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    ‘These guys are idiots’: Sean Penn and Dustin Lance Black call out government’s Harvey Milk erasure

    Sean Penn, the Oscar-winning actor of the 2008 Harvey Milk biopic Milk and Milk writer Dustin Lance Black have spoken out against US defense secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to remove the gay rights icon’s name from a navy ship.“This is yet another move to distract and to fuel the culture wars that create division,” Black told the Hollywood Reporter in a phone call on Wednesday. “It’s meant to get us to react in ways that are self-centered so that we are further distanced from our brothers and sisters in equally important civil rights fights in this country. It’s divide and conquer.”Penn, who won his second best actor Oscar for playing the former San Francisco supervisor, added in an email: “I’ve never before seen a Secretary of Defense so aggressively demote himself to the rank of Chief PETTY Officer.”The order to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, christened in San Diego in 2021 for the prominent gay rights and navy veteran, was part of an internal memo that was leaked on Tuesday. The Pentagon’s chief spokesperson confirmed that the ship’s new name “will be announced after internal reviews are complete”.The timing of the decision for mid-June, a month meant to celebrate the LGBTQ+ community, was reportedly intentional. The renaming is supposed to ensure “alignment with president and SECDEF objectives and SECNAV priorities of reestablishing the warrior culture”, referring to Donald Trump, Hegseth and navy secretary John Phelan, according to the memorandum.“Secretary Hegseth is committed to ensuring that the names attached to all DOD installations and assets are reflective of the commander in chief’s priorities, our nation’s history and the warrior ethos,” the Pentagon said in a statement.“These guys are idiots,” Black told the Hollywood Reporter. “Pete Hegseth does not seem like a smart man, a wise man, a knowledgeable man. He seems small and petty. I would love to introduce him to some LGBTQ folks who are warriors who have had to be warriors our entire life just to live our lives openly as who we are.”Milk, written by Black and directed by Gus Van Sant, depicted Milk’s political ascendancy in San Francisco, where he became the first publicly gay man to be elected to public office when he won a seat on the city’s board of supervisors. He was assassinated along with mayor George Moscone by former city supervisor Dan White in 1978. White was convicted on two counts of voluntary manslaughter and served just five years in prison.The USNS Harvey Milk was initially named in 2016 during the administration of Barack Obama. According to the leaked memo, Phelan is also considering new titles for vessels named after such civil rights icons as Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Harriet Tubman and Cesar Chavez.“Harvey Milk is an icon, a civil rights icon, and for good reason,” Black said. “That’s not going to change. Renaming a ship isn’t going to change that. If people are pissed off, good, be pissed off – but take the appropriate action. Do what Harvey Milk had said we need to do, and it’s about bringing back together the coalition of the ‘us’-es that helps move the pendulum of progress forward. Stop the infighting and lock arms again. That’s what Harvey would say.” More

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    We in the cultural sector must stand up to Trump’s attacks – if not now, when? | Gus Casely-Hayford

