Pink Flamingos: A Screenplay

“Filth is my politics, filth is my life!”
— Babs Johnson

The script for Pink Flamingos, by John Waters, was published this month as Pink Flamingos: A Screenplay. (It was previously available as part of Trash Trio and Pink Flamingos and Other Filth, collections of three Waters screenplays.) The script begins with a note of self-deprecation, describing “the atrocious voice of the Narrator” — the film was narrated by Waters himself. It ends with a description of the film’s infamous final sequence, involving what was intended to be “a Hungarian sheepdog.”

Pink Flamingos is a masterpiece of bad taste. On its first release in 1972, it was described as obscene and compared to Luis Buñuel’s notoriously shocking silent film Un chien andalou (‘an Andalusian dog’). It remains the ultimate example of transgressive cinema, breaking every cultural taboo, and it’s been shown twice in Thailand: in 2017 at the Bad Taste Café in Bangkok, and in 2023 at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya.

Naya Bharat ('new India')

Indian comedian Kunal Kamra is the subject of a police investigation in the state of Maharashtra after he criticised a politician from the region in his stand-up show Naya Bharat (‘new India’). Kamra performed a few satirical songs during the set, and they appeared with karaoke-style subtitles when he uploaded a video of the show to his YouTube channel on 23rd March. He was charged with defamation on the following day.

The lyrics to one song, a parody of the theme to the Bollywood film Dil To Pagal Hai (‘the heart is crazy’), include the word ‘gaddar’ (‘traitor’), in an oblique reference to politician Eknath Shinde. After footage of the performance circulated online, a mob of Shinde’s supporters ransacked The Habitat, the Mumbai studio where Kamra had recorded the live show. A spokesperson for Shinde’s political party Shiv Sena has called for Kamra’s arrest.

The Habitat was also the venue for another controversial comedy last month, when an episode of the podcast India’s Got Latent was recorded there. A guest on the show, Ranveer Allahbadia, asked a contestant: “Would you rather watch your parents have sex every day for the rest of your life, or would you join in once and stop it forever?” The episode was released on YouTube on 10th February, and multiple police complaints were filed against Allahbadia. India’s Supreme Court described Allahbadia’s question as obscene on 18th February, though it stopped short of filing criminal charges against him.

In a similar case in 2021, Ashutosh Dubey, an adviser to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, filed a legal complaint against comedian Vir Das in relation to a live performance in Washington D.C. Das recited his poem Two Indias at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on 12th November 2021, and uploaded it to YouTube four days later. As he predicted in the words of the poem itself, “I come from an India that will accuse me of airing our dirty laundry”.

Husain: The Timeless Modernist

Police in India were granted a court order yesterday to remove two artworks by the late M.F. Husain from the Delhi Art Gallery. A visitor to the Husain: The Timeless Modernist exhibition made a police complaint on 4th December last year, after being offended by depictions of the gods Ganesha and Hanuman touching nude female figures. The retrospective ran from 26th October to 14th December last year.

The works in question are the ink drawing Untitled (Ganesha) and the serigraph print Untitled (Hanuman). They have not been on display since the exhibition closed. All news reports of the police seizure have described the artworks inaccurately as paintings, and their titles have not been reported elsewhere.

Husain, who died in self-imposed exile in 2011, was India’s greatest modern artist. Hundreds of obscenity charges were filed against him in 2006 after he exhibited his painting Bharat Mata (‘mother India’), though he was exonerated by India’s Supreme Court in 2008.

Pup

Sarawut Intaraprom is a director with a particularly niche claim to fame: he has made the only two films featuring erections that have been passed by Thai censors. Don’t blink during his science-fiction film Father and Son (พ่อและลูกชาย), or you’ll miss an explicit shot lasting only four frames. And in his new film Pup (สุนัข และ เจ้านาย), two characters are seen baring all, in a way that would probably fail the ‘Mull of Kintyre test’ (an unofficial rule applied by the UK film censors, based on a map of the flaccid-looking peninsula).

