Of the 26 executive orders President Donald Trump signed on the first day of his second term, one was billed as “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship,” barring the government from “any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.” In his address to Congress a few weeks later, Trump reiterated this point: “I have stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America. It’s back.”
Free speech has long been, as NPR’s media correspondent David Folkenflik put it, “an article of faith” for conservative politicians and especially, recently, for the MAGA right, which has argued that their views have been suppressed by left-leaning social media platforms and misconstrued in the mainstream press. (Some on the left have expressed similar concerns about their views.) Yet what’s transpired since late January wouldn’t meet a free speech absolutist’s definition of unfettered discourse. Federal mandates targeting diversity or racial and gender equality have resulted in bans or attempted bans on words, ideas, books and people. Employees at NASA and other agencies were ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures. The Department of Defense briefly excised a tribute to Jackie Robinson’s army service from the Pentagon website and instructed West Point to adjust its curriculum, in an attempt to purge U.S. military institutions of “divisive concepts and gender ideology.” In March, a Turkish grad student in Massachusetts was taken off the street by plainclothes officers in masks and held without charges for weeks in a Louisiana immigration detention center, seemingly for the crime of having co-authored an opinion essay in the Tufts University student newspaper critical of the school’s response to Israel’s actions in Gaza.
American artists have long seen their creative freedom attacked by governments of all political persuasions. They’ve also been the ones to speak out when others are too frightened to do so. We spoke with several seasoned artists in various fields about their own experience with having been censored. In some cases, that censorship, decades old, feels like a relic of another political moment, of other culture wars, even as it resonates with what’s happening now: same wars, new battles. It almost always affected careers and artists’ tolerance for risk — but not always negatively. For censorship can also be a rallying cry, a reminder of why artists make art in the first place. — M.H. Miller
John Waters, 79, Film Director and Writer
After Waters’s third feature, “Pink Flamingos,” debuted in 1972, the Detroit Free Press compared it to “a septic tank explosion.” The film follows a criminal named Babs Johnson (played by the drag queen Divine, a frequent collaborator of the director’s who died in 1988) as she fights the Marbles, a couple who run a black-market baby ring and deal heroin to children, to retain her title as the “filthiest person alive.” With scenes involving unsimulated fellatio and the human consumption of dog feces, the cult classic, which was added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 2021, nearly 50 years after its initial release, has been occasionally banned in parts of the United States, though it has never been cut to avoid an X rating. — Nick Haramis
To play a movie in a Baltimore theater back then, you had to submit it to the Maryland State Board of Censors [a three-member committee that operated for 65 years beginning in 1916]. I never did that. Instead, I screened “Mondo Trasho” (1969) and “Multiple Maniacs” (1970) in church basements. When “Pink Flamingos” opened in 1972, I rented a hall at the University of Baltimore. Then “Female Trouble” (1974) opened at a theater, and the censors had to see it. That’s when one of them said, “You can’t have that cunnilingus scene.” I said, “Well, that’s a man — that’s not a vagina.” And that’s when she said, “Don’t tell me about sex. I was married to an Italian!” She handed me scissors, and I had to cut the scene out of a brand-new print. Way later, “Multiple Maniacs,” which she’d never seen, played in a theater. She went insane because of the rosary job [a sex act involving holy beads]. She took it to court and the judge said, “My eyes were insulted for 90 minutes, but it’s not illegal.”
“Pink Flamingos” has been censored all around the world. There were four offending scenes: the eating [expletive], the [expletive], the artificial insemination and the chicken [expletive]. That last one was the worst because the animal died. But Crackers [played by Danny Mills] cooked the chicken and ate it afterward, so it wasn’t that bad.
I never won an obscenity case, even though the Museum of Modern Art bought a print for its collection when it came out. I’ve said it before, but it’s true: At midnight, it’s a joyous experience to watch with a rowdy crowd but, if you check in for jury duty at 8 a.m. and are sitting in a courthouse with eight to 12 strangers, it’s worse than obscene. So [Robert] Shaye and I — he was the head of New Line [Cinema] at the time — would just plead guilty because the fine cost $5,000, and the lawyers cost more. Supposedly, if we ever go back to show it in Hicksville, N.Y., we’ll go to prison.