    In one of his recent Truth Social posts, Donald Trump appeared to fire Kim Sajet – the fearless and utterly brilliant director of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The president used his social media platform to claim that Sajet’s support for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) made her unsuitable for her role. “Upon the request and recommendation of many people, I am hereby terminating the employment of Kim Sajet as Director of the National Portrait Gallery”, Trump wrote. “She is a highly partisan person, and a strong supporter of DEI, which is totally inappropriate for her position. Her replacement will be named shortly.”Where to start? By now, we all know the arts has become the terrain for a brutal proxy battle for hearts and minds. A culture war 2.0, where not just reputations are at stake, but institutions, whole sectors and ways of thinking. But I am hoping that even Trump’s support base have begun to grow a little bored with these attacks on figures and institutions in the cultural sector. The culture war has moved beyond farce into the deeply tragic.I am sure even many of the president’s most loyal supporters know deep down that the Smithsonian (a vast complex of 21 museums) is a genuine force for good, an institution that represents so much of the US at its very best. And like the Kennedy Center, the cultural institution that Trump took control of earlier this year, or the universities his administration has attacked, the Smithsonian is a fish in a barrel: easy to bully, its financial destiny in significant part tied to public funding, with limited scope to defend itself. This contrived political theatre damages critical institutions, threatens the careers of talented, dedicated people, and its repercussions will be deep and long-lasting.Good museums are not sleepy institutions trapped in heritage-aspic. Across its 178-year history, the Smithsonian has consistently evolved to reflect ambient change and address public need. Like many other national museums around the world, these changes, particularly in recent years, have been driven by an aspiration to engage and enfranchise, to broaden audiences and to catalyse national conversations. I would have thought that seeking to give value back to a greater number of the population is uncontroversial. Institutions this important, mostly sponsored by the public, must simply, continually, work to be ever more universal, inclusive and open. Left or right, that has value. In times like these, when we are, as citizens of western democracies, so riven and divided, the arts have a job to do of being a space for inclusive debate.But the truth is that DEI isn’t some new-fangled indulgence. That drive to be inclusive is what good museums were created to deliver. Twenty-five years ago, I began my career at the British Museum. I still remember reading its founding purpose for the first time. The British Museum was created for “all studious and curious persons”. I remember thinking that the word that does the really hard work in that statement is “all”. The British Museum was created in the mid-18th century around an inclusive imperative, around the idea that we might all hope to find ourselves reflected in its spaces and concerns.Its founders must have recognised the powerful need for a national museum: it was created at a time when Britain was going through a period of existential anxiety, when Scots were rebelling; the country needed a unifying narrative. I am sure the British Museum’s founders knew exactly what they were doing when they committed the institution to that beautifully enfranchising ambition of being for us all. And yes, I know museums have so often failed miserably to live up to these inclusive objectives, but we must never stop trying, nor relinquish the basis on which the public can hold us to account.Universities and museums are vital for healthy societies, and their independence, their bravery, their sometimes maddening honesty, underpins so much that is important. We undermine that at our peril. I spent a number of treasured years as a Smithsonian museum director and fell for its ethos and its dedicated people. It was founded on an ambition to propagate “the increase and diffusion of knowledge”. It was created to enable transformational change through sharing and empowering US citizens with knowledge, with truth. I cannot think of a time when this has been more important.It is unclear whether Trump has the authority to fire Sajet. What is clear is that his move is designed to demoralise her and all my former Smithsonian colleagues. That’s why, directing a different museum now, across the Atlantic, I feel moved to write. We in the cultural sector everywhere need to stand up and be counted, we need to celebrate Kim Sajet, we need to not retreat from diversity here in Britain. To my former colleagues, I say that speaking the truth and having the courage to do so when it is difficult does not make you unsuitable for your roles in a demographically complex democracy; it is probably the most important aspect of what we are called upon to do. It is easy writing the diversity action plan, but having the moral courage to stand up for those principles when they are needed – that is heroic.

    Gus Casely-Hayford is a curator, cultural historian, broadcaster and lecturer who is currently the director of V&A East More

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    The genteel, silver-tongued thinker who fathered US conservatism – and paved the way for Trump