Pup, rated ‘20’, is being shown at Doc Club and Pub in Bangkok. At its first screening yesterday, three staff from the Ministry of Culture were present to ensure that the cinema was rigourous in verifying patrons’ ages. (Viewers are required to show their ID cards before watching films rated ‘20’, though it’s unusual for the Ministry to supervise this process. Thai Cinema Uncensored discusses these rules, and the history of Thai film censorship, in more detail.)

Other Thai directors have included equally graphic images in their films, though these have always been censored: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Blissfully Yours (สุดเสน่หา) and Tanwarin Sukkhapisit’s Insects in the Backyard (อินเซคอินเดอะแบ็คยาร์ด) were both cut for this reason by the Thai censorship board. (Apichatpong and Tanwarin were interviewed about this in Thai Cinema Uncensored.) Similarly, Ekachai Uekrongtham’s Pleasure Factory (快乐工厂), made in Singapore, was cut for its Thai and Singaporean theatrical releases.

Non-Thai films featuring unsimulated sex have recently been passed uncut by the Thai censors, in another significant relaxation of the censorship rules: Dogtooth (Κυνόδοντας) and Pink Flamingos were both rated ‘20’. Pink Flamingos was screened at the Thai Film Archive in Salaya last year, and Dogtooth will be shown at House Samyan in Bangkok in August.

The first non-pornographic film to show an erection was Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour, which the U.S. Supreme Court declared obscene in 1967. In the 1960s, several artists produced short, experimental hardcore films, the first being Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth in 1962. In the UK, films featuring erections were not initially classified by the BBFC, though screenings were permitted at private cinema clubs in London. One such screening of Flesh at the Open Space Theatre in 1970, was raided by the police.

In the Realm of the Senses (愛のコリーダ) introduced unsimulated sex into arthouse cinema and was, as Linda Williams writes in Screening Sex, “the first example of feature-length narrative cinema anywhere in the world to succeed as both art and pornography”. Hardcore video footage has also been used as a backdrop for several theatrical performances, including Joyce by performance artist Ron Athey, Kimura-san by video artist Tadasu Takamine, XXX by theatre group La Fura dels Baus — all in 2002 — and Kim Noble Will Die by comedian Kim Noble in 2009.

Home

Canadian band Numenorean caused controversy in 2016 by using a post-mortem photograph of a two-year-old girl as the cover for their debut album Home. (On the CD version, the exploitative cover is inside a slipcase.) Kristen MacDonald was killed by her father in 1970, in a well-documented murder case, and the band explained their use of her image in the album’s liner notes: “Perhaps what we are really searching for is the innocence that we once had as a child. However, since we are incapable of ever getting that back, the only place we can perhaps find this comfort once more is in death.”

The first photograph of a dead body on a record cover was perhaps the Dead Kennedys’ single Holiday in Cambodia, released in 1980. The 12" single appropriated Neal Ulevich’s image of a public lynching after the 6th October 1976 massacre. Another notorious lynching appeared on the cover of the Public Enemy single Hazy Shade of Criminal in 1992: Lawrence Beitler’s 1930 photograph of the hangings of J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith in Indiana. (This photo also inspired the writing of Strange Fruit, one of the most powerful protest songs in popular music history.)

There have also been at least three examples of severed heads on album covers, released in consecutive years. Pungent Stench’s 1991 album Been Caught Buttering used Joel-Peter Witkin’s photograph Le baiser (‘the kiss’) — a decapitated head sawn in half, appearing to kiss itself — as its cover image. This was followed in 1992 by Naked City’s Grand Guignol album cover, which features a photograph of a decapitated head from the Stanley Burns archive of medical imagery. Then, in 1993, Brujeria bought the reproduction rights to a photo of the head of a murder victim from the Mexican tabloid magazine ¡Alarma! (‘warning!’), for the cover of their album Matando Güeros (‘killing whiteys’).

