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A new exhibit responds to the long practice of censorship of LGBT art.

Sexuality has been, and continues to be, used as a tool to prohibit LGBT cultural artwork. This exhibit at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, curated by Jennifer Tyburczy, includes work spanning three decades that has been censored, and in some cases vandalized.

Museum director Hunter O'Hanian says, The focus of this exhibition will be the work which has been excluded from other mainstream institutions due to its gay content. Going back to the Culture Wars of the 1980s, the exhibition landscape has changed as certain works of art have been excluded because they were considered offensive or too risky. While in some ways we live in a time which appears more tolerant, exclusion of artwork, and certain facts about some artists, are still excluded because of the persons sexual orientation.

Guest curator Jennifer Tyburczy says, The exhibition draws inspiration from the innovative responses to watershed moments in the history of censoring LGBTQ art in Canada, England, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, and the United States. In concept, the show is principally drawn from two events: the censorship of Robert Mapplethorpes art in the 1980s and 1990s and the more recent withdrawal of David Wojnarowiczs A Fire in My Belly from the National Portrait Gallery in 2010. In practice, it seizes on the international fame of these controversies to delve deeper into the many ways that censorship functions in queer artistic life.

Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art February 13May 3 Public Opening: February 13, 2015, 68 p.m.

Zanele Muholi, excerpt from "Being" series, 2007, digital print, 48 x 39 in. Courtesy of the artist.

In the "Being" series (2007), Zanele Muholi interrogates black lesbian relationships and safer sex. On the surface, the visuals capture couples in intimate positions and moments showing their love for each other. However, Muholis photographs also critique HIV/AIDS prevention programming in South Africa, and how, in her view, it has failed women who have sex with other women. For years, Muholi has documented gay, lesbian, and transgender people in South Africa and beyond. In April 2012, Muholis apartment was broken into while she and her partner were away. The thieves took nothing but her archives, and little has been done to retrieve her works.

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Irreverent: A Celebration of Censorship

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Join the largest online protest in history: tell Congress to stop this bill now!

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I am writing to you as a voter in your district. I urge you to vote "no" on cloture for S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act, on Jan. 24th. The PROTECT IP Act is dangerous, ineffective, and short-sighted. It does not deserve floor consideration. I urge my representative to vote "no" on SOPA, the corresponding House bill. Over coming days you'll be hearing from the many businesses, advocacy organizations, and ordinary Americans who oppose this legislation because of the myriad ways in which it will stifle free speech and innovation. We hope you'll take our concerns to heart and oppose this legislation by voting "no" on cloture.

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New book retraces the idea of censorship

Censorship is often regarded as a new concept used by modern leaders to suppress ideas and thought. But a new book edited by Dr Geoff Kemp from the University of Auckland outlines how censorship has been part of human life for 2500 years.

In Censorship Moments: Reading Texts in the History of Censorship and Freedom of Expression an international team of experts explores the nature of debates over censorship from Socrates and Cato to the later twentieth century.

The book is pointing out that the whole idea of censorship is bound up with history. The story of censorship is in part the story of democracy, Dr Kemp says.

Chapter topics range from ancient Roman Censorship to the Papal Index of Prohibited Books, the American founders and the censorship of public opinion, and Lenin and George Orwell on censorship. Contributors are drawn from the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Ireland and New Zealand, and feature leading historians of political thought such as Professor Bryan Garsten of Yale University and Professor Melissa Lane of Princeton University Professor Lane will visit Auckland as a Hood Fellow in semester two this year.

Dr Kemp, a Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the School of Social Sciences, has also written a chapter, Areopagiticas Adversary: Henry Parker and the Humble Remonstrance.

Areopagitica is the most celebrated denunciation of pre-publication press censorship in the English language. It was written by John Milton, poet and a civil servant for the Commonwealth (republic) of England under Oliver Cromwell, and published 23 November 1644, at the height of the English Civil War.

The Humble Remonstrance of the Company of Stationers had been written in April 1643 by political writer Henry Parker to support press regulation. The chapter asks how Milton and Parker, both associated with ideas of republican liberty, could differ on so fundamental an issue as free expression.

University of Auckland colleague Dr Katherine Smits chapter The Silencing of Womens Voices: Catharine MacKinnons Only Words discusses how Professor MacKinnons book identifies pornography as a key source of the continuing censorship of women, although it is, ironically defended on anti-censorship grounds.

The books release is topical given the recent Leveson Inquiry into the British Press, and the massacre of 12 people at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris last month.

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New book retraces the idea of censorship