Last month on Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher talked with his guest panel about the abrupt departure of actor Geno Segers from the Broadway musical Hadestown. Being a theater director and arts educator in New York City, I was interested to hear what Maher and his guests had to say.

Shortly after Segers was hired, it was discovered he had posted videos on social media that included his views on trans athletes in sports. His comments ignited online backlash from theater fans and commentators. One of his comments was, “I’m not against anyone living out their lives the way they want, but I am against their rights superseding the rights of other people. That’s a little bit foul.”

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On Real Time, Maher lamented, “Cancel culture is not dead because he is shit-canned from the show, and in certain precincts of this country, you are not allowed to have any opinion that doesn’t conform exactly, and I mean exactly, to the one true opinion.” Maher’s guest, journalist Tara Palmeri, explained, “The arts are controlled by liberals, and so therefore they get to set the rules.” Maher replied, “I don’t think that’s liberal — that’s regressive.”

Has the American theater regressed from a forum that dramatized clashing views to a monotone megaphone for, as Maher calls it, “the one true opinion?”

Many theater professionals, myself included, have felt pressured to affirm a particular set of beliefs through workplace trainings and institutional policies rooted in concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Ever since an anonymously penned manifesto, “BIPOC Demands for White American Theatre,” was circulated across the theater industry in 2020, I’ve felt a chill in the wings. The subsequent campaign — We See You, White American Theater — demanded mandatory DEI training, racial affinity safe spaces, on-site therapists, and “that the majority of writers, directors and designers on stage for the foreseeable future be BIPOC artists.”

Though its webpage is down, the manifesto haunts the stage. As reported, it became a “universal reference point” for conversations about institutional priorities such as strategic planning, hiring, and workplace practices. Nicole Brewer, founder of Anti-Racist Theatre, acknowledged its lingering influence, saying the manifesto “has reached so many people’s consciousness, and that can’t be erased.”

Many believe the worst of the DEI era is behind us. But for theater professionals who experienced the consequences of this period, the story is not over. The American theater’s DEI fever hasn’t broken. And if the title of a 2026 roundtable report, “What’s at Stake? Sustaining DEIJ in U.S. Theater,” is any indication, it may be rising.

As I have found, expressing views that question DEI initiatives can carry the risk of professional exile. Yet artists should not fear ostracism for questioning the methods used to pursue these goals, especially since evidence casts doubt on the effectiveness of some of these methods. Nevertheless, I lost employment after I objected to DEI trainings that pressured me to affirm beliefs I did not hold.

I still feel that pressure.

At a recent group interview for a teaching artist job, before we presented our demo lessons, we were all told to state our names and pronouns. If pronouns are important to others, that’s fine. I’m happy to respect how people see themselves. But since pronouns are not an aspect of my identity I want to discuss with strangers, I don’t appreciate being compelled to recite them as part of a job interview to teach children and teenagers about theater.

Further, declaring my pronouns on demand makes me feel pressured to affirm a theory of gender I don’t fully believe. Is this ritual a test to determine if I am a good witch or a bad witch? I suspected if I did not comply with the directive, I could jeopardize any chance of getting the job. With all eyes in the room on me, I felt I had no choice but to say, “I’m Kevin, he/him.”

The little lies I’m forced to recite are the most degrading. They are evidence that the pressure to endorse activist ideology is alive and well. I still sense an expectation that I affirm a sanctioned set of values, both personally and artistically, if I want to remain employed in the arts.

As theater artists in America, our most prized freedom should be the freedom to express our views, both on stage and off, even if those views are contentious, unpopular, or offensive. How can any artist hope to ignite meaningful thought or feeling if he can’t dare to say what he believes in his heart to be true?

While private employers may generally hire and fire at will in New York State, legality is not the only measure of whether speech is truly free: a legal decision can still produce a chilling effect. Does Segers’s departure from Hadestown send a message that there are views you cannot express if you want to remain employed in the American theater?

Free speech is hard. I suspect most of us struggle to apply our principles consistently.

Consider Theatre Communications Group (TCG), one of several theater organizations that successfully sued the Trump administration in 2025 after it revised the criteria for National Endowment for the Arts grants. Under the new rules, applicants were required to promise they would not promote “gender ideology” in their work. Unsurprisingly, a federal judge ruled the restrictions constituted viewpoint discrimination. The case is now on appeal. Following the initial ruling, TCG’s Emilya Cachapero called it “a significant victory for the entire theatre field and for artistic freedom nationwide.” I agree. But is TCG committed to protecting the freedom of expression of all artists, or only some?