UK goregrind band Carcass used montages of autopsy photographs as the covers for their albums Reek of Putrefaction in 1988 and Symphonies of Sickness a year later, both of which were seized when police raided Earache Records in 1991. The raid was prompted by the earlier seizure of cover art for the Pain Killer album Guts of a Virgin. That image — an autopsy photo of a woman with her intestines exposed, in a tasteless pun on the album title — was destroyed by customs as potentially obscene. (The uncensored photo was used for the Japanese CD release.) Clearly, goregrind record sleeves are as gross as their titles, and Last Days of Humanity’s albums, such as Hymns of Indigestible Suppuration from 2000, are particularly nauseating examples.

Boiled Angels:The Trial of Mike Diana

In 1994, cartoonist Mike Diana was convicted of producing and distributing obscene material, after Florida police obtained copies of his zine Boiled Angel (no. 7–8). Its twisted humour was certainly provocative — zine bible Factsheet Five described it as “designed to turn your stomach” — though this was precisely Diana’s intention. As he says in the excellent documentary Boiled Angels: The Trial of Mike Diana: “My goal was to make the most offensive zine ever made.”

Following the guilty verdict, Diana was denied bail. After four days in custody, he was fined $3,000 and sentenced to 1,248 hours of community service. The documentary, by horror director Frank Henenlotter, features interviews with Diana, his family, and the defence and prosecution attorneys. It’s a thorough recounting of Diana’s trial, and it also gives plenty of historical background on the Comics Code and the underground comix movement.

Diana’s case was very similar to that of Mark Laliberté, whose comic zine Headtrip (no. 1–2) was accused of obscenity in Canada. Laliberté and Diana had traded zines, and Laliberté’s copies of Boiled Angel were also cited in the Headtrip obscenity trial. The failure to secure a conviction in Canada perhaps made the US authorities all the more eager to prosecute Diana in Florida. (At least, that’s what Laliberté alleges in the documentary.)

Although Diana is the only artist ever convicted of obscenity in the US, there have been other prosecutions of comic art. Booksellers in New York were fined for stocking Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix (specifically the ‘family values’ parody Joe Blow in no. 4; charges against Zap’s publishers, the Print Mint, were later dropped). In a similar case in the State of Washington, booksellers were prosecuted in relation to Jim Goad’s zine Answer Me! (no. 4, with a cover illustration by Mike Diana), though they were eventually acquitted.

There have also been a handful of obscenity cases against comics in the UK. Charges against Oz magazine (no. 28) and the Nasty Tales comic (no. 1) were both related to Robert Crumb cartoons, and Crumb’s book My Troubles with Women was seized by customs in 1996. (In all three cases, the charges were eventually dropped or overturned.) David Britton was found guilty on obscenity charges relating to his novel Lord Horror and his comic Meng and Ecker (no. 1); the charge against the novel was overturned on appeal, though the conviction of the comic was upheld.

Ulysses

This year marks the centenary of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses, which was first published in Paris in 1922. The book was officially banned in the UK and the US for more than a decade, declared obscene by customs officers on both sides of the Atlantic. (The US ban even predated the novel’s Paris publication, as the editors of the literary magazine The Little Review were convicted of obscenity in 1921 after serialising it.)

Random House sought to publish an American edition, and imported a copy from Paris to test the waters in 1932. The following year, New York City District Court judge John M. Woolsey ruled that the book was not obscene, leaving Random House free to publish it in the US. In his summing up, the judge argued that the novel was disgusting rather than titillating: “whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” (The same argument was made by the Appeals Court judge in the Oz obscenity trial almost forty years later.)

Despite having read only forty-two pages of the novel, the UK’s Director of Public Prosecutions, Archibald Bodkin, dismissed it as “a great deal of unmitigated filth and obscenity.” All copies brought into the UK were therefore confiscated by customs, until Bodley Head — encouraged by the US verdict — released a British edition in 1936. No longer imported from overseas and seized under the Customs Consolidation Act, the book was henceforth subject to the Obscene Publications Act, which has a higher burden of proof. The Attorney-General, David Somervell, advised that such a conviction would be unlikely, and the Bodley Head edition faced no legal challenge from the government.