    Back when the “public intellectual” was still a thriving species in America, the conservative writer William F Buckley Jr was one of the most famous – of any political stripe.On the PBS television show Firing Line, which he hosted weekly until 1999, he debated or interviewed people ranging from ardent rightwingers to black nationalists. In between, he edited the magazine National Review, wrote three columns a week, wrote or dictated hundreds of letters a month, and was known to dash off a book while on vacation. He was photographed working at a typewriter in the back of a limousine as a dog looked on. In Aladdin (1992), Robin Williams’s genie does Buckley as one of his impressions.Buckley’s extraordinary energy is captured in a sweeping new biography that also uses its subject to tell a larger story of the American right. “As far as I’m concerned, he invented politics as cultural warfare, and that’s what we’re seeing now,” the writer Sam Tanenhaus said.View image in fullscreenTanenhaus spent nearly three decades researching an authorized biography that was published on Tuesday, titled Buckley: The Life and Revolution that Changed America.Buckley is often remembered as the architect of the modern conservative movement. For decades he worked to unite anti-communists, free marketeers and social conservatives into the coalition behind the Reagan revolution. Yet today, almost two decades since Buckley’s death in 2008, the conservative landscape looks different. Free trade is out, economic protectionism is in. The Republican party’s base of support, once the most educated and affluent, is now increasingly working-class.Even as Donald Trump remakes the right in his own image, however, Tanenhaus sees Buckley’s thumbprints.One of the biggest is Trumpism’s suspicion of intellectual elites. Although Buckley was a blue blood and loved the company of artists and literary people, he memorably said that he would “sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University”. His first book, in 1951, accused professors of indoctrinating students with liberal and secularist ideas – more than half a century before the Trump administration’s bruising attempts to pressure Ivy League universities into political fealty.Tanenhaus, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review, spoke to me by video call from his house in Connecticut. He is a gregarious and funny conversationalist. At one point, he paused a digression about Joan Didion to observe: “Wow. There’s a vulture in my backyard. For God’s sake.” He said he looked forward to reading my piece about him, “unless you’re saying bad stuff about me. Then send it to me and say: ‘My editors made me write this.’”Our free-flowing, one-and-half-hour conversation gave me some sense of why Tanenhaus’s biography took so long to write. It also made me better understand how the conservative Buckley was charmed into the decision to allow a self-described “lifelong unregistered liberal Democrat” unfettered access to his papers, and to give that person the final – or at least most comprehensive – word on his life.The outcome is a lively, balanced and deeply researched book. At more than 1,000 pages, including end matter, the hardback is an engrossing, if occasionally wrist-straining, read.View image in fullscreenTanenhaus was born in 1955, three weeks before Buckley published the first issue of National Review. Writing the book, he said, often felt like a kind of “reconstructive journalism” where he relived history that he had experienced but never considered in its context. As a liberal and an “unobservant, ignorant, secular Jew”, he also had to try to understand someone with whom he had little in common, politically or culturally.Although Buckley’s views on some subjects evolved over time, “he was pretty and firmly entrenched with two foundational ideas,” Tanenhaus said. “One was Catholicism, which was the most important thing in his life. The second was a kind of evangelical capitalism.”Unlike many of his mentors and allies, who tended to be ex-Marxists or ex-liberals, Buckley was not an ideological convert. His father, a wealthy, devoutly Catholic and rightwing oilman from Texas who raised his large family in Connecticut and across Europe, loomed large over his early life.Buckley and his nine siblings were desperate to impress their father. He was loving to his family and also racist, in a “genteel Bourbon” way, and antisemitic, in a more vitriolic way. In 1937, when Buckley was 11, his older siblings burned a cross in front of a Jewish resort. He later recounted the story with embarrassment but argued that his siblings did not understand the gravity of what they were doing.Although Buckley came to make a real effort to purge the right of racist, antisemitic and fringe elements, Tanenhaus thinks his upbringing held sway longer than most people realize. One of the most interesting sections of the book concerns Camden, South Carolina, where Buckley’s parents had a home. In the 1950s the town became notorious for violence against black people