ABSTRACT
The government is using homophobia again as an instrument of social control. We need to focus on homophobia and not on "saving the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)." The organized arts community has a lot of soul searching to do about its own history of exclusion. Before Helms, many other biases existed in the funding and presentation of artwork. For any minority artist, part of being admitted to the reward system is that while the benefits are great for the individual, the price for the community is tokenism. Some of the gay men currently involved in the NEA scandal participated in that exclusion. Lesbians were not reviewed in mainstream publications, were not presented in prominent art venues and almost never received funding for explicitly lesbian projects. Through the new tokenism, a few political and apolitical sensibilities are permitted to be contained within the dominant culture. Individuals are even easier than political movements to contain.