When people get their books banned today, I always say, “Be glad! It’ll be in the front of the bookstore by the cash register in the banned books section, not in the gay section next to true crime by the bathroom.” The censor boards were my best publicists. They didn’t realize it, but they worked for me. Every time they were outraged, people laughed. Nobody stumbled into “Pink Flamingos” thinking it was a movie about the Everglades.
Andres Serrano, 74, Artist
Known for his photographic works that make use of bodily fluids — blood, semen and breast milk — Serrano, who was confirmed in the Catholic Church, created “Piss Christ,” a photo of a crucifix submerged in a plexiglass tank of the artist’s urine, in 1987. The work, he once said in a statement, was about exploring his “unresolved feelings about my own Catholic upbringing.” He’d received a $15,000 award from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (now the North Carolina Museum of Art, Winston-Salem), with a third of the funds coming from the National Endowment for the Arts, for it and other works. “Piss Christ” was subsequently denounced by, among others, the Christian-right American Family Association and Jesse Helms, a conservative senator from North Carolina, who mounted a campaign against federal funding for the arts. — Kate Guadagnino
“Piss Christ” was in an exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and someone wrote a letter to the editor of The Richmond Times-Dispatch complaining about it. Then the Rev. Donald Wildmon, who was the head of the American Family Association, urged his flock of 170,000 to write to Congress. A third of the $15,000 grant I’d won for my work had come from the N.E.A. In May 1989, the [expletive] hit the fan and [the United States Senators] Alfonse D’Amato and Jesse Helms denounced me on the Senate floor. That’s where, in the eyes of the public, “Piss Christ” was born. It was very painful, especially the lie that I’m anti-Christian when I’ve always seen myself, as they told us to be when we were confirmed, as a soldier of God. The impact of “Piss Christ” destroyed my first marriage. At the same time, it was empowering. I was a complete unknown and suddenly, according to Jesse Helms, I was “taunting the American people.” I thought, “OK, everyone knows I’m an artist, so I can do what I do best as an artist, and that is to create.”
A few weeks later, because I was getting all this flak from Congress, the Corcoran Gallery [of Art] in Washington, D.C., canceled a Robert Mapplethorpe show and all hell broke loose in the art world. But there’s that kind of censorship where something is pulled, and then there’s the other kind, where you’re not even considered. I’ve had about 20 different solo exhibitions in Europe, and only one in America.
Karen Finley, 69, Artist
Finley and three other artists sued the N.E.A. in 1990 after it rescinded their fellowships. Following an eight-year legal battle, the Supreme Court ruled against the so-called N.E.A. Four, upholding a law that deemed the agency should base its decisions on “general standards of decency” in addition to artistic merit, which altered the scope of public funding for the arts in the United States. — Coco Romack
When I did [“We Keep Our Victims Ready” (1990), which she’d begun performing the year before], I was looking at sexual violence. In my performance, I covered my body in chocolate, a ritual that represented the body being devalued and dehumanized. Then I turned it around. At the end, I covered my body in silver tinsel, making myself almost like a disco ball. Three other artists — John Fleck, Holly Hughes and Tim Miller — and I were denied our grants [by the N.E.A.] because of the content of our work. We considered it vague that the government could use decency to restrict funding, so we appealed to the Ninth Circuit and won. But then it went to the Supreme Court, and that’s where we lost.
That became a precedent for where we are today. If the government considers a work or production to be indecent, it can restrict support. The public has to be thinking about this in a much broader fashion. That’s what we’re seeing with trans health care, with abortion. We can see it in the libraries, universities and colleges. It’s become pervasive. I think about the artist as a historical recorder. I was speaking about sexual violence, the AIDS crisis, war — many issues that are still here today.
I was considered to be important enough to censor, but it was very upsetting and hurtful for me in the beginning. I went into teaching, but I never stopped making work. Eventually I went back to thinking about why I create art. I made the decision that I’d work from joy — which might be more of a radical gesture than the art itself.
Khaled Hosseini, 60, Writer
Born in Afghanistan, Hosseini moved to the United States as a teenager, when his family was granted political asylum, and later became an American citizen. He published his debut novel, “The Kite Runner,” in 2003. Set against the backdrop of the collapse of Afghanistan’s monarchy and the years of war that followed, the book includes a brutal depiction of sexual assault and has been banned from more than 100 school districts across the country. — K.G.
