New York City theater festival pulls show over anti-transgender content

---

The Frigid Fringe Festival, an independent theater festival held in New York City that showcases edgier plays, comedy shows, and readings by independent artists, pulled a production after staff found it to contain anti-transgender material.

Key Players

David Lee Morgan, a performance poet and street musician, created “Poems on Gender,” a spoken word monologue divided into 12 poems that was pulled from the festival.

Erez Ziv is the managing artistic director of Frigid New York, the organization behind Frigid Fringe.

Further Details

Founded in 1998, Frigid New York gave “emerging and established artists the opportunity to create and produce original work of varied content, form, and style, and to amplify their diverse voices.” Frigid Fringe has touted itself as an “uncensored” event that allows artists “to let their ingenuity thrive in a venue that values freedom of expression and artistic determination.” 

In 2022, Morgan performed “Poems on Gender” at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest cultural arts festival, held each August in the Scottish capital, The New York Times reported. He submitted it for the 2023 Frigid Fringe Festival, which is scheduled to run from February 15 to March 5, and it was selected for inclusion through a random drawing.

However, in the fall of 2022, a staff member flagged Morgan’s piece after reading a blurb from his show that started with, “There are two sexes, male and female,” The Times reported. 

The work was brought to Ziv’s attention, who consulted his staff, several of whom are transgender or nonbinary. Ziv watched online videos of Morgan’s performances and consulted with the festival’s co-artistic director Jimmy Lovett, who is transgender. Lovett expressed concern about how Morgan’s related works were “very minimizing” of the transgender experience and framed gender-affirming health care in a negative light.

“Poems on Gender” include dialogue such as, “You tell me I can’t be your friend / Unless I believe you are a real woman / I can’t do that” and “You took a rainbow and forged it into a knife,” referring to gender-affirming medical care. 

Morgan told The Times that the work was inspired by conversations he had with transgender performance poets. “I’m looking at people I have a lot of respect and unity with, and then seeing where we disagree,” he said.

Outcome

Frigid Fringe pulls Morgan’s show

On Dec. 8, 2022, Frigid Fringe announced it had pulled the show, saying that its “commitment to freedom of expression does not obligate us to lend our efforts to platform what we consider to be hate speech, or even just very offensive and hurtful speech.”

The festival said that it respected Free Speech, but cited a misalignment with “our values and beliefs as an institution” and “anti-trans” material. “We are not comfortable presenting this type of content on our stages at this moment in history. And so have withdrawn their invitation to participate in the festival.”

Ziv had to walk back his claims that Frigid Fringe was a completely uncensored festival. “In November, I boastfully said to an entire room full of fringe producers in North America that I would allow a show to happen no matter what. But then it happened: We actually got a show that I just couldn’t ask my staff to work,” he told The Times. “I support free speech. I think all speech should be legally protected, but not all speech should be platformed.”

Morgan said he understood censoring shows with harmful or extreme content, but did not think his show would be one of them. “If I were presenting a recruiting film for the Ku Klux Klan, I’d be astounded if they’d be fine with putting it on,” he said. “Is it reactionary? Is it anti-trans? Is it bigotry to say there are two sexes, male and female?”

Ziv said that the presence of several transgender people on his staff played a role in his decision, adding that because the definition of hate speech was not entirely clear, communities must make decisions for themselves on where the line between Free Speech and hate speech falls.

“Half of my staff is on the trans spectrum, and this show is just plain insulting and hurtful to all of them,” he said. “I can’t host content that half my staff finds personally offensive at a time when members of their community are being shot at simply for existing. We live in a country that does not define hate speech. It is up to us, as a community, to define it for ourselves.”

Frigid Fringe announced it would no longer consider itself an “uncensored” festival after pulling Morgan’s show and offered to refund already accepted participants who did not agree with that sentiment. 

“FRIGID will move forward as an [unhurried] festival with participants drawn at random, as before. But we now officially reserve the right to pull a show we feel is over the line, and we commit to the understanding that this line keeps moving,” the statement reads.