The next landmark cases in US and UK obscenity law both came in the late 1950s. Samuel Roth was jailed in 1957 after the US Supreme Court ruled that his quarterly book series American Aphrodite (vol. 1, no. 3), published in 1951, was obscene. The case set a precedent as the judgement redefined obscenity as material which “taken as a whole appeals to the prurient interest”, thus preventing courts from convicting literature based on isolated extracts. Similarly, in 1959 the UK’s Obscene Publications Act added a stipulation that any material under scrutiny be considered in whole rather than in part. This led directly to the acquittal of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960.

No Love Deep Web

No Love Deep Web has one of the most provocative covers of any album: an uncensored photograph of an aroused phallus. Specifically, the organ belongs to Zach Hill, the drummer from the band Death Grips, and the record was released in 2013. (The album was rereleased in 2020 with a plain slipcase.) Frontal nudity on record sleeves is very rare, and this is the first and only erection on an album cover.

Perhaps the closest equivalent is the explicit H.R. Giger painting Penis Landscape, which was issued as a poster with the Dead Kennedys’ LP Frankenchrist. After a fourteen-year-old girl bought that album in California, her mother made a police complaint, and the record label was charged with distributing harmful material to minors. (Coincidentally, another music-related obscenity case was also unwittingly instigated by a fourteen-year-old girl: the daughter of a Canadian police officer bought the Dayglo Abortions albums Here Today Guano Tomorrow and Feed Us a Fetus, and her father filed an obscenity charge.)

“Conspiracy to corrupt public morals...”

Alfred Barrett’s lonely hearts magazine The Link, founded in 1915, was certainly ahead of its time. It published personal ads, though as its masthead proudly proclaimed, they were “NOT MATRIMONIAL” in nature. So if people weren’t looking for a spouse, what could they be looking for...? The Metropolitan Police pondered that very question, after R.A. Bennett — editor of another magazine, the moralistic Truth — sent copies of The Link to Scotland Yard.

Bennett suspected that some of The Link’s classified ads were coded messages written by gay men. One example, which he underlined with a literal blue pencil, was by someone “anxious to correspond with friend. Must be same sex, affectionate, and amiable”. Homosexuality was illegal in Britain at the time, and the police seized not only copies of The Link but also letters sent to the box numbers advertised. Barrett was convicted of conspiracy to corrupt public morals in 1921, and sentenced to two years’ hard labour.

Forty years later, in 1961, another publisher was convicted of the same offence. Frederick Shaw’s Ladies Directory, founded in 1959, was a catalogue of ads placed by prostitutes (the equivalent of the ‘tart cards’ left in phone boxes). Shaw himself had sent his publication to the Director of Public Prosecutions, seeking guidance on its legality. He got his answer when the DPP charged him with conspiracy to corrupt public morals, and after his conviction he served nine months in prison. The charge — which set a legal precedent — related specifically to no. 7–10 of the Ladies Directory. (My copy of no. 8 is an undated and unpaginated A5 booklet.)

In 1965, Way Out led a revival of the lonely hearts magazine, and soon inspired imitators such as Exit and numerous others. In his authoritative Encyclopedia of Censorship, Jonathon Green noted that these titles “were not prosecuted, and more respectable magazines began to run lonely hearts columns that might have been indictable in earlier years.” H.G. Cocks, however, in his book Classified: The Secret History of the Personal Column, demonstrates that these titles were indeed prosecuted for conspiracy to corrupt public morals: “The way the police in Britain investigated smalltime magazines like Exit and Way Out while their American counterparts merely shrugged as their own swinging industry exploded, tells us everything about the differences between the two countries.” (Classified’s coverage of the investigation into Exit and Way Out sets it apart from other books on censorship in Britain.)

The last major UK conviction for consiracy to corrupt public morals came in 1970, when three publishers of the underground magazine International Times received suspended sentences. In 1969 (issues 51–56), IT published a column of gay personal ads (Males), and this gave the Metropolitan Police the excuse they needed to prosecute the magazine, after several previous speculative raids on its offices. In an echo of the investigation into The Link fifty years earlier, and notwithstanding the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967, the police seized hundreds of letters sent in reply to the ads. The editors of a more famous underground title, Oz, were acquitted of conspiracy to corrupt public morals in 1971, though after a prolonged trial they were found guilty of obscenity (a verdict later overturned on appeal).

