Vandals remove Pride posters

After blanketing campus with posters advertising Pride Week events, the LGBT Center reported that posters have been torn down en masse in recent days.

Debbie Bazarsky, director of the LGBT Center, estimated that of the 500 original posters, roughly 300 had been removed. The center was prepared for such a reaction, however, and quickly put up replacement posters.

Bazarsky said that while posters advertising events on LGBT issues are often taken down, the recent incident must have been the result of a concerted effort.

"We often have posters ripped down and covered over, but not in such mass quantities," she said in an interview Wednesday. "For 20 or 50 or 100 posters to come down, that's deliberate. It's not an accident."

The posters advertised two panel discussions this week, "Putting the Sex Back in Sexuality: Have We Lost Our Roots" and "The Religious Right's Obsession with Gay Sex."

Bazarsky said the events' emphasis on sex probably contributed the most to the reaction. "When there are posters about gay sex in particular, people are uncomfortable," she said.

Pride Alliance president Luca Nagy '07 said that other posters with gay themes that did not prominently feature gay sex had not been met with as much resistance.

Fewer "Love=Love" posters, which depicted both gay and straight couples kissing, were torn down this year than last year, Nagy said.

"[The Pride Week] posters are more provocative ... The opposition is mainly about sex, because that's the only thing that's explicitly forbidden in the Bible," she said.

But posters concerning gay-themed events and issues have not been the only ones to provoke strong reactions from viewers.

Anscombe Society vice president Cassandra Debenedetto '07 pointed to seven of her group's posters that had elicited a negative reaction. The society, according to its mission statement, promotes "chastity and 'traditional' sexual and familial ethics."

"It is unfortunate that at Princeton, where we should pride ourselves in fostering academic discussion and understanding, students are tearing down posters, judging these events before they even take place," Debenedetto said in an email.

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Gay-themed posters were last torn down in large numbers in 2003. They advertised a program called "From Top to Bottom: Everything You Want to Know About Gay and Lesbian Sex."

The posters featured partial nudity, and, according to Bazarsky, almost all the posters were torn down the day after they were posted. The LGBT Center later agreed to replace them with less explicit ones after one of the event's cosponsors expressed concern.

In reaction to the first posting, however, a group calling themselves the "Queer Mafia" posted pornographic images throughout campus. Due to a mix-up, the facilities office removed both the center's posters and the explicit ones, forcing the LGBT Center to use 1,600 posters in three days.

With that experience in mind, Bazarsky ordered 1,000 posters this year so they could be quickly replaced if torn down or otherwise removed.

"I don't know why people get so upset and anxious," she said, "and the only thing I can attribute it to is homophobia."