My novel “The Kite Runner” has been challenged or banned pretty much since the early days of its being taught in high schools, going back to 2008 or so. Often all it takes is a single frivolous complaint from a parent or small group of parents alleging it’s harmful because it depicts sexual violence or, in some cases, believe it or not, that it promotes Islam and terrorism, without any sober consideration of context or a legitimate, holistic appraisal of the book’s literary merits. There’s been an uptick in the last few years, as school boards have increasingly become battlegrounds for conservative policymaking.
I came to this country in 1980 and, in these book bans, I don’t recognize the America my father talked about, the reasons he went through the trouble of bringing us here. But they haven’t hurt me or benefited me much personally, apart from giving me the touch of pride I feel at being censored alongside people like Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood — and if I’m being targeted by groups with little tolerance for diversity of perspective, I’ve done something right. The ones who really stand to lose are the students, whose freedom we’re undermining and whose worldview we’re narrowing. There’s an astounding disconnect between the objections raised by so-called concerned parents and the experience of students who’ve read the book. I have 20 years’ worth of letters in which high school students tell me how “The Kite Runner” encouraged them to stand up to bullies, defy intolerance, volunteer, look inward; how it gave them a more nuanced, more compassionate perspective on Afghanistan and its people. That, I think, is the real argument against book bans.
Geraldine Brooks, 69, Writer
A former foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Brooks is known for her deeply researched historical fiction. Earlier this year, to comply with Trump’s executive order “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government” and “combating race and sex stereotyping,” Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, called for the removal of hundreds of books from the U.S. Naval Academy’s library (many of which have since been returned). According to a spreadsheet released by the Department of the Navy, these included an academic study of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” Maya Angelou’s 1969 autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” and “Horse,” Brooks’s most recent novel. — K.G.
The first book of mine to be taken out of school libraries was “Year of Wonders” (2001). It’s based on the true story of what happened when the bubonic plague hit a village in the Peak District in England in 1665. I was astonished to learn it had been considered unsuitable, probably, I decided, because one of the characters experiences religious doubt — or as a lovely drag queen who read from it at a book festival in Provincetown, Mass., figured, because of women in the book doing science.
I was a little less surprised — just infuriated — about “Horse” (2022), which deals with the role of enslaved Black horsemen in the antebellum period, being banned from the Naval Academy library. It’s part of this disgusting erasure where no story can be told that reflects the truth of the brutalities of the past. In this case, they’re only wanting to offer a white account of history, to be on the side of the enslavers, essentially, not the enslaved. The cowardice of Hegseth to think that young trainee military officers can’t be exposed to real history — how dare somebody who’s such a coward have any leadership role among the brave men and women who are going out in the field?
But it gets me up in the morning. This was also true when I was a journalist. I once tried to give some English books to a young Palestinian man I’d interviewed who was imprisoned. One was “The Old Man and the Sea” [by Ernest Hemingway] (1952), and his jailers wouldn’t let him have it. The fact that they’re afraid of words makes me excited about trying to give them something else to worry about.
Art Spiegelman, 77, Cartoonist
Spiegelman’s two-volume graphic novel “Maus” (1986-91), about his parents’ experiences as Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, and his mother’s suicide when Spiegelman was 20, has faced challenges in several international markets. Since 2021, it has been banned in school districts in Tennessee, Florida, Texas, Missouri and Iowa for “its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide,” according to a statement issued by the Board of Education for Tennessee’s McMinn County. More recently, images of Trump in a comic strip that was distributed at the 2017 Women’s March were removed from a 2025 episode of the PBS documentary series “American Masters,” which is produced by the public broadcasting company the WNET Group. — C.R.
About eight years ago, I was doing a public performance called “Wordless!” that was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House. Some documentary filmmakers were recommended to me by mutual friends, and I asked if they would come and film the performance. Once they started following me around, it turned into “let’s make a documentary about you.”