and white liberals.View image in fullscreenDuring his research, Tanenhaus discovered that the Buckleys – who were considered by their black domestic workers to be unusually kind relative to the white people of the area – also funded the town’s pro-segregation paper and had ties to a local white supremacist group. After a spate of racist attacks in Camden, Buckley wrote a piece in National Review condemning the violence, but not segregation itself. He defended segregation on the grounds that white people were, for the time being, the culturally “superior” race.Buckley’s views on race began to change in the 1960s. He was horrified by the Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls. During his unsuccessful third-party campaign for mayor of New York in 1965, he surprised both conservatives and liberals by endorsing affirmative action. In 1970 he argued that within a decade the United States might have a black president and that this event would be a “welcome tonic”.Despite his patrician manner and distinct accent, Buckley had a savvy understanding of the power of mass media and technology. National Review was never read by a wide audience, but Buckley and his conservative vanguard fully embraced radio, television and other media. A technophile, he was one of the first to adopt MCI mail, an early version of email. Tanenhaus thinks he would thrive in the age of Twitter and podcasts.Yet the current era feels a world away in other respects. For one, Buckley’s politics rarely affected his many friendships. “His best friends were liberals,” Tanenhaus said. He greatly admired Jesse Jackson. It was not strange for Eldridge Cleaver, the black nationalist, and Timothy Leary, the psychonaut, to stop by his house.Buckley was deeply embarrassed by the notorious 1968 incident in which Gore Vidal called him a “crypto-Nazi”, on-air, and Buckley responded by calling Vidal an alcoholic “queer” and threatening to punch him. It was an exception to a code of conduct that Buckley generally tried to live by.“If he became your friend, and then you told him you joined the Communist party, he would say: ‘That is the worst thing you can do, I’m shocked you would do it, but you’re still coming over for dinner tomorrow, right?’” Tanenhaus laughed. “It’s just a different worldview, and we don’t get it because we take ourselves more seriously than he did.”Being the authorized biographer of a living person entails a special relationship. You become intimately familiar with your subject – perhaps even good friends, as Tanenhaus and his wife did with Buckley and his socialite wife, Pat. Yet you also need critical distance to write honestly.It was impossible to finish the book “while he was still alive”, Tanenhaus said. He realized in retrospect that Buckley’s death was “the only way that I could gain the perspective I needed, the distance from him and the events that he played an important part in, to be able to wrap my arms around them”.He thinks Buckley also understood that a true biography would be a full and frank accounting of his life. “I think that, in some way, he wanted someone to come along and maybe understand things he didn’t understand about himself.”Despite his disagreements with Buckley’s politics, Tanenhaus was ultimately left with a positive assessment of him as a person. “He had a warmth and generosity that are uncommon. When you’re a journalist, part of your business is interacting in some way with the great, and the great always remind you that you’re not one of them. They have no interest in you. They never ask you about yourself. Buckley was not like that.”He is not sure what he would have made of Trump. Buckley was willing to criticize the right, and was an early critic of the Iraq war, Tanenhaus said. Yet “conservatives can always find a way to say: ‘Whatever our side is doing, the other side is worse.’”View image in fullscreenThis is Tanenhaus’s third book about conservatism. I asked what he thinks the left most misunderstands about the right.He instantly responded: “They don’t understand how closely the right has been studying them all these years.” He noted that Buckley surrounded himself with ex-leftists and that he and other conservatives made a point of reading left and liberal books and studying their tactics of political organizing.But that doesn’t seem to go the opposite direction. Leftists and liberals “don’t see that the other side should be listened to, that there’s anything to learn from them. And they think, no matter how few of them there are, that they’re always in the majority.”Buckley once said that his “idea of a counter-revolution is one in which we overturn the view of society that came out of the New Deal”, Tanenhaus said. Today, Trump is aggressively moving, with mixed success, to roll back the federal administrative state – a vestige of Buckley’s vision of unfettered capitalism, even if Trump’s other economic views aren’t exactly Buckley’s.“It would not be far-fetched to say we are now seeing the fulfillment of what he had in mind,” Tanenhaus said. More

