CENSORSHIP: A CANADIAN COMPLEX
[Published: San Francisco Examiner, 1994-02-21]
Books by San Francisco writers Susie Bright and Pat Califia, as well as publications like Taste of Latex and Bad Attitude are to this day subject to seizure by zealous Canadian customs agents. Their concern with denying entry to sexually-explicit materials has even led to the confiscation of books by the anti-pornography feminist writer Andrea Dworkin.
In one memorable assault on culture, the Ontario Board of Censors banned the film made of Günter Grass's novel The Tin Drum. Owing to a scene that showed the prepubescent narrator watching an adult couple having sex, it was suppressed as child pornography.
A recent visit to Canada, after more than a decade of living in the U.S., brought me up to date on this penchant for protecting the people from dangerous images and ideas.
Now even the Canadian media have to toe the line. The judge banned detailed coverage (and barred foreign journalists from the courtroom) in the murder trial of Karla Homolka. She and her husband, Paul Teale (who has still to be tried in court) are the defendants in a grisly series of sex-and-torture killings in Southern Ontario. Their crimes have been dubbed the Barbie-Ken murders, in reference to the accused being an attractive middle-class couple in their 20s. The press ban was issued in an effort to ensure a fair trial for Teale, and to spare the families of the victims.
Homolka was sentenced last Fall to 12 years in prison for her role in the abductions, torture and murder of two teen-aged girls. It is also suspected that she procured her 14-year old sister for her husband as a Christmas present in 1990. Her sister did not survive the ordeal; her death was at the time ruled accidental by the coroner, but since Homolka's trial the body has been exhumed for further investigation.
So far, the Canadian media have complied with the press ban, albeit with some grumbling. The Washington Post and the American televison show A Current Affair were the first to air the details of the murders; copies of U.S. newspapers that carry this information have been seized at the border.
In the global village, a ban of this type is no longer tenable; despite the blackout by Canadian news organizations, in an age of computer bulletin boards and television satellite dishes, people are going to find out what they want to know regardless of a court order.
During my visit over the holidays, I was pleased to see that the New Zealand film The Piano is allowed to be shown untampered with by the authorities. Ten years ago, it could have met the same fate as The Tin Drum, branded as child-pornography.
This one good omen, however, does not an enlightenment make. Shortly before Christmas, a young artist named Eli Langer had 5 paintings and 35 drawings confiscated from the Mercer Union art gallery by the Toronto Police Morality Bureau.
The artist will be the first person tried under a new anti-child pornography law (Bill C-128) that was rushed through by the Conservative government a few months before they were voted out ofoffice last October. This law prohibits the making, possession and display to public view of material showing explicit sexual activity of people under 18, with a possible sentence of 10 years in jail. The gallery's paid employee has also been charged.
Although the law specifically exempts works of artistic merit, or with scientific, medical or educational value, the burden of proof to refute the judgment of the morality police now rests with the accused.
This seizure might recall the FBI confiscation of the pictures of San Francisco photographer Jock Sturges a few years ago. Sturges's pictures showed naked children; whether one saw innocence or eroticism, exploitation or appreciation, was in the eye of the beholder. No charges were ever filed against Sturges.
In Eli Langer's work, children are shown with adults in various positions that suggest sodomy, fellatio, and masturbation—the critical distinction here is that that no models were used (or abused), the pictures came from Langer's imagination. Even if one finds the subject matter repulsive or objectionable, it is the function of art to represent different, and frequently difficult realities.
Recent studies have shown child abuse to be endemic in both the U.S. and Canada. By clamping down on reportage of the Homolka-Teale cases, and seizing Eli Langer's work, the guardians of Canadian society are shooting the messenger rather than dealing openly with troubling and pervasive social ills.