Michael Feinstein is speaking out about the Kennedy Center event cancellations which led to the dismissal of a Pride program he was set to conduct.
In an Instagram post earlier this week, the singer and pianist slammed the “recent Kennedy Center losses,” noting them as “government-sanctioned censorship.” There, Feinstein shared his penned “Fear of Queer?” essay, where he further discussed the cancellations.
“Recently, I was invited to conduct the National Symphony Orchestra, perform and speak at a program entitled ‘A Peacock Among Pigeons: Celebrating 50 Years of Pride’ at The Kennedy Center, which celebrated the rainbow of influences upon art, music and our entire culture,” Feinstein began. “This program was abruptly and unceremoniously canceled.”
“These recent Kennedy Center losses may well be defined in the years ahead, as the 21st century government-sanctioned censorship and silencing of creativity, regardless of value, based strictly on sexual orientation,” he wrote. Later in the essay, Feinstein also addressed Donald Trump’s recent executive order to stop federal funding for NPR and PBS.
“Indeed, the latest attempts to strip PBS and NPR of critical funds, highlight the fact that any government-supported access to the arts is no longer safe,” he wrote. “Since the current administration has banned, cancelled or forbidden, in an effort to erase any concert or program at the Kennedy Center, that in any way allows art to acknowledge of existence of homosexuality.”
After returning to power, Donald Trump announced his plans to “terminate multiple individuals from the Board of Trustees” of the center on Truth Social in February, and named himself chairman of the Kennedy Center in a vote that resulted in the center’s longtime president Deborah Rutter being fired.
In a statement shared online in early March, Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, said that “the only shows under the Kennedy Center programming umbrella that we have cancelled since February 12 were due to lack of sales or artist availability.”
Feinstein continued, “The next logical step is to ban all works written by homosexual, bisexual, omnisexual, transsexual people, friends of gay people or people suspected of being queer. It worked for the Nazis, right?”
As a lifelong friend and collaborator to Liza Minnelli, the EGOT winner showed her support for Feinstein’s “clarion call about what may only be defined as a bigoted attack on the arts” and the LGBTQ+ community.
“As an ally of the LGBTQ+ community, a human rights advocate, the daughter of two iconic, amazing artists, a career of my own that without contributions from LGBTQ+ geniuses, would have rendered me a singer with few songs, a dancer with few collaborators, mostly naked ON STAGE, acting without scripts and I could go on!” Minnelli wrote. “Please read ‘Fear of Queer? by Michael Feinstein’ carefully. Become active in solution. Together, we will stop censorship and hate.”