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    Susanna Reid clashes with Robert Jenrick over fare dodgers video: ‘It’s not about you’

    Good Morning Britain presenter Susanna Reid clashed with Robert Jenrick over a video of himself confronting alleged fare dodgers on the London Underground.The shadow justice secretary visited Stratford station last week, where he filmed several alleged fare dodgers appearing to break the law.In one scene he appears to confront a man, who claimed he had a knife on him.The GMB host confronted Mr Jenrick about his video during Monday’s show (2 June), telling him: “You made it all about you, the video was literally all about you” More

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    Four queer business owners on Pride under Trump: ‘Our joy is resistance’

    As the first Pride month under Donald Trump’s second presidency approaches, LGBTQ+ businesses are stepping up, evolving quickly to meet the community’s growing concerns.Since day one, Trump has signed executive orders targeting the LGBTQ+ community, particularly the trans and gender non-conforming population. He aims to eradicate “gender ideology” by enforcing a two-sex binary determined at conception, reinstating and expanding the military ban on transgender service members, and directing agencies to prevent gender-affirming care for youth.This leaves the LGBTQ+ community feeling apprehensive about losing further rights and protections.The Guardian spoke with four queer business owners, and one message was clear: queer businesses are here to support the community now more than ever and spread joy as resistance.Uptick in weddingsBusiness is surging for New England-based wedding photographer Lindsey “Lensy” Michelle as queer couples decide to take their vows, fearing the Trump administration will go after marriage equality. Michelle says she’s only getting louder and even “more queer”.“I’m not changing anything about my business, no matter what the government says,” Michelle said. “We elected a president who doesn’t support this type of marriage, or at the very least doesn’t care enough to try to protect it.”View image in fullscreenShe is seeing queer couples accelerate their wedding plans in fear of Trump and the supreme court overturning 2015’s ruling on Obergefell v Hodges, which recognized same-sex marriages. Michelle currently offers accessible pricing for queer couples.“[Pride] is a good time to remind wedding vendors to stop advertising to only brides or using very gendered language, or assuming that every couple has a bride and a groom,” she said. “Performative allyship is really dangerous, and for businesses June can be a time of greater reflection on how they can be more clear and inclusive.”According to Michelle, there is an emerging trend for queer couples to distinguish legal marriage from a wedding ceremony. Many of her clients explained that they are registering their marriage now out of an “abundance of caution” because they don’t feel like “their rights will be protected”, she said.“It’s a privilege when you’re able to celebrate instead of protest and queerness is always rebellious,” she said. “You protest when things aren’t welcoming to begin with and you celebrate when you’re able to but I think also you have to do both. Otherwise, it becomes quite sad.”After noticing an uptick in demand, she created an LGBTQ+ wedding directory of more than 130 businesses. She didn’t stop there: Michelle then teamed up with five other vendors to throw a queer mass wedding ball for six lucky couples on 5 January.“We don’t really feel like celebrating. We feel like crying and we feel helpless and all we’re trying to do is get married,” Michelle said. “We just wanted to throw a party. This event is coming out of the time of fear and uncertainty, but that’s always been the queer story.”View image in fullscreenThe team behind the wedding ball are “open to the idea” of hosting a similar event in other states, particularly in Republican-led ones.Nine states are urging the supreme court to reverse Obergefell v Hodges.“We’re scared, and I don’t put that lightly,” Michelle said.We will surviveIn Decatur, Georgia, Charis Books & More aims to alleviate the fears the queer and trans community are experiencing.“My job is to support young people and those with children and to say: ‘Look, we have spent most of our history as queer and trans people as outlaws and we can be outlaws again. But, we will survive, we are very creative and we’ll figure out how to get through this time,’” said Errol Anderson, the executive director of Charis Books & More’s non-profit arm, Charis Circle.View image in fullscreenCharis Circle hosts events like story time and offers support groups, especially for the trans community. They have four support groups for trans and gender non-conforming individuals across ages. Georgians in less welcoming parts of the state see Charis “as a beacon”, according to Anderson.“We’re seeing these particularly aggressive attacks on trans people for the past couple years now being mirrored in national legislation and it’s very scary,” Anderson said. “A lot of people right now feel very hopeless, but we need to remember we do actually have a lot of power to speak up for what we believe in and our voices do matter.”Joy as resistanceNew York’s 34-year-old queer bar Henrietta Hudson is returning to its roots as a political activist space, especially as Pride approaches.View image in fullscreen“Acutely since the inauguration, but really since the election, there’s a different tone to how people come to [the bar]. It feels more necessary,” Hutch Hutchinson said. “People are craving to be around other queer people and to be in a safer space. We have to buckle down for the family we have here.”Hutchinson, who uses he/they pronouns, is the director of operations at Henrietta Hudson. He said Pride is already in the air as the bar has seen a surge in energy and purpose.“[Pride] often does feel like a protest and we call our Pride as occupying Hudson, a very definitive statement on us taking up space in the West Village,” he said. “The general feeling at Henrietta Hudson is that we’ve just become more political. This place has been through so many eras of queer resistance and uprising. We are relighting that fire.”They lend their bar to vetted non-profits and local grassroots organizations for events giving back to the LGBTQ+ community, such as a Pride week fundraiser benefiting the BTFA Collective for Black trans femme artists and the annual NYC Dyke March.Hutchinson explained that the bar will always take explicit stances to protect and support the community. It posted a message on their Instagram, calling out the “immoral”, “dangerous” and “unlawful” attacks by Trump’s administration.“We talk, as a [staff] about, what does resistance look like? Sure, resistance is showing up to rallies and supporting the ACLU, learning your rights, marching and protesting,” he added. “But it’s so important for us to dance and to see each other smile and laugh and sing. Our joy is resistance.”Being visible is more importantDown in St Louis, Missouri, art collective Swan Meadow plans to be a safe third space for the community where members can “simply exist as who they are”. Partners Fern and Mellody Meadow, who both use they/them pronouns, emptied their savings to open the collective last fall after a close presidential election.View image in fullscreen“We are always trying to craft events and spaces for people to come to and to sit with complicated emotions and thoughts and to talk to people about them,” Fern said. “It can be isolating and so frustrating to know that things are wrong that are outside of our control, but when you come together as a community, so much positive change can happen.”They open their workshop multiple times a month for free community-focused events such as “crafternoons”. ​Some events act as fundraisers for local mutual aid organizations such as the Community Closet, which distributes free household, cleaning and hygiene items. The collective also offers branding, photography and printing services.The Meadows envision Swan Meadow taking on a larger role in political advocacy for the community.“As pushback becomes more prevalent and discrimination becomes more normal, being visible is more important than ever,” Mellody said. “I’m tired of living through history.” More

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    ‘So polarised’: Bruce Springsteen’s anti-Trump comments divide US fans

