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When John Trobaugh was hired to teach art appreciation courses at Shelton State Community College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the Art Department's welcoming gesture was an invitation to exhibit his own artistic output in two school galleries. The response to both shows– one entirely dismantled, the other bowdlerized by order of college president Rick Rogers– was not an Alabama aberration. It was consistent with widespread attitudes toward gay visibility.

Trobaugh (www.johnart.com) is a 35-year-old graphic designer and artist who studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and completed his Master of Fine Arts degree last June at the University of Alabama's Birmingham campus. He lives in Birmingham with his partner of 13 years. It appears that Trobaugh is the first uncloseted gay faculty member Shelton State– Alabama's officially designated "Junior College of the Fine Arts"– has ever had.

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The work he chose to exhibit was reviewed and approved by Art Department chairman Krist Lien and associate dean Linda Grote. Double Duty, a series of ten 30-by-40-inch color photographs, was installed in the Shelton Fine Arts Center's photography gallery on October 2. A group of ink-wash drawings collectively entitled Childhood Memories was hung at the same time in the Bean Brown Gallery, a space within the lobby of the Shelton State theater.

Double Duty depicts GI Joe and Ken dolls in affectionate poses outdoors. Arrangements of perspective make the eerily expressive action figures seem life-size. The images suggest male bonding rather than imminent homosex, but the figures do touch and sometimes embrace. In "Fraternization," GI Joe wraps his arms around a smiling Ken who seems to have abandoned Barbie. In "Congratulations," a Marine sweeps a sailor into a pose suggestive of Alfred Eisenstaedt's 1945 "victory kiss" photo. In at least two photographs, male dolls wear drag.

Failure to accentuate the positive

The pictures are not stridently political, but hot-button issues lurk just outside (and sometimes within) the frame. Trobaugh puts a queer, subversive spin on toys designed to steer American heteros-in-training toward traditional family values such as male-female courtship and armed aggression.

A few days after Double Duty went on display, Trobaugh was asked to meet with Dean Grote, who told him the response to the show had been "negative," requested its cancellation. The artist later learned that the parent of a student enrolled in an after-school dance class had complained about the work to the administration. When Trobaugh refused to remove the photographs, they were taken down by administrative staff on October 8.

Trobaugh did remove his drawings from the theater gallery, however, after he learned that one of the Childhood Memories pieces had been excised without his consent. President Rogers had directed the removal of an ink drawing entitled "Don't Worry, You'll Be Like Me When You Get Older." The drawing shows the hirsute lower abdomen of a man, his trousers open, pressing against smooth buttocks The sexual content, though clearly present, is not fully decipherable at a glance. But the title speaks for itself. Other drawings range from "My First Experience with Amylnitrate in the Sixth Grade" to "View from Our Stationwagon's Back Door."

Rogers claimed his main concern about Trobaugh's art in general was its potential effect on children. With a nod to the First Amendment pitfalls of censoring art, Rogers offered, finally, to let Trobaugh show his work in a remote second-floor classroom with institutional fluorescent lighting, on condition that no reception or other event be held there. This substitute space was unacceptable to the artist. When he complained to the press, Trobaugh was verbally reprimanded, but the Shelton State administration could not keep a lid on his outrage.

"They took away my voice," Trobaugh charges. "They took away my art, and made no mention of having removed it. At least one person who drove a long distance to see my show arrived at the gallery, found nothing, and had to be told by a student that the art had been taken down."

Good gays, dead gays?

In defending the banishment of the drawing from the theater gallery, Rogers explained that he was protecting audiences attending the "family comedy" Arsenic and Old Lace, in Theater Tuscaloosa's early-October production. (In Joseph Kesselring's 1941 Broadway chestnut, a pair of spinsters serially poison elderly men; more laughs are provided by an escaped psychopathic killer.) As proof that homophobia does not reign at Shelton State, Rogers cited a recent college production of The Laramie Project, Moises Kaufman's docudrama about the circumstances surrounding the Wyoming murder of gay student Matthew Shepherd.

"Maybe if you're killing gay people it's okay," says Trobaugh. "Maybe if I'd shown a bunch of guys strung up, it would have been more acceptable."

In 2003, a time when art has pulled back from the edge, it takes less to create a censorship incident. Censorious homophobes targeted more transgressive material for suppression in the '80s and '90s: leather/SM photography by Robert Mapplethorpe and Mark Chester, collaged images of sex and death by David Wojnarowicz, on-stage bloodletting by performance artist Ron Athey.

Authoritarianism is in

But censorship has greater respectability today than it had 14 years ago, when Jesse Helms went into orbit over Mapplethorpe's photographs. Several factors have led to a shift in public consciousness. The prodigiously repressive USA Patriot Act, the "War on Terror," and the rise of the Homeland Security State have cast a pall over free expression from Nome to Miami. Current censorship initiatives reflect a post-9/11 nervousness, and a fear of even peripheral brushes with such strife-torn topics as same-sex marriage.

Galleries, museums, and theaters dependent on public funding are sticking to the safe and the bland.

"It isn't just homoerotic expression that's affected," says Svetlana Mintcheva of the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC). "Any kind of sexuality is becoming more and more taboo. There's an increasing caution. Institutions are practicing a greater degree of self-censorhip. It's a nationwide phenomenon, with variations according to region."

Evidence of the new squeamishness appeared soon after the attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In November 2001, jittery members of the Los Angeles City Cultural Affairs Department disinvited a show called War from appearing at the Watts Towers Arts Center, fearing that its content– humorous, conciliatory paintings by Alex Donis showing members of the LAPD dancing with members of local gangs– might be inflammatory or disturbing.

In one of a number of more recent censorship brushfires sparked by gay expression, 77-year-old James Callahan spotted the November 11, 2003 issue of The Advocate on a magazine rack at his local public library the Williamsburg, Virginia, and became incensed by the cover photo of a bare-chested, interracial male couple on the verge of a kiss. For ripping the cover off the magazine– a Class 1 misdemeanor– the unrepentant Callahan may face a $1000 fine.

First Amendment protections of free speech apply directly and explicitly to state and federal institutions– public libraries, government agencies, public schools, and state institutions of higher learning. As a government-operated college whose mission statement stresses "innovative arts programming," Shelton State might reasonably be expected to be sensitive to free-expression issues.

"The fact that they don't have a free-speech environment, that they have this totalitarian attitude, should jeopardize their accreditation," Trobaugh suggests. His protests against Shelton State's policies have won support from the NCAC and other defenders of free speech. On November 18, the Faculty Senate of the University of Alabama passed a resolution expressing solidarity with Trobaugh and condemning threats to academic freedom.

"This kind of censorship isn't just destructive to artists and faculty members," Trobaugh points out. "It affects students who see this happening and decide they'd better watch what they create, what they say, what they think. The worst censorship of all is when students are taught to censor themselves."