Although corrupting public morals is now an outdated offence in the UK, it remains a serious crime in countries such as Egypt. I 2017, Egyptian television presenter Doaa Salah was sentenced to three years in prison for outraging public decency, after she advocated single motherhood on her variety TV show مع دودي (‘with Doaa’). In an episode broadcast by Al Nahar on 28th July 2017, she delivered a tongue-in-cheek monologue recommending women to visit sperm banks, become pregnant before marriage, or enter into short-term marriages of convenience.

Similarly, another Egyptian TV presenter was jailed for one year in 2019, after being found guilty of inciting immorality. Mohamed al-Ghiety’s satellite TV talk show صح النوم (‘wake up’), featured a gay man discussing his sex life in an episode transmitted on 5th August 2018. (The man&rsuo;s face was blurred to disguise his identity.) The broadcaster, LTC TV, was suspended for a fortnight after the programme was aired.

School Kids Oz

Fifty years ago today, Britain’s longest obscenity trial came to an end, and the editors of Oz magazine all received custodial sentences. Richard Neville was sentenced to fifteen months in jail, James Anderson received a one-year sentence, and Felix Dennis was sentenced to nine months. Their crime? To allow schoolchildren to edit an issue (no. 28) of the underground counter-culture magazine Oz. The School Kids Oz conviction was a (temporary) impediment to the ‘permissive society’ that had been initiated by the mass-market paperback publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960, of which prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones famously asked the jury: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?”

The Oz trial began on 22nd June 1971, and ended six weeks later with a withering summing up by the judge, Michael Argyle. When the jury asked him for guidance on the legal interpretation of obscenity, Argyle simply read out a dictionary definition, thus equating obscenity with indecency. (In fact, as per the Obscene Publications Act, obscenity in law requires a tendency to deprave and corrupt.) This “substantial and serious misdirection to the jury on the question of obscenity” was noted by the Appeals Court judge, David Widgery, who quashed the obscenity convictions.

Censored!Stage, Screen, Society at 50

Theatre censorship in the UK was abolished fifty years ago, and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is marking the anniversary with Censored! Stage, Screen, Society at 50, an exhibition devoted to UK censorship. The exhibition covers theatre, film, music, and media censorship, with exhibits including the 3rd June 1976 issue of Gay News (no. 96, containing James Kirkup’s poem The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name about a Roman centurion’s sex with Christ after the crucifiction) and the ‘School Kids’ issue of Oz (no. 28, which was the subject of a long-running obscenity trial in 1971). Censored! opened on 10th July, and runs until 27th January next year.

Denis Lemon, editor of Gay News, was convicted of blasphemous libel in 1977, following a private prosecution instigated by Mary Whitehouse. A handful of socialist magazines — Anarchist Worker (no. 33, February 1977), Peace News (28th January 1977), Liberator (January 1977), and Freedom (23rd July 1977) — reprinted Kirkup’s poem in solidarity. It was also included as a single-page insert in the 14th July 1977 issue of Socialist Challenge (no. 6), and was reprinted in the San Franciso magazine Gay Sunshine (no. 38–39, Winter 1979). The socialist journal Gay Left (no. 5, Winter 1977) published extracts from the poem, along with an ambivalent analysis: “It is a rather silly poem. It is at times an amusing poem. It is from start to finish an extremely “literary” poem.” Inoffensive extracts also appeared in The Observer (on 17th July 1977), which coyly explained that “the centurion kissed Christ’s body.”

Geoffrey Robertson was a defence barrister in the 1977 trial, and his memoir The Justice Game includes lengthy extracts from the poem, including one stanza “which the judge suggested was so profane not even I would read it aloud”. Reflecting on this, Robertson writes: “after two decades, I wonder whether the reason I could not read it was the awfulness of the poetry rather than the grossness of the blasphemy.” Alan Travis included the same extracts in Bound and Gagged, his history of obscenity, and they are also reprinted in A Voyage Round John Mortimer, Valerie Grove’s biography of the barrister who defended Gay News in court.