    As the lead singer of a Bruce Springsteen cover band, Brad Hobicorn had been looking forward to performing at Riv’s Toms River Hub in New Jersey on Friday. Then came a text message from the bar’s owner, saying the gig was cancelled. Why? Because the real Bruce Springsteen had lambasted Donald Trump.“He said to me his customer base is redder than red and he wishes Springsteen would just shut his mouth,” Hobicorn recalls by phone. “It was clear that this guy was getting caught up in that and didn’t want to lose business. The reality is we would have brought a huge crowd out there: new customers that are Springsteen fans that want to see a band locally.”The culture wars have arrived in New Jersey, the state of Frank Sinatra, Jon Bon Jovi, Whitney Houston, comedian Jon Stewart and TV hit The Sopranos. Springsteen – revered for songs such as Born In The USA, Glory Days, Dancing In The Dark and Born To Run – has long been a balladeer of the state’s blue-collar workers. But last year, many of those same workers voted for the president.Now their split loyalties are being put to the test. Opening a recent tour in Manchester in Britain, Springsteen told his audience: “The America I love, the America I’ve written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.” He repeated the criticisms at later concerts and released them on a surprise EP.Trump responded by calling Springsteen highly overrated. “Never liked him, never liked his music or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy — just a pushy, obnoxious JERK,” he wrote on social media. “This dried out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back in the Country.”Trump, 78, also posted a video edited to make it seem as if he had hit 75-year-old Springsteen with a golf drive. Trump called for a “major investigation” into Springsteen, Beyoncé and other celebrities, alleging that they had been paid millions of dollars to endorse his Democratic opponent in the 2024 election, Kamala Harris.Harris beat Trump by six percentage points in New Jersey, significantly less than Joe Biden’s 16-point winning margin in 2020. In Toms River, a township along the Jersey Shore, Trump received twice as many votes as Harris, helping explain why Riv’s Toms River Hub got cold feet about hosting a Springsteen cover band.The bar and restaurant cancelled the 30 May gig by No Surrender, a nine-person band that has played Springsteen songs for more than two decades, despite it being scheduled months in advance. Contacted by the Guardian, owner Tony Rivoli declined to comment.Hobicorn, 59, from Livingston, New Jersey, says the band suggested a compromise of playing classic rock other than Springsteen’s but Rivoli rejected the idea. Hobicorn also received some criticism from Springsteen fans for offering the partial climbdown.But he explains: “That’s where I made the point that not everybody in the band is aligned with Bruce Springsteen’s politics. Everybody’s got a different point of view but that’s OK. You can still be in a Springsteen cover band and not 100% agree with everything he says.”He adds: “My band is split. We’re half red, half blue. We have civilised conversations and then we go and play the music and it’s never been about politics. This thing got made into a political situation.”Springsteen is not new to the political arena. When former president Ronald Reagan referenced the singer’s “message of hope” at a campaign stop, Springsteen wondered if Reagan had listened to his music and its references to those left behind in the 1980s economy. Later, he was a regular presence on Barack Obama’s presidential election campaign.He has also challenged his audience politically beyond presidential endorsements. Born in the USA told of a Vietnam war veteran who lost his brother in the war and came home to no job prospects and a bleak future. My Hometown described the kind of economic decline and discontent that Trump has exploited: “Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores / Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more.”Springsteen’s 1995 album The Ghost of Tom Joad bluntly documented the lives of struggling immigrants, including those from Mexico and Vietnam. His 2001 song American Skin (41 Shots), criticised the shooting by New York City police officers of an unarmed Guinean immigrant named Amadou Diallo, angering some of the blue-collar segments of his fanbase.But taking on Trump is a cause of a different magnitude. His “Make America great again” (Maga) movement has proved uniquely polarising in US culture, forcing many people to choose whether they are on the blue team or red team. The clothes people wear, the food they eat and the music they listen to have become signifiers of Maga. Even some in New Jersey, where Springsteen grew up and now lives in the town of Colts Neck, are having doubts.Hobicorn reflects: “As the country has become more and more divided, there’s certainly a real disdain for Springsteen and his politics in New Jersey. Most New Jerseyans are supportive of who he is, what he’s done for the state, what he’s done for our culture, what he’s done for music.“I feel like it’s not a lot of stuff in the middle like, yeah, he’s OK. It’s one way or the other. In New Jersey it’s mostly in a positive way: people love and respect Bruce for everything. But some are going to paint the picture of him: he’s a billionaire and he doesn’t give a crap about anybody but himself. That’s what they do.”View image in fullscreenNo Surrender has found an alternative venue. After the cancellation of its Toms River gig, Randy Now’s Man Cave, a record shop in Hightstown, New Jersey, stepped in and will host the band on 20 June. The shop will producers flyers and T-shirts that say: “Free speech is live at Randy Now’s Man Cave.”Owner Randy Ellis, 68, says: “The state is proud of Bruce Springsteen. He should become the state bird for all I know.”But he admits: “In the last election, Harris won the state but there were many more people for Trump than I ever expected in New Jersey. It’s so polarised now. We may have people in front of my store saying Springsteen sucks and all that. Who knows?”At a time when many of Trump’s critics have kept quiet, Springsteen is arguably his leading cultural foe. In 2020 he said: “a good portion of our fine country, to my eye, has been thoroughly hypnotised, brainwashed by a conman from Queens” – knowing the outer-borough reference still stung a man who built his own tower in Manhattan.Dan DeLuca, who grew up in Ventnor, New Jersey, and is now a popular music critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper, says: “The thing about Bruce that people love is this idea of being a truth teller. You see what you see and you need to speak on it. There’s a lot of people who are muttering things or speaking in private about what’s going on in America who are not speaking out for whatever reason. Maybe they don’t believe that politics and art should mix. Maybe they’re worried about their fanbase or something.“As he said, there’s a lot of crazy shit going on and it’s happened since he was last on the road. It’s good that he’s speaking his mind and he’s speaking what a lot of people want to hear but maybe are afraid to hear and it’s maybe giving some people courage.”But as the case of No Surrender demonstrated, there is a significant minority in New Jersey who see things differently in this hyper-partisan era. DeLuca reflects: “I grew up in south Jersey, which is less densely populated, less urban, and it’s Trump country now.“Springsteen has been true to what he sings about and the people he sings about and the blue collar concerns but then he’s open to target because he’s rich or hangs out with Obama. They probably think that Bruce has turned into a knucklehead socialist or something. I’m sure there are plenty of people who probably do have some divided loyalties.” More

