The New York Times circa 1950.
The creative team behind the 2016 opera Fellow Travelers — composer Gregory Spears, librettist Greg Pierce, director Kevin Newbury, producer Jecca Barry, and novelist Thomas Mallon — have decided to withdraw their work from the 2025-26 season of Washington National Opera, in protest of Trump's hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. They write in a statement: "The expansion of freedom and liberty for all people are core values of the opera and the book upon which it is based. The current administration’s takeover of the Kennedy Center and many of its policies contradict those values." In light of a feeble response from the W.N.O. — “Art and music have the power to rise above division and bring people together to find common ground," blah blah blah — it's worth specifying why, over and above the personal convictions of the creators, Fellow Travelers doesn't belong at Trump's Kennedy Center. The opera, which I wrote about in 2018, is based on Mallon's 2007 novel about the lives of two men who have an affair in 1950s Washington. The context is the "lavender scare," the purging of some five thousand gay men and lesbians from the federal work force. Many lives were ruined; more than a few people chose suicide. We are now living in a time where trans people are being demonized by the Trump regime. The draft-dodging president is attempting to bar trans and nonbinary people from military service, declaring, with his usual mind-bending hypocrisy, that their identity "conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle.” Precisely the same logic targeted gay men and lesbians in the fifties: our very nature marked us as un-American. Add to this the bans on transgender topics in schools, on trans people in sports, and on gender-affirming medical care for people under nineteen. As M. Gessen wrote in the Times: "The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation." History is repeating itself, in even more vile fashion. Under such circumstances, a presentation of Fellow Travelers at the Trump Center would have been grotesque.