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the prosecution revived interest in the case. An analysis in Gay Times (no. 270, March 2001) dismissed any potential literary merit: “The poem itself is tawdry and insignificant.” The Guardian (11th July 2002) was equally dismissive: “as a poem, it’s feeble in the extreme.” Joan Bakewell recited extracts from it in an episode of her BBC2 documentary series Taboo (broadcast on 12th December 2001), and the socialist magazine Weekly Worker (no. 423, 14th March 2002) defended her right to do so. (Extracts later appeared in the Channel 4 documentary The Secret Life of Brian, broadcast on New Year’s Day 2007.) The Weekly Worker reprinted the first four stanzas, though declined to offer any literary criticism: “Whether or not it is a good poem or bad poem I will leave to the reader to decide.”

攻占

The Chinese author of 攻占, a homoerotic novel about an affair between a teacher and his student, has been jailed for ten years. The book was published anonymously last year, and 7,000 copies were sold online. Under Chinese obscenity law, an extended jail term can be imposed for the distribution of more than 5,000 copies of pornographic materials.

Censored

French photographer Tiane Doan na Champassak's book Censored features more than 4,000 photographs taken from 1970s Thai softcore magazines such as Siam's Guy (สยามหนุ่ม). The book was published last month, and is available with six different cover designs.

The nudity in the images is self-censored (hence the book's title), to conform to the Thai obscenity law, though the book celebrates this censorship as a creative act in itself. The magazines employed artists to draw symbols and shapes over the models' erogenous zones, and the book crops the photos to focus on these painted and stencilled graphics. (Ironically, some pictures are censored with cigarette packets, which are themselves subject to censorship today.)

Thai erotic magazines are still prohibited from publishing frontal nudity, and they are occasionally withdrawn if they go too far. (For example, sales of Cute magazine were suspended in 2007.) Similarly, Thai television routinely censors nudity, guns, alcohol, and cigarettes by blurring parts of the screen, a technique parodied at the start of the comedy film SARS Wars: Bangkok Zombie Crisis (ขุนกระบี่ผีระบาด).

Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures

Mapplethorpe: Look At The Pictures is the first feature-length documentary on the life and work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died in 1989. The film is an HBO production, and was first broadcast on 4th April 2016. (In the UK, it was shown on BBC2, as part of the Imagine... series, on 29th July 2017.) Its directors, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, previously collaborated on the documentary Inside Deep Throat.

The film's subtitle is taken from a speech on the Senate floor made by Jesse Helms in 1989: "I want Senators to come over here, if they have any doubt, and look at the pictures." Helms was campaigning against National Endowment for the Arts funding for exhibitions by Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, amongst others, and he showed Mapplethorpe's Man In Polyester Suit (1980) and Serrano's Piss Christ (1987) in the Senate. When the posthumous Mapplethorpe retrospective The Perfect Moment opened at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati later that year, the Center's director was charged with exhibiting obscene images, though he was ultimately acquitted.

The makers of Look At The Pictures were given complete access to the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation's archive. Consequently, the fascinating documentary includes hundreds of previously unseen photographs by Mapplethorpe, and audio extracts from interviews with him. He tells one interviewer: "The work dealing with sexuality is very directly related to my own experiences. It was an area that hadn't been explored in contemporary art, and so it's an area that interested me in terms of making my statement." Many of Mapplethorpe's surviving friends, lovers, and family members participated in the film, with the notable exception of Patti Smith.

Mapplethorpe's most notorious work was a series of thirteen photographs known as the X Portfolio: Scott, NYC (1978); Self-Portrait (1978); Cedric, NYC (1977); Patrice, NYC (1977); Joe, NYC (1978); Jim, Sausalito (1977); Helmut, NYC (1978); John, NYC (1978); Lou, NYC (1978); Helmut & Brooks, NYC (1978); Jim & Tom, Sausalito (1977); Ken, NYC (1978); and Dick, NYC (1978). The Cincinnati obscenity charges related to five of these pictures (Self-Portrait; Jim & Tom, Sausalito; Helmut & Brooks, NYC; Lou, NYC; and John, NYC) and two photographs of naked children (Jessie McBride and Rosie, both from 1976).

