When Marjorie Heins started her "dream job" at the American Civil Liberty Union's Arts Censorship Project in 1991, she did not realize how much it would focus on sex. The previous year, however, had seen prosecutions for obscenity against a museum for showing the works of famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and against a music store owner for selling a recording by a rap group. Heins foresaw how sex-and-censorship wars would continue throughout the 1990s.
Heins’s book “Not in Front of the Children: ‘Indecency,’ Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth” focuses on the continuing power of sex-based censorship. Heins will narrate her astonishing journey as an American Civil Liberties lawyer during these years.