In 2023, Frigid Fringe Festival, a New York City theater festival that once prided itself on being “uncensored,” canceled a show it had already agreed to present after its author, David Lee Morgan, wrote a blurb describing his play. That blurb contained the statement, “There are two sexes, male and female.” Frigid New York’s managing director at the time, Erez Ziv, said, “I support free speech. I think all speech should be legally protected, but not all speech should be platformed.”

A festival cannot be legally forced to platform contentious views, but pulling a play it already agreed to present because of those views is institutional gatekeeping at best, not to mention censorial. TCG said nothing then. Now, however, it argues in federal court, in its challenge to the NEA, that artists should not lose opportunities to present their work because of the viewpoints expressed in that work.

The arts sector rightly identifies threats to freedom of speech from external forces such as the Trump administration’s revised NEA rules. But when threats to freedom of expression come from internal pressure, like the outcry from theater fans and commentators over Segers’s posts or a play at a festival, then the theater seems to have little, if anything, to say. Worse, some within the theater openly celebrate, declaring speech should carry professional consequences when it criticizes favored groups or viewpoints.

Has the American theater become a field in which sanctioned views are treated as objectively true and righteous while others are considered so repugnant that they cannot be voiced? Has this created an incentive for artists to explore preferred themes while avoiding subjects they perceive as verboten?

Something should be done.

The UK’s Freedom in the Arts has taken steps to address this issue. Its 2025 report, “Afraid to Speak Freely,” found artists face pressure from within the arts sector to self-censor. While U.S. studies have examined external threats to freedom of expression, I cannot find a contemporary study comparable to FITA’s that asks about both external and internal pressures.

American artists face real external threats from government, audiences, donors, and grant funders. But how pervasive are internal pressures from colleagues, employers, unions, institutional policies, workplace trainings, programming decisions, and prevailing norms within the field? I’m open to survey results that show my perceptions are inaccurate. But unless the questions are asked, no one can know with certainty.

I’m not calling for a study aimed at identifying villains to be persecuted. Over the last decade, there’s been enough witch-hunting to inspire endless sequels to The Crucible. Instead, I hope a U.S. version of the FITA study inspires self-reflection. External threats are difficult to control. The arts’ own policies and practices are not. Artists can consider their willingness to collaborate across differences. Administrators can reconsider policies to apply free speech principles evenly.

Imagine if the producers, cast, and crew of Hadestown had fairly applied an approach to free speech and opened their doors to a man whose views they found deeply objectionable. Could the collaborative nature of theater have been uniquely suited to mend wounds? Is it possible everyone, Segers included, would have come away from the experience of performing a Broadway show together a little more enlightened and empathetic? Wouldn’t that show the world that the American theater does, in fact, believe in freedom of expression?

Ally Duong studies at Rutgers Law School and is a documentation volunteer for the non-profit fan activist group Organization for Transformative Works and their virtual archive of fan works Archive of Our Own. Previously, she interned in the contracts department at Deep Vellum Publishing, formerly Dalkey Archive.

“Romantasy” is a genre marriage of romance and fantasy that has been selling books like wildfire. And this year, your local bookstore’s romantasy section is likely lined with covers featuring a curly-haired brunette heroine next to a suave, silver-haired hero–all because fans who saw what an author couldn’t see decided to write stories about a couple that never came to be.

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Much of the latest wave traces back to the couple Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger, two of the best-known characters in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In Rowling’s books, Draco and Hermione remain enemies and never become romantically involved. But fans have spent countless hours imagining an alternate reality, producing more than 100,000 online stories about “Dramione” on Archive of Our Own alone.

Now some of those fan works are making the leap from online archives to traditional publishing. The attraction for publishers is obvious: a popular fanfic may arrive with a ready-made audience and social-media buzz. But that shift raises a serious legal question: What must an author change before an unauthorized derivative work becomes an independent — and lawfully marketable — novel?

Copyright protects expression, not every idea

Critics of the fanfiction-to-publishing pipeline call the practice unethical, legally questionable, or both. They argue that authors are profiting from characters, settings, and stories someone else created. But the necessary extra labor of reworking a story to transform it from internet fanfiction into a traditionally published book leaves little doubt that such books are legal to sell under a copyright law doctrine called “fair use.”

Copyright protects an author’s original expression, but it doesn’t protect abstract ideas, general themes, stock characters, or familiar plot devices. The fair use doctrine recognizes that people must be allowed to use copyrighted material in certain situations to allow free expression, satire, and parody to flourish. Fair use is decided on a case-by-case basis with courts weighing four factors:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether it is commercial

2. The nature of the copyrighted work

3. The amount and substantiality of the copyrighted material used

4. The effect on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work

The key question is: How much is a copyrighted work transformed? In other words, is the original work used to express something different?