Look At The Pictures misrepresents the Cincinnati case by mistakenly claiming that Joe, NYC was included in the list of photographs being prosecuted. More contentiously, the film omits any mention of Jessie McBride or Rosie, which were presumably deemed too sensitive to include in the documentary. These two images were included in a Channel 4 documentary, Damned In The USA, broadcast on 27th September 1991. Rosie, from Mapplethorpe's book Certain People (1985), is especially controversial, and is not included in later Mapplethorpe monographs; it was removed from a Hayward Gallery exhibition in London in 1996 on police advice.

Still Brazy

Still Brazy, the latest album by rapper YG, has been censored by its distributor, Def Jam. The tracks FDT (Fuck Donald Trump, featuring Nipsey Hussle) and Blacks and Browns (featuring Sad Boy) both contained lyrics suggesting that Donald Trump could (or should) be shot, and those lines were removed before the album was released.

There were two deletions from FDT: YG's line "Surprised El Chapo ain't tried to snipe you" and Nipsey Hussle's "you gone prolly get smoked" were removed. One of Sad Boy's lines from Blacks and Browns was replaced by white noise, to highlight the censorship.

YG and Nipsey Hussle performed a clean version of FDT on the Comedy Central programme The Nightly Show on 22nd July, without any swear words, though ironically they did include the lines censored from the album. Also, when YG and Nipsey Hussle perform the song in concert, they play the uncensored version.

The uncensored version of FDT was released online in April, in advance of the album. According to YG, the Secret Service then contacted Def Jam's parent company, Universal, requesting a copy of the album's lyrics. YG says that the references to shooting Trump were removed by the record company at the request of the Secret Service.

The record company has not commented on the issue, and by definition the Secret Service is also unlikely to make any public comment. Thus, there is no way to verify YG's version of events. The album was certainly censored prior to its release, though YG's explanation about the Secret Service seems exaggerated.

The only album to be declared illegal in America was The 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be (1989), which was convicted of obscenity in Florida. Ironically, when the band released a self-censored version of the album, As Clean As They Wanna Be, they were taken to court again, this time for copyright infringement over an unauthorised sample of Roy Orbison’s Oh, Pretty Woman. The case set a legal precedent, with the Supreme Court ruling that parody constituted fair use.

In the UK, there have been a handful of police investigations into albums and singles. Thousands of copies of NWA's album Efil4zaggin were seized by customs and released several months later after a failed obscenity prosecution. The same fate befell Dismember's album Like an Everflowing Stream, 800 copies of which — en route from Germany — were also seized by customs. (In both cases, the albums were confiscated under the Customs Consolidation Act, a Victorian statute prohibiting the importation of obscene or indecent material.) Bata Motel, a track on the Crass album Penis Envy, was convicted under the Obscene Publications Act after a raid by Greater Manchester Police. So What?, the B-side to the Anti-Nowhere League's single Streets Of London, was also convicted of obscenity.

A Poem For Erdoğan

The Spectator, a weekly UK news magazine, has launched a "President Erdoğan Insulting Poetry Competition", with a £1,000 prize for the most offensive poem written about President Erdoğan of Turkey. According to the rules, drawn up by Douglas Murray, "all entries must be (a) wholly defamatory and (b) utterly obscene."

The competition, announced in the magazine's current issue (dated 23rd April), was inspired by recent attempts to prosecute German comedian Jan Boehmermann, who recited a poem mocking Erdoğan on 31st March. The deadline for entries is 23rd June, timed to coincide with the UK's referendum on its membership of the European Union.

Shunga

Shunga: Sex & Pleasure In Japanese Art opened in 2013 at the British Museum in London, and was the world's largest exhibition of shunga works. The 500-page exhibition catalogue, edited by Timothy Clark, C Andrew Gerstle, Aki Ishigami, and Akiko Yano, is the most comprehensive book on shunga. ('Shunga' literally translates as 'Spring pictures', a euphemistic description for this genre of erotic and pornographic Japanese illustrations produced throughout the Edo period.)

