The obscenity crackdown on avant-garde art was national, not just New York

Evidence

The campaign against fags, weirdos, and commies was not restricted to New York. Saturday evening, March 7, Los Angeles police raided the Cinema Theater and confiscated the print of Scorpio Rising—“a purely homosexual thing,” one member of the vice squad termed it. Theater manager Mike Getz was soon after arraigned, charged with “exhibiting an obscene film.” Although acquitted by an all-female jury, Anger would later maintain that the American Nazi Party sued him for desecration of the swastika. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1909

Categorization

• XREF: Supports the reader’s cross-check that legal repression was a shared material condition across scenes, not a local New York anomaly.