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Written by jay
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Tuesday, 19 February 2008 05:50 |
Reversing a 2003 decision made by the Tokyo High Court, a collection of erotic photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe has been deemed OK under the country's indecency laws. The book, titled Mapplethorpe and originally published by Random
House, had been readily available in Japan from 1994 to 1999 from
Uplink Publishers, owned by Takashi Asai, until Asai halted its sale under pressure from authorities. Such prudishness about Mapplethorpe's homoerotic work is not new, with a 1989 exhibition of his photographs in Washington forced into cancellation after facing some high-profile opposition led by North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms, who was trying to cut off all kinds of NEA funding at the time. (No word on what then Idaho Rep. Larry Craig was doing besides jerking off to a copy of the Mapplethorpe monograph at home.)
After Asai's own copy of the book was confiscated by an airport
customs agent in 1999, and after receiving a subsequent summons and
warning from the Tokyo Police, Asai voluntarily suspended sales of the Japanese
edition. He won a suit to retrieve his confiscated copy of the book in 2002, and today's ruling he says "could change the obscenity standard" in Japan.
We're not sure if anyone else out there was ever in an upscale
bookstore as a proto-gay teenager and had their mother catch them
thumbing through a copy of this book, but we're pretty sure if we were
in Japan this experience would have been about nine times more
mortifying. We might have even, like, died right there. But the
pictures are super hot and probably count as the first gay porn we ever
saw, so we're glad Japanese gays can salivate over them anew.
Japan High Court OKs Mapplethorpe Nude Photos (CBS News)
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