San Francisco International Lesbian And Gay Film Festival

The National Endowment for the Arts has exonerated the 15-year-old San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival of allegations by two conservative congressmen and a right-wing religious group that it included pornographic motion pictures in its most recent summer program.

The National Endowment for the Arts has exonerated the 15-year-old San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival of allegations by two conservative congressmen and a right-wing religious group that it included pornographic motion pictures in its most recent summer program.

A Southern Baptist agency, under the firm control of the political and theological fundamentalists in the denomination, urged today abolishing the National Endowment of the Arts unless it stops funding "offensive" art. "Each week seems to bring new revelations about the activities of the NEA," Richard Land, executive director of the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission said in a letter to members of Congress.

Pam Walton initially turned down a chance to make a documentary on the struggle of gays and lesbians to become ordained pastors in the theologically torn Lutheran church. "Like a lot of gay and lesbian people, I didn't have a lot to do with religion," the 56-year-old said. "The whole idea of religion turned my stomach." But then she met some of the gay Lutheran clergy. "These people are so devoted to their church that they won't leave it," Walton said. "They just can't. They feel called.

John E. Frohnmayer still unwinds by rowing a shell on the Potomac River four times a week at dawn, but the controversy bedeviling the National Endowment for the Arts has virtually silenced his singing. Of all the slings and arrows he has suffered in his 18 months as NEA chairman, none stung Frohnmayer more deeply than an allegation that he required a subordinate to give him free voice lessons during and after working hours.

November 1971. A packed house at the Anderson Theater in New York, strewn with celebrities and socialites, waited to see the latest San Francisco sensation, the Cockettes. But when the curtain rose, the show didn't live up to its hype. A grossly under-rehearsed, elaborately overdressed collection of hippies, drag queens and acid freaks ran through a loosey-goosey musical of their own trippy invention. They could feel themselves bombing as audience members left in disgust.