The catalogue begins with a detailed introduction by Timothy Clark and C Andrew Gerstle, who compare the fantasies depicted in shunga to the "pornotopia" described by Steven Marcus in The Other Victorians. Edo Japan and Victorian Britain were both seemingly conservative societies, though they were also prolific producers of pornography. (Even in contemporary Japan, there is a separation between public reserve and private consumption of sometimes extreme imagery.)

Shunga was produced as emaki (scrolls) and illustrated books, and even as shikake-e (early examples of paper engineering), though it was most often associated with ukiyo-e (woodblock prints, known as 'images of the floating world'). An essay by Ishigami Aki demonstrates that shunga was influenced by the Chinese 'chunhua' genre of sex-education manuals. (Thus, like origami and bonsai, shunga is another apparently Japanese tradition that actually originated in China.)

Katsushika Hokusai, whose Great Wave is the most celebrated ukiyo-e print, also produced "perhaps the most famous of all shunga images", Kinoe No Komatsu (1814). (This illustration of a woman being pleasured by an octopus was also included in the Barbican's Seduced exhibition.)

In the introduction, Kitagawa Utamaro is described as "arguably the greatest shunga artist of all," and an essay by Kobayashi Tadashi cites Utamaro and Torii Kiyonaga as "two artists who were the most remarkable in the whole history of shunga". Tadashi writes that Utamaro's Utamakura (1788) and Kiyonaga's Sode No Maki (1785) "vie for the title of greatest shunga masterpiece" though Kiyonaga's work "should surely be placed at the summit of achievement among all Japanese shunga."

Jennifer Preston discusses the censorship of shunga in the Edo period. Nishikawa Sukenobu's Fufu Narabi No Oka (1714) was the first shunga to be suppressed: "the courtly references in the work, such as details of the imperial palace, came to the attention of the authorities and Sukenobu was severely punished." Sukenobu's Hyakunin Joro Shinasadame (1723) was also banned. Later, the illustrated book Ehon Taikoki and Utamaro's Taiko Gosai Rakuto Yukan No Zu were both banned in 1804. Novelists Santo Kyoden and Tamenaga Shunsui were manacled for fifty days (in 1791 and 1842 respectively).

Censorship of shunga began again in the twentieth century. Ishigami Aki recounts the 1960 obscenity charges against Hayashi Yoshikazu's book Ehon Kenkyu, Kunisada (a historical study of shunga). Yoshikazu was convicted after a thirteen-year trial, though when he updated the book in 1989, as Edo Makura-eshi Shusei, it was published uncensored.

The catalogue features more than 400 illustrations, with some fold-out pages. It also includes biographies of shunga artists, with names and titles printed in Japanese kanji, and an extensive bibliography. Timon Screech, author of the first academic study of shunga (Sex & The Floating World, 1999), also contributes an essay to the catalogue. Richard Lane's Images From The Floating World (1978), the classic study of ukiyo-e prints, includes several examples of shunga.

Diorthosi

On 21st November, police in Cyprus removed photographs from an art exhibition and charged the organisers with exhibiting obscene material. Diorthosi, an exhibition of photographs by Paola Revenioti, opened at the Old Municipal Market in Nicosia on 20th November, and was scheduled to run for three consecutive evenings.

Photography Will Be

An exhibition at the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art has been censored by police in Japan. Photography Will Be includes photographs by Ryudai Takano depicting himself and various male models posing nude. The photos were initially exhibited uncensored, despite Japanese obscenity laws prohibiting frontal nudity, though some visitors complained to the police.

On 13th August, instead of removing the twelve photographs (from a series titled おれと), the Museum draped translucent white sheets over them to partially obscure the nudity. Of course, this has also drawn attention to the censorship. The exhibition opened on 1st August, and runs until 28th September.

ေအာင္ရင္ၿငိမ္း

An erotic novel, ေအာင္ရင္ၿငိမ္း by Aung Ying Nyein, has been banned in Burma. The novel, set in a world of 'romanbots' (romance robots), was withdrawn from sale by its publisher, Pinlae Thit, after pressure from the government. The author is now facing obscenity charges.