Prop 8 Supporter Maureen Mullarkey Still Hiding Behind ‘But I’m An Artist!’ Defense

Last month we told you the story of Maureen Mullarkey, the New York-based artist who in the 1990s looked to drag queens for inspiration — and also donated cash to support Prop 8. In a brief statement she gave to the press when they came calling to ask why she was among just four New Yorkers who donated more than $500 to strip gay Californians from their right to marry, she responded, “Artists are not in the habit of imposing ideological conformity on one another or demanding it from others. Moreover, regard for individual gay persons does not require assent to a politicized assault on bedrock social reality and the common good.” Now that she’s had time to collect her thoughts, Mullarkey shares her experience of being on the receiving end of everyone calling for her head. After the San Francisco Chronicle published publicly available data of Prop 8 supporters (names, home addresses, and cash amounts), Mullarkey, writing in The Weekly Standard, says:

Emails started coming. Heavy with epithets and ad hominems, most in the you-disgust-me vein. Several accused me, personally, of denying the sender his single chance at happiness after a life of unrelieved oppression and second-class citizenship. Some were anonymous but a sizable number were signed, an indication of confidence in collective clout that belied howls of victimhood. New York’s Gay City News asked for an interview because I was “one of only four New Yorkers who contributed more than $500.” I ignored the request, trashed the emails, and forgot about them. But the West Coast bureau chief of the New York Daily News did not forget. One night in early February, I drove home to find two cars, two men, waiting for me, unannounced, in the dark. Reporters for the Daily News, they were publishing a story on me and Prop 8 the next day and wanted a live quotation. Serious interviews are arranged ahead of time. Besides, I had filed enough newspaper pieces on deadline to know that copy is well into the can at 7 P.M. This was intimidation, not fact-gathering. Where is the story, I asked, if I have not said anything? The response was: “We have documents.” Sound familiar? For half a second, I thought of saying that Prop 8 left intact all the legal advantages of civil union. It took nothing away. But I was too surprised by having been singled out. After a few heated words–none of them equal to what, in hindsight, I wish I had said–I went into the house. Next day, I discovered in the Daily News that I am known as a painter of gays and lesbians; gay activists felt betrayed by my contribution. It was a sparse article. The only accurate quotation to appear was a sentence cribbed from my own website, which seems to be the “document” from which the story was spun. (The sentence, from an old interview about a gallery show of my paintings, referred to New York’s gay pride parade as “an erotic celebration loosed for a day to keep us all mindful that Dionysus is alive, powerful and under our own porch.”) Compensating for the interview that never took place, the reporter constructed an exchange over the question he obviously wanted to ask but never got the chance. The article reads: When asked how she could have donated money to fight gay marriage after making money from her depictions of gays, she just said, “So?” Set aside the non sequitur. The question was an undisguised indictment that triggered a barrage of virulent mail and threats of blacklisting. Suddenly, I was “a vampire on the gay community” who should be put out of business. As one note put it: “Your career is over, you nasty piece of s–. F– off! WHORE!”

And where did Mullarkey feel that left her?

I was up there now with Halliburton and Big Oil, a class enemy. The brownshirts came out in force. Within 24 hours, the “story” spread from one gay website to another, even to Vancouver (“Typical greedy American bigot”), France, and Belgium. My home address and email were repeated in comment sections in which readers egged each other on to “make the bitch pay.” Militants trawled for editors and gallerists I had worked with to warn them that “the Gay Community is looking at our adversaries and those who may support them.” (One former editor blind-copied me his exchange with an aspiring storm trooper who threatened a boycott for those “having an association” with me.)

An artist whose livelihood and right to create is secured by the First Amendment, Mullarkey then has this to say about others who exercise their same rights:

It is one thing to read hate-filled mail on a computer screen. It is something else to have it in hand. At the end of the week, when it started coming to my house, I filed a police report. Until now, donating to a cause did not open private citizens to a battery of invective and jackboot tactics. While celebrities sport their moral vanity with white ribbons, thousands of ordinary Americans who donated to Prop 8 are being targeted in a vile campaign of intimidation for having supported a measure that, in essence, ratified the crucial relation between marriage and childbearing. Some in California have lost their jobs over it; others worry about an unhinged stranger showing up at the door. Who was it who predicted that if fascism ever came to the United States, it would come in the guise of liberal egalitarianism?

And when history is written, people like Mullarkey will no longer be understood to be “private citizens” who are simply “ratif[ying] the crucial relation between marriage and childbearing,” but perpetrators of hate who don’t believe all of mankind is truly created equal. On the next page, read what some wrote to Mullarkey (perhaps one of the comments is your own?):