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"Gay Jesus May Star on Broadway" read the headline in the May 1 edition of the New York Post. On Tuesday, April 28, the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), a nonprofit subscription theater dedicated to new plays, had held a reading of playwright Terrence McNally's work in progress, Corpus Christi. The MTC had scheduled the play for production early in its 1998-99 season. Ward Moorhouse III and Tracy O'Connor's lurid Post account, quoting an unnamed "production insider," depicted the script as a Biblical travesty in which a Christ figure named Joshua, "King of the Queers," has offstage sex with some of his apostles.

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The play is actually set in contemporary Corpus Christi, Texas, McNally's hometown, where a group of gay men perform a play-within-a-play based on the story of Christ. The Post, a homophobic Murdoch tabloid, brought its hearsay knowledge of Corpus Christi to the attention of William A. Donohue, president and CEO of the militant Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Donohue pronounced the play "sick beyond words," and began to mobilize, first sending an open letter to McNally requesting that "offensive" material in Corpus Christi be censored out. When Donohue received no immediate response, he unleashed a propaganda barrage.

The Manhattan Theatre Club began receiving hate mail and abusive phone calls. There were at least five death threats, including several from a caller identifying himself as a member of the "National Security Movement of America." The caller's rant was anti-Semitic as well as homophobic, stating that his messages were "for Jew filthy homosexual Terrence McNally," promising that "we will exterminate every member of the theater and burn the place to the ground," and ending with "Death to the Jews worldwide!" On May 21, MTC artistic director Lynne Meadow announced that Corpus Christi had been canceled "for security reasons."

South African playwright Athol Fugard, whose new play The Captain's Tiger was to be part of the MTC's fall season, quickly withdrew his work in protest. "In yielding to the blackmail and threats of the Catholic League," he said, "the theater management has compromised one of the basic freedoms of democracy the freedom of speech and they have done it by censoring themselves and collaborating in the attempt to silence Mr. McNally." Led by Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and PEN International, a potent list of American playwrights signed on to a letter condemning the MTC's "capitulation" to extremists. A number of prominent artists, including gay playwright Jon Robin Baitz (A Fair Country), vowed never to work with the Manhattan Theatre Club again. Other theaters offered to stage the play. On May 28, Meadow announced that the Manhattan Theatre Club had rescinded the cancellation, and that the play would go on as scheduled under police protection.

Donohue, who had vowed to "wage a war that no one will forget" against anyone foolish enough to produce Corpus Christi, was incensed. "The Manhattan Theatre Club is bending to the furor of anti-religious zealots," he fumed. "There is something terribly perverse going on in the artistic community. The need to offend Catholics is so deep and so sick that it can only be described as pathological." Why he is certain that Catholicism is the specific target of McNally's purported blasphemy remains unclear, though McNally is a former Catholic.

An 'offensive' playwright

McNally's work includes Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, The Lisbon Traviata, Master Class, Love! Valour! Compassion!, and the books of several musicals, including Ragtime, for which he recently won his fourth Tony. The Ritz, his 1975 bathhouse farce, was arguably the first overtly queer Broadway hit. Since 1985, most of McNally's recent work has been developed at the Manhattan Theatre Club's City Center facilities on 55th Street. In 1992, a Marietta, Georgia, production of his Lips Together, Teeth Apart inspired right-wing Christians to pull the plug on arts funding in surrounding Cobb County. The Corpus Christi incident is McNally's first run-in with Catholic reactionaries.

The New York Times and other mainstream newspapers persist in identifying the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights as "a Catholic civil rights group," inadvertently supporting the League's efforts to seem representative of mainstream Catholics. The non-profit organization, founded in Milwaukee in 1973 by Jesuit Father Virgil Blum in response to the Supreme Court's pro-choice ruling in Roe v. Wade, has always taken rigorous positions consistent with only the far right wing of the Church hierarchy. According to John O'Brien of Catholics for Free Choice, "The Catholic League is in a league of its own."

Persecution complex

If its own membership figure of 350,000 is accepted at face value, the League represents slightly more than one half of one per cent of America's 60 million Catholics. According to the National Catholic Reporter, however, the League's regular contributors number only about 94,000. It nevertheless has powerful friends, especially among such right-leaning John Paul II appointees as Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law and New York's Cardinal John J. O'Connor.

The organization is profoundly undemocratic and obsessed with persecution. Donohue, a political science professor and former adjunct scholar at the archconservative Heritage Foundation, has led the group since 1993. During his tenure the group has been increasingly focused on efforts to undermine and reshape the First Amendment in the name of fighting "anti-Catholic bigotry." Donohue favors highly visible media campaigns. Recent television shows like Nothing Sacred, That's Life and South Park have occasioned letter-writing campaigns, talk-show blitzes, product boycotts, and a steady stream of polemical press releases.

The League's first high-profile assault on a work of art was directed at the 1985 American release of Jean-Luc Godard's film Hail Mary. Intimidation tactics practiced by the League helped insure that the film would never open in many American cities. The League was also at the center of the maelstrom surrounding Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, and spearheaded the Theocratic Right's Disney boycott with its attack on the gay-themed British film Priest. Until now, the plays it has most aggressively targeted have been by another gay ex-Catholic playwright, Christopher Durang, whose Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You continues to enrage conservative Catholics.

The Catholic League cannot be said fully to represent even the Catholic right, which ranges from the relatively docile Catholic Alliance, the Catholic auxiliary of the Christian Coalition, to violent fringe groups that condone abortion-clinic assassinations. But the homophobia and anti-Semitism that emerged in anonymous calls to the Manhattan Theatre Club are widespread among Catholic reactionaries. Much of the American Catholic right carries on the tradition of Father Charles Coughlin, the notoriously pro-fascist '30s radio demagogue. Many of the most dedicated homophobes of the Theocratic Right are Catholic: Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Buchanan, Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council, and Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, which subsidized the influential work of Jesuit Enrique Rueda, author of the paranoid hate screed The Homosexual Network.

It remains to be seen what shape the "war" that Donohue has promised against Corpus Christi will assume. Meanwhile, the play remains uneasily in development, having achieved the notoriety of Robert Mapplethorpe's XYZ Portfolio without even having been produced. "Now nobody can react to this simply as a play or judge it strictly on its merits," says playwright Neal Bell, a former instructor at New York's Playwrights Horizons. "Whatever effect McNally intended has already been lost."