April 5, 2001

Good afternoon. I’m Alisa Solomon, the executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York, and I’m glad to be here on behalf of CLAGS to voice our strong objection to Mayor Giuliani’s so-called Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission. We at CLAGS are not fooled by the Mayor’s disingenuous assertions that this committee is merely a group of concerned citizens exercising their free speech in offering him their advice, for we recognize many of the members as long-time activists in the effort to squelch dissident viewpoints and legislate their own narrow morality. Nor are we fooled by the mayor’s professions as an opera queen, even if he does like to put on a dress now and then, for we know his abysmal record on support for the arts, public space, and free expression, and we recognize the deep threats of his policies to the open exchange of ideas upon which democracy depends.

I’ll leave the issue of unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination that the Mayor’s efforts imply to the legal scholars among us today. What I’d like to offer, instead, is a brief comment on the context in which the Mayor takes this appalling action, for it is linked to his sustained attacks on small arts institutions, community spaces, public education, and other activities at the heart of a vibrant culture.

Let’s start by being clear on one important point: despite his protestations that he wants to save the arts from perversion and blasphemy, the Mayor is no friend to the arts. Year after year, his budget proposal has called for the absolute gutting of the Department of Cultural Affairs --- indeed he actually referred to city council support for some 450 independent theaters, museums, dance companies and other arts organizations as "political pork." His arts policy, from the day he took office, has been to shore up the big tourist-drawing institutions at the expense of smaller groups; meanwhile, giddily selling off public building to private developers, he has evicted one arts group after another. At the same time – and here the hypocrisy in his complaints that the Brooklyn Museum is misusing public funds by trying to make a buck is downright chutzpadik – the mayor has repeatedly proposed in his budget that in order to be eligible for city funds, arts groups demonstrate that at least 50 percent of their income comes from private sources.

This is no coincidence. The more than decade-long battle over the National Endowment for the Arts made it all too clear that the arts are a powerful wedge for attacking the very principle of public funding. And indeed, among the people on the Mayor’s so-called advisory panel are aggressive attackers of funding for the City University and other public institutions. If the Mayor would move to defund or evict a museum for including work that some people find offensive, what’s next? Cutting faculty lines at CUNY because he prefers a conservative curriculum and phony appeals to a misguided definition of standards? It’s already happening.

Perhaps what’s most dangerous in the Mayor’s policy is his specious claim that he is protecting taxpayers from being offended, as if those who appreciate the artwork he objects to don’t also pay taxes. Thus in declaring whose opinions will have access to our dwindling public space and whose won’t, the Mayor is asserting who counts as a citizen and who doesn’t. What is at stake here is not simply tax dollars for so-called "offensive speech," but public space for different, and yes, sometimes discomforting points of view. We at CLAGS believe that minority or controversial views must not only be tolerated, but that indeed, they should be welcomed and encouraged for their positive contribution to the discourse and debate that are essential to a democracy.