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    Trump says he fired National Portrait Gallery chief in latest conflict with arts

    Donald Trump says he is firing the first female director of the National Portrait Gallery, which contained a caption that referenced the attack on the US Capitol that his supporters carried out in early 2021.The president announced the termination on Friday in a post on his social media platform that accused Sajet – born in Nigeria, raised in Australia and a citizen of the Netherlands – of being “a strong supporter” of diversity initiatives that his administration opposes as well as “highly partisan”. He cited no evidence for either claim.Legal experts, including Eric Columbus, a former litigator for the January 6 select committee, suggested Trump does not have the power to fire Sajet, since the gallery is part of the Smithsonian, which is not run by the executive branch.In its collection of portraits of American presidents, the gallery had this text about Trump: “Impeached twice, on charges of abuse of power and incitement of insurrection after supporters attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, he was acquitted by the Senate in both trials. After losing to Joe Biden in 2020, Trump mounted a historic comeback in the 2024 election. He is the only president aside from Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) to have won a nonconsecutive second term.”Sajet arrived in the US with her family in 1997, held positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and was appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery in 2013, according to a Guardian profile of her.The National Portrait Gallery is an art museum in Washington DC that opened in 1968 and is part of the Smithsonian Institution. It boasts the only complete collection of presidential portraits outside the White House.After beginning his second presidency in January, Trump issued an executive order directing the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the institution’s storied museums.Sajet had said the gallery under her leadership tried “very hard to be even-handed when we talk about people and that’s the key”.“Everyone has an opinion about American presidents, good, bad and indifferent,” Sajet said. “We hear it all, but generally I think we’ve done pretty well.” More

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    Casualties in Trump’s war on the arts: the small museums keeping local history alive

