From my new column in Taki’s Magazine:

Unjuried, Uncensored…Until Now
Steve Sailer

January 11, 2023

The fringe theater festival movement is one of the countless liberatory and transgressive developments in the Western arts in the 160 years since the 1863 Salon des Refusés featured French avant-garde painters rejected by the Paris Salon for not subscribing to the stodgy preferences of the Académie des Beaux-Arts. But fringe theater has finally run into a line too shocking to allow to be spoken on stage: “There are two sexes, male and female.”

Yes, sure, artists are supposed to épater les bourgeois and all that. But these days, some people, such as self-proclaimed nonbinaries, are just too sacred to disagree with.

Fringe theater was an early flowering of the ’60s antiestablishment spirit. Over subsequent decades, fringe theater festivals spread across the world, with dozens annually in the U.S. They elevated nondiscrimination to a new height: If there are too many applicants for the number of stages available, performers are selected by lottery. Traditionally, fringe festivals describe themselves as “unjuried” and “uncensored.”

Read the whole thing there.