Where the Culture Wars Began

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we're going to talk to the author of a new history of the American so-called Culture Wars.
Far from over, of course, a CNN headline from last week, Americans are divided on culture war issues, a new CNN poll finds, as if they needed to tell you that. In some ways, it was ever thus, right? But culture historian Isaac Butler argues that the techniques developed by the right, particularly in the last decades of the 20th century are key to understanding what's happening today and worth knowing the history of. His new book is The Perfect Moment, God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars. You may know him from his work in podcasts, his substack, his previous books on theater history, the method, and the world only spins forward, the ascent of angels in America.
Hello, Isaac Butler, welcome back to WNYC.

**Isaac Butler** (1:06)
Thank you so much for having me, Brian. It's amazing to hear your voice actually talking to me.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:12)
Oh, thanks. So you date this perfect moment, as you call it, as running from 1986 through the end of the Cold War to the start of the War on Terror after 9-11. Why that period?

**Isaac Butler** (1:27)
Well, that is the first time that these kinds of political conflicts over American culture are explicitly called the culture wars. And so I thought it would be really fascinating to like look at that exact period and figure out, well, what was it? What was going on? How did it work? What were its causes? What were its effects? And one thing that I quickly discovered is that a number of different factors were intersecting kind of all at the same time. So you have the religious right trying to increase its power both within the Republican Party and the country at large. You have the Cold War is about to end at the beginning of it, and then it really ends.
You have the AIDS crisis and the fight for LGBTQ freedom and liberation. And then you also have on top of that, this really fascinating transition going on in our society where what we call the post-war consensus is completely breaking down and dissolving, and Americans lose the ability to agree on a lot of different issues that most of us agreed on for many years after World War II.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:40)
Right. Though we could certainly argue that the so-called culture war was in full swing as early as the 1960s, right? The backlash to hippie counterculture or whatever you want to call it, the Civil Rights Movement is kind of part of that.
Women's Lib, as they called it in the early 70s, the environmental movement of that period, right? But something was going on in the mid-80s that you particularly wanted to pinpoint.

**Isaac Butler** (3:06)
Yes. What I really wanted to pinpoint was this specific conflict between the religious right and American artists with the federal government kind of caught in the middle. You know, about what kind of a country we were going to be, what our arts and culture are for, what the government's place in funding and supporting the arts are, and also about, you know, a lot of that fight from the religious rights perspective was very specifically about tamping down on LGBTQ expression during the AIDS crisis. And I was really fascinated by that conflict and how artists and their allies fought back.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:45)
Right. And of course Stonewall dates to 1969

**Isaac Butler** (3:49)
Yeah, total.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:49)
AIDS really flourished in the early 80s and through the 80s. And the title of your book, The Perfect Moment, comes from the name of the retrospective show of the artist Robert Mapplethorpe that was at the heart of one of the skirmishes in the 1980s culture wars, remind us or introduce people to what was at stake with that show, which came to the center of attention when it was open at the Corcoran Gallery or about to open at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington in 1989

**Isaac Butler** (4:21)
So basically, you know, Robert Mapplethorpe is one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. He is not single handedly, but one of the major figures responsible for the fact that we take photography on its own terms as seriously as a real art form. And early in his career, he shot a number of photos of people displaying their S&M fetishes. You know, there's one of a man urinating in another's mouth, for example, that people were pretty upset by.
And so there was a retrospective work, sorry, a posthumous retrospective of his work that was due to come to Washington, DC to the Corcoran Gallery of Art. And that show had received direct funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. And so the religious right and its key ally in the Senate, Jesse Helms, saw this as an opportunity to really pounce. And because the photographs were so upsetting to so many people, to really use it to beat up on the NEA and to try to reign the National Endowment for the Arts in. And one of the reasons why it became such a huge issue, why The Perfect Moment became The Perfect Moment, is the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which doesn't exist anymore, was like two blocks away from the Capitol. It was really a stone's throw from Congress. And the head, the then head of the Corcoran, canceled the show under political pressure. And it moved from the Corcoran to this much scrappier artist led organization called The Washington Project for the Arts, which full disclosure, my mother joined the board of the WPA in the midst of this. And so that was like one of the first times that a museum had bowed to political pressure like that and canceled the show. And it really meant that, you know, the symbol was or the question was, is the art establishment, is the kind of centrist establishment art institutions, are they actually signing on to this? Are they saying that bowing under political pressure and centering artists is okay?