    For the past two years, a small arts non-profit has been telling stories about the communities living alongside the Los Angeles river, one voice at a time.The organization, called Clockshop, has collected the oral histories of nearly 70 local residents, activists and elected officials. Their knowledge is compiled in a vast cultural atlas – which contains videos, an interactive map and a self-guided tour exploring the waterway and its transformation from a home for the Indigenous Tongva people to a popular, rapidly gentrifying urban space.But in April, the future of the ever-growing atlas was thrown in uncertainty, when a three-year federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the agency that supports libraries, archives and museums, was terminated 17 months early. The grant, originally for $150,000, still had $20,000 left to pay out. “There is no recourse to recover the funds still in the grant project activities,” the organization said in a post on Instagram.Now, executive director Sue Bell Yank says their mission to preserve the stories of residents ousted by gentrification could lead to “erasure of the past, of cultural self-determination, and a lack of understanding about how communities can successfully advocate for the kinds of neighborhoods we deserve”.Clockshop’s post foreshadowed an alarming message that would eventually be delivered to hundreds of other arts and cultural institutions across the US. As the Trump administration directed federal agencies to cancel grants that did not support the president’s new priorities, which focused on funding “projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity” and targeted anything broadly deemed “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion), millions of dollars dedicated to preserving local history and culture suddenly disappeared.Shortly after IMLS grants were terminated, so too were those awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). By Friday 2 May, a spreadsheet created by writer and theater director Annie Doren was being passed around the internet, aiming to catalog every organization that had lost their NEA funding. With more than 500 organizations on the list, the question shifted from who lost their funding to who didn’t.View image in fullscreenWhile organizations of all kinds were impacted, it is the small and midsized institutions that lack endowments, prominent donors, and broad outreach whose futures are particularly in jeopardy. The cuts have affected a broad swath of projects – from a documentary film-maker in Fresno making a film about a woman who has played Harriet Tubman in civil war reenactments for 30 years; to a dance performance about south-east Asian mothers in New York City, to an organization that brings films, book clubs and other cultural events to rural Montana.Rick Noguchi who runs a non-profit called California Humanities, said he has seen the 112 NEH grants it awarded across the state suspended indefinitely by the Trump administration. “There are many newer immigrant communities that don’t have deep donors and struggle with being able to find individual donors that step in to tell their stories.”‘The country is abandoning its citizens’Back in Los Angeles, the cuts have blanketed cultural institutions with feelings of anxiety and urgency. But their leaders are also fighting back, vowing to continue the work of preserving local history in spite of the administration’s threats to revoke non-profit status if they continue to champion DEI programs.The Japanese American National Museum (JANM), an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution in LA’s Little Tokyo neighborhood that focuses on the history, culture and legacy of Japanese immigrants, initially lost grants that amounted to roughly $1.45m – though some have since been temporarily restored after a court order. Among those cut was a NEH landmarks of American history and culture grant, which funded a workshop helping teachers build a curriculum about the history of Japanese incarceration during the second world war. JANM CEO Ann Burroughs said that the program benefits approximately 20,000 students a year.“It was very much to ensure that the history was never forgotten,” Burroughs said about the museum’s mission and outreach. “It was also to ensure that what happened to Japanese Americans never happened to anybody else.”View image in fullscreenLos Angeles’s One Institute, which houses the largest queer archive in the world, also uses their collection to help educate others on queer history and marginalization. They lost a $15,000 NEA grant to support their upcoming annual festival in October, and now they are scrambling to hold fundraisers to keep the festival on track.Tony Valenzuela, the organization’s executive director, said that their event is important because it covers a gap in education. “Even in liberal states like California, only a fraction of students learn about the contributions of queer people to society,” Valenzuela said. “If the government abandons funding non-profits and other individuals and organizations providing a social good, this country will also be abandoning whole swaths of its citizens who greatly benefit from this work.”Another organization that was hit hard was the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), which operates the Skid Row History Museum & Archive, located just a few blocks north of the neighborhood in Downtown Los Angeles. They lost four grants administered by IMLS, NEH, and California Humanities, and are unlikely to receive an NEA grant that normally keeps the organization running – a total value of nearly $144,000 dollars, or 22% of the organization’s annual budget.Like Clockshop, the LAPD’s exhibitions, public programs and archives chart the ways Skid Row has been transformed – and nearly erased – due to development and gentrification. “Not everyone sees Skid Row as a community, let alone a thriving arts community,” said Henry Apodaca, LAPD’s media archivist. “This is a critical counter narrative to popular narratives that we’ve all been inundated with when talking about Skid Row.”View image in fullscreenOne of the terminated grants was an IMLS grant for small museums, which was being used to support a project called Welcome to the Covid Hotel. The project, named for the temporary medical treatment centers that popped up in vacant hotels during the pandemic to care for unhoused people, culminated in an exhibition and a series of theatrical performances based on interviews with patients, nurses and social workers.“There’s stories of people coming in blind and getting cataract surgeries,” explains LAPD’s co-founder and artistic director, John Malpede. “Someone with gangrene needed to have his legs amputated, and it saved his life. And most people got and accepted some form of next-step housing.”Malpede’s performance is a creative way for policymakers to notice the Covid Hotels’ impact and potentially make the sites into permanent fixtures. When the grants were canceled, LAPD was still waiting on more than $38,000 to come through: money that was supposed to pay venues, crew and performers for events that took place in April, as well as upcoming performances in May and June, and a forthcoming publication. While LAPD aims to move forward with their plans, they are uncertain on how to fund it.After going public on social media, private donors have since stepped up to help the JANM and Clockshop recoup their losses. LAPD and the One Institute, however, are still looking for support. Without this funding, not only could the non-profits disband, but also the communities that have flourished as a result of their work.As Malpede warns: “It’s only because of the neighborhood standing up and using its own history that it continues to be present.” More