Jesse Helms

Excerpts from 1998 film Dear Jesse, in which a gay filmmaker explores his relationship to Jesse Helms. Helms was an American politician and extremely conservative U.S. Senator who became the face of anti-gay censorship. In 1987, Helms was responsible for enacting a ban that prevented people with HIV from traveling to the United States. This ban was in effect until President Obama appealed it in 2009.

Helms was also the key figure in denying funding for gay artists through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). In 1989, Senator Helms publicly denounced Andres Serrano's photograph, Piss Christ, which was being displayed as part of an NEA-funded exhibition.

Helms claimed "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy" (States News Service, 5/17/88, qtd. in a FAIR.org press release) and described homosexuals as "weak, morally sick wretches" (Newsweek, 12/5/94, qtd. in Fair.org press release)

In 1995, for example, Helms told The New York Times that the government should spend less money on people with AIDS because they got sick as a result of "deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct." (qtd. in the Washington Post). “We’ve got to have some common sense about a disease transmitted by people deliberately engaging in unnatural acts,” (Helms in the New York Times, qtd. at Americablog). “Nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah,” he said, “and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle.” (Helms qtd. in the New York Times)

In 1989, Helms proposed an amendment to the NEA budget that would restrict the organization from funding "obscene or indecent" art. This is known as the "Helms Amendment." Congress passed a bill that banned federal funds for art that "may be considered obscene, including but not limited to, depictions of sadomasochism, homoeroticism, the sexual exploitation of children, or individuals engaged in sex acts and which, when taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value."

Koch, Cynthia. "The Contest for American Culture: A Leadership Case Study on The NEA and NEH Funding Crisis." Public Talk: Online Journal of Discourse Leadership. 1998. University of Pennsylvania. 19 Feb. 2012. Web.

Helms called the NEA "the upholstered playpen of the arts and crafts auxiliary of the Eastern liberal establishment" (exhibit on editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant from The Library of Congress)



Helms on art: “The self-proclaimed, self-anointed art experts would scoff and say, ‘Oooh, terrible,’ but I like beautiful things, not modern art,” (Helms, qtd. in the New York Times, 1989)