty-five years no one would touch it. They always said they couldn’t figure out who the audience would possibly be.

Then finally one of the top book publishers of our day, Judith Regan, contracted to publish it when she was at HarperCollins. But she was fired over internal politics at HarperCollins just before my book went into production.

I finally launched a Kickstarter campaign and self-published the book in 2012. I raised over $32,000 from a combination of friends and people I had never heard of, which was heartwarming because it proved to me that there was a significant audience for the work. But the next hurdle was that I could not find a printing company in the United States that would print it. Everyone we approached turned us down because of the sexually explicit imagery in the book.

I ultimately had to go to Germany to get it printed, which turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. The German printing company I used had no issues at all with the subject matter; they were just concerned with getting all the color corrections right. What a pleasure not having to deal with people being embarrassed over the images. And what a triumph it was to finally hold American Ecstasy in my hands!

The work that Jennifer Tyburczy included in...