In 2022, the school board [in Tennessee] unanimously decided that “Maus” couldn’t be taught. It had to do with a picture of a naked woman’s breast, which is very small. It’s a dot on the picture of my mother dead in the bathtub after she killed herself, seen from overhead and behind. Sexual references and forbidden language are the easiest ways to get a book out of circulation, so that’s what they went for, but of course it wasn’t really about that. It was about being disturbed by the content of “Maus,” and by the real history behind it.
After that happened, the filmmakers felt more excited and wanted to make the documentary for “American Masters.” Everything was ready to go and, two weeks before it aired, the top honchos of WNET got in touch [with the producers] and said that we had to cut this sequence out. It was a sequence near the end that began with my wife and daughter, who were putting out a magazine called Resist! I did one cartoon for them. It was four panels that started with a picture of Trump with rather fecal-looking hair. WNET decided they couldn’t show that on PBS.
I got indignant because it’s exactly what I feared could happen over the years of having to fight with censorship. The First Amendment is just a scrap of paper unless it’s defended. [WNET Group said in a statement, “As producers, we had and have the contractual right (and public obligation) to request edits from the filmmakers of our documentaries. … Only after the fact did they characterize it as ‘censorship.’” The company also noted that the comic would be included in all future commercial versions.] I’m part of a generation that grew up with Mad comic books, a catalyst to the underground comix generation, where the whole point of making comics was to be transgressive. Moving past norms in order to say things that aren’t easily sayable is an important public duty.
Kate Bornstein, 77, Author, Actor and Performance Artist
In 2006, Bornstein was scheduled to speak about her self-help book “Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws” at a high school in Bedford, N.Y., when a local businessman complained to the school’s superintendent about the contents of Bornstein’s website, resulting in the cancellation of the event. “Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation,” a 2010 collection of stories by trans and queer artists that Bornstein edited in collaboration with the author S. Bear Bergman, was banned in a school district in Missouri in 2022. — C.R.
In another time, a whole other world where “transgender” was a brand-new idea, “nonbinary” wasn’t a word and B.D.S.M. meant you were an evil person, I was all three of those and looking for a community. And many of the communities I found didn’t want anything to do with me.
In 1989, I wrote a play called “Hidden: A Gender” that premiered in the basement at Theater Rhinoceros in San Francisco. It was a wacky play about two people, me before transition and me during transition, and a literary figure named Herculine Barbin, a French hermaphrodite who wrote letters and memoirs about her transition [in the mid-19th century]. It was framed as a television talk show where I was a Jerry Springer character selling miracle cures for anybody whose gender was blurring — pink bottles for girls and blue bottles for men. During the run, there was a gay man sitting outside the theater handing out rotten fruit to the people coming in because [he believed] transsexuals didn’t belong at a gay and lesbian theater. Some people actually threw rotten fruit at the actors.
It wasn’t until much later that mainstream folks began to censor me. I was going to talk with a group of high school students in New York in 2006. A committee got up in arms. They stopped me from appearing there, [saying] that it didn’t belong in the ears of young folks. It didn’t harden my heart against anyone. Maybe some years in the future, the people who are censoring me now [Bornstein wasn’t aware that “Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation” had been banned in a Missouri district until she was asked about it during this interview], like the people who censored me way back then, will realize that, as weird as I am, I mean them no harm.
Moisés Kaufman, 61, Playwright and Director
“The Laramie Project” (2000), written by Kaufman with the members of Tectonic Theater Project about the aftermath of the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay college student who in 1998 was kidnapped, tortured and left to die outside Laramie, Wyo., has been censored in many high schools. In the past few years, a school board in Kansas has banned it from the curriculum and districts in Texas and Arizona have postponed planned productions of the play. — K.G.
What will happen is that a teacher or a theater director who works in a high school will choose “The Laramie Project,” the students will start rehearsing it and then the school board will get wind of this and try to cancel the production, always under the guise of “Oh, some of this material may not be appropriate for this age group.” They never say it’s because of the gay subject matter. Then either the students and community fight back and the play is reinstated, or they fight back and still don’t win. I can’t say I’ve been surprised. We’re at a moment in history where America is deeply divided and, fortunately or unfortunately, this play resides in that space.
