Esperanza Peace & Justice Center

a n d p u b l i c f u n d i n g

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Index of information about Esperanza's Funding Cut

Asked why Esperanza was singled out [for arts funding cuts], [Mayor Howard] Peak said: "They seem to go way beyond what people want their money spent on. That group flaunts what it does--it is an in-your-face organization. They are doing this to themselves."

Graciela I. Sanchez, Esperanza's executive director, disagreed: "The attacks have been coming for the last four years because of the queer programming... They want to say that this is not homophobia, but it is homophobia."

Dear Mayor Peak and All City Council Members:

We agree with the Mayor (above) and we commend you for your recent decision to de-fund the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. As taxpayers, we want the city to get back to the basics of funding fire and police protection, code compliance, streets and draining and programs for youth.

We steadfastly agree that "they are doing this to themselves." We would like to make two other points:

1. Esperanza's grandstanding, flaunting, in-your-face activism has damaged the arts community in San Antonio. Although we disagree among ourselves on the issue of public funding of the arts, we agree that Esperanza for the past several years has created divisiveness within the art community and between the taxpayers and the arts community. We hope the arts community wakes up to this fact before it is too late for arts funding in general. Those organizations that stand in "solidarity" with Esperanza are making a grave mistake.

2. Esperanza is also damaging the cause of equal rights for gays and lesbians in San Antonio. Its only goal is promoting a radical, pro-Castro, liberationist political agenda. While Esperanza has a right to express and promote its views, it is not, and never has been, a gay and lesbian organization. (We even question whether it is an arts organization). While some of its leadership consists of gays and lesbians, it is a political organization--obsessed with victimhood and using "sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia," as rhetorical and political ploys to extract guilt money from individuals and organizations, including the City. Esperanza has made its battle for tax dollars a referendum on homosexuality and we resent this. But Esperanza's greatest damage to the gay and lesbian community is the divisiveness it creates within by repeatedly injecting issues of class, race and gender for self-serving purposes.

It is probably obvious to you that the Esperanza also promotes divisiveness in the community in general. Two years ago, for example, when the major Council members unsuccessfully opposing Esperanza's funding were "anglos,"--Esperanza charged "racism." This year, when he Council's majority of Hispanics--the first in the city's history--voted 10-0 to cut all of Esperanza's public funds, they charged "homophobia."

Esperanza has taken its cues from the national "victim art" movement which Robert Hughes, art critic for Time, wrote about in Culture of Complaint:

"[T]he abiding traits of American victim art are posturing and ineptitude, In the performances of Karen Finley and Holly Hughes you get the extreme of what can go wrong with art-as-politics--the belief that mere expressiveness is enough; that I become and artist by showing you my warm guts and defying you to reject them. You don't like my guts? You and Jesse Helms, fella.

"But the fact that a work of art is about AIDS or bigotry no more endows it with aesthetic merit than the fact that it's about mermaids and palm trees. And the grotesque exaggeration of some victim-rhetoric can be gauged from the fact that we not have gay activists claiming that homosexuals, of all people, are and, within living memory, have been the victims of bigotry in the American art world. Of all places! In fact as anyone with the slightest experience of it knows, the art world has long been a refuge for homosexuals, and their 'suffering' at its 'bigotry' can be gauged from the careers of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, and others too numerous to list. You might as well claim that straight white Protestants are habitually sneered at, snubbed and otherwise tormented in Midwestern country clubs."

Again, thank you all for seeing through this Esperanza's rhetoric and for representing the interests of all citizens of San Antonio.

Rob Blanchard, Ph.D.
National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association

Dan Castor
Co-chair, San Antonio Equal Rights Political Caucus

Michael McGowan
President, San Antonio Log Cabin Republicans

Glenn Stehle

Ted Switzer, M.D.
Publisher, The San Antonio Marquise

Byron Trott
San Antonio Gay and Lesbian Community Center

What do you think? E-mail us at esperanza@esperanzacenter.org.