Sarah J Stanley: Thou Shalt Not Make Art

Now, I’m no shock artist. I never set out to offend, although being nice isn’t exactly my art-making agenda. Yet recently, two pieces of artwork in an exhibition I opened in Glasgow’s Merchant City were censored. After some complaints, I was asked by the powers that be in the studio complex in which I work to cover or change the works. Of course, I wasn’t going to change the work, so after a bit of a fight, I made signs to cover them. Maybe I should have taken the whole show down, but I wanted to make a point I suppose.

It’s worth exploring why these two pieces were a problem for people to look at, the content considered too explicit. One culprit, titled ‘Staring at this dot will de-gay you I promise’ was in the firing line. But the way I see it, everyone should be happy with this artwork. I don’t understand what kind of camp the complaint about this piece comes from. If you’re gay, surely you notice something maladjusted with my ability to be homophobic? If you’re anti-gay, just get all the filthy gays to stare at the dot and the world is sorted, right?

I grew up with all the Christian superstitions and demonisations you can imagine (and likely more). I used to be a gay person lying to themselves in an effort to please the church I had been brought up in involuntarily. Thank goodness I got out of its cult-clutch. I don’t want you to think I had some sort of old-fangled experience of Christianity either. No, I saw the modern Pentecostal, happy clappy, speaking in tongues, all-healing, all-dancing church. It was a money-hungry and recruitment mad false hope machine.

After puberty I knew I had to find myself either cures or boundaries to fix my ‘problem.’ I received terrible advice from my church, including being told to ‘just let him’ and ‘eventually you’ll get used to it’ in reference to the marital sex I didn’t want to have. It didn’t help that no one advised me not to get into that situation in the first place, like you’d expect someone who cared to do. Advice like this is not only useless, it’s the facilitator to abusive behaviour perpetuated by a patriarchy installed in the very core nature and culture of church life. 

If you thought de-gaying therapies were just for documentaries on American bible belters you’re wrong. It’s going on right now in the UK. People being told they are mentally ill, have mummy and daddy issues, aren’t gay at all. At best they may be allowed to acknowledge they have some same-sex attraction, but be told it doesn’t mean they can’t get married and have kids (in a heterosexual monogamous relationship). You never know, you might even find you can force an attraction for things; for example, the opposite sex... but I’m convinced it’s a road to insanity.

I’ve met people who are gay and yet live a life of lying and trying to get fixed so as not to rock the Noah’s ark of their massive Christianity. It’s cripplingly sad. Those who thought the piece was homophobic missed the point exceptionally. Please go and do your own research on xtian de-gaying therapies – I hope you’re suitably appalled.

All of Christendom that believes gay people have struggles because they’re battling God’s perfect plan for them can fuck off. The struggles come from how extremely hard it is to be gay, especially if you’re attempting to change yourself intrinsically because you need to become ‘better.’  I now take the moral stance that lying about who you really are is the real blasphemy.

The other piece in the show that was censored was titled ‘church of rape.’ That topic is another few thousand words or so and I’ll leave it for another time. But, it wasn’t the pieces entitled ‘fuck off yes you’ or ‘pay your tithes you creepy fuckers’ that were singled out in the show as the offenders. It was the idea of a church full of rapists (which of course is not what I meant) that was too much for people. 

I’m not apologising for a second for the work I made. If anything it’s provided an opportunity to talk about the offensive and the poorly thought out views of those who still think it’s okay to try and ‘fix’ someone’s sexuality. And it’s not. It’s wrong. Just like censoring art.