But it’s been encouraging to see the vehemence with which the students have fought. A couple of times, they’ve rented a space near the school and put the play on there instead. Another thing that’s happened is that people from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas have come to protest the play, so, in order to get to the rehearsal room or the theater, students have had to walk through these people holding signs that say, “God hates fags.” So the play ceases to be a uniquely theatrical endeavor. It becomes a visceral experience where the students get to understand some of the bigotry and homophobia.
And as difficult as that is for them, there’s something profoundly good about the political awakening that kind of action generates. The censorship does the opposite of what it wants to do. It makes people really think: “What are the issues in the play? Whose stories get to be told?” And then, when the students put on the play, it makes it much more of an event.
Dread Scott, 60, Artist
In 1989, Scott, born Scott Tyler, was a 24-year-old art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and participated in a show there with an installation titled “What Is the Proper Way to Display a U.S. Flag?” It required visitors to step on one in order to answer that question in a guest book. In response to the piece, which also included photographs of American flags draped over soldiers’ coffins, thousands of veterans rallied outside the museum building, and Scott received multiple death threats. Senator Bob Dole denounced Scott, whom he identified as a “so-called artist,” on the Senate floor. President George H.W. Bush described the work as “disgraceful.” Several months later, Congress passed an amendment, the Flag Protection Act of 1989, making the deliberate placement of a flag on the ground a criminal offense. Scott and a few friends and activists responded by burning flags on the steps of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Their arrest led to a 1990 Supreme Court ruling that the federal law against desecrating the flag was unconstitutional. — N.H.
I was a young radical who thought that art could change the world. Then, suddenly, I had a work that was part of the national discussion. And it wasn’t just being discussed by the powerful but by the powerless — people from housing projects were standing in line for over an hour to see it. When Congress and the city of Chicago intend to outlaw your work, it shows the power of art, but also the extraordinary lengths [to which] the government is willing to go, including ripping up its own Constitution, to suppress the voice of a previously unknown undergraduate art student.
I didn’t know anybody making a career as an artist, so I wasn’t thinking, “Oh my God, I’m never going to show again.” Having grown up in Ronald Reagan’s America, with all the narrow-mindedness and selfishness and greed that it embodied — and then George H.W. Bush continuing that legacy — to be able to speak truth to power was fantastic. But then, of course, there were people who felt they couldn’t show my work. And then there were art institutions that lost funding after they did show it.
One thing I realized is that my personal fate and safety were bound up with defending this work, and that, if I wanted others to defend it, I had to be strong myself. If I’d suddenly said, “Look, I just want this to go away,” then my network of support would’ve also fallen away. I thought, as I said at the time, that if Black people hadn’t been willing to offend the sensibilities of white people, we’d still be chattel slaves. The flag flew over the Supreme Court during the Dred Scott decision [an 1857 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court declaring that enslaved people weren’t American citizens and couldn’t sue for emancipation]. This was the flag that the cavalry carried as they massacred Native Americans. I wanted people to talk about those ideas. And if my life was a little disrupted, so be it.
Because of the death threats, I had to move a lot during that time. I was staying on couches, sometimes for a week or a month. There were artists at the national level — Richard Serra, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero — who lent their voices in various ways. The most vitriolic responses were publicly couched as being from veterans. But often they did me the favor of being very racist. Some would say, “Why don’t you go back to the jungles of Africa?” It was easy for me to separate the people I should be standing with and caring about from those who wanted me dead. The ones who were more complicated were, like, my mom. She’s always been one of my greatest supporters, and she really liked what I was saying. She just wished somebody else was saying it.
When the Supreme Court ruled in our favor, we were vindicated. But while it’s legal to show my piece anywhere in the United States, it’s effectively a banned work. It’s talked about in Art History 101, but it hasn’t been shown in the United States since 2006. Think about what would happen if this were shown today, especially at a major institution. You’d likely have the current president denouncing it. You’d have the people who were willing to storm the Capitol and attack police officers coming to your museum. I’m in conversation with at least one university gallery that wants to do it, but we’ll see whether it happens.
Overall I wouldn’t change a thing. When you’re young and naïve, you have a lot more courage. I don’t think I’ve mellowed with age, but I certainly wouldn’t want to apply the sophistication or wisdom that I now have to the young me. Make as much trouble as you can. And get a lot of friends. The world is intolerable as it is. Make art about it.
These interviews have been edited and condensed.