For traditionally published fanfiction, however, courts may never need to reach fair use. The threshold question is whether the rewritten book still copies protected expression at all. Copyright law requires only a “modicum of creativity” for a work to contain copyrightable expression. If only unprotected ideas, tropes, and conventions remain, there may be no infringement to excuse.

Filing off the serial numbers

Fanfiction culture has proved fertile ground for artistic expression. Copyright law nurtures that creativity by protecting an author’s particular expression rather than the underlying ideas. Humans have always retold familiar stories. Shakespeare borrowed plots. West Side Story reworked Romeo and Juliet. Countless romances owe something to Pride and Prejudice. Copyright does not demand that each new book emerge from a cultural vacuum. If it did, creativity would be stifled and expression severely limited on the grounds that practically no story is entirely original.

Fanfiction has also been quietly making its way onto bookstore shelves for years. Fifty Shades of Grey began as a Twilight fanfiction titled Master of the Universe. After the name and references were changed, only devoted “Twihards” were likely to see Edward Cullen and Bella Swan behind Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele.

Fan communities call that revision process “filing off the serial numbers.” The author reworks the original characters’ names, identifiable locations, invented terminology, and other features tied to the source material. The online version is often deleted before the new edition is commercially released. Some changes are so thorough that rewritten works leave behind only common tropes and scènes à faire — standard plot elements for a particular genre. Those features generally cannot be copyrighted. Otherwise, such common elements could be used as evidence of copyright infringement (“Look! This story has an elf! It’s Tolkien plagiarism!”), and the first author to write about them could fence off whole genres of storytelling.

From Reylo to The Love Hypothesis

Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis offers a useful example. The novel began as Head Over Feet, a Star Wars story pairing the protagonist Rey with the villain Kylo Ren. It was traditionally published in 2021, and a film adaptation is scheduled to premiere on Prime Video on Sept. 23, 2026.

In the reworked edition, Rey and Kylo Ren are no longer heroes in a galactic war. They instead become university researchers Olive Smith and Adam Carlsen, who hilariously end up “fake dating” despite being polar opposites. The only surviving similarities are the enemies-to-lovers foundation of the romantic relationship, some physical traits, and familiar tropes of opposites attracting and a tall, dark, brooding love interest. These building blocks are not the property of Lucasfilm and are too general to belong to any one creator.

Tropes and scènes à faire make a genre like romantasy, but it’s the particular expression of each one that creates copyrightable books.

One judge, 6,000 pages, and hot paranormal boys

Building on the infamous “omegaverse litigation,” a recent federal case illustrates the distinction. In Freeman v. Deebs-Elkenaney, Lynne Freeman claimed that Tracy Wolff’s Crave series copied Freeman’s unpublished paranormal-romance manuscripts.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon read more than 6,000 pages of romantasy fiction across the competing works to determine whether two paranormal romance books were substantially similar enough to be copyright infringement. Her answer was no; there are some tropes that are simply conventions of the genre and cannot be claimed by one person.

“Both include the inevitable love story between the heroine and a hot boy who turns out to be a paranormal,” McMahon wrote. “This is ‘romantasy’ fiction, so there has to be a romance, and hot boys are a staple of the genre.”

Dramione in chains

So is the case closed on traditionally publishing fanfiction? Probably not, because publishers are pushing the envelope, particularly with the latest trend of reworked Dramione fanfiction, beginning in 2025 and now in full swing. These works far more openly use the Dramione relationship to market the new books. Some hardly even try to pass as original. Julie Soto’s Rose in Chains, previously the Dramione fanfiction The Auction, centers around a magical boarding school, a heroine named Briony (rather than Hermione), and a villainess named Veronika (certainly not Voldemort).

These characters and their world are distinct from the Harry Potter universe, yet their origin is no secret. Publishers are using marketing tactics that directly target Dramione fans, riding the coattails of the Harry Potter intellectual property, with some cover designs and promotional materials winking at the pairing through silver-haired men, curly-haired women, and so on.

Despite exploiting the Harry Potter link for marketing, Dramione fans aren’t picking up the rewritten works because of their origins in Harry Potter. They are reading these stories for the romantic relationship, which never appeared in Rowling’s work. The space that Dramione reworked fanfiction takes up on shelves isn’t taking away from Harry Potter itself. They may even be helping keep the series relevant in the marketplace.

While an evenhanded application of the fair use factors weighs in favor of the right to publish such fanfiction, it remains to be seen how the courts will actually view the situation. Without any public cases targeting this specific issue, the legality of more lightly reworked fanfiction is still murky. But while resistant readers may bristle at the similarities, reworked fanfiction, fueled by nerdy devotion, have rightfully found a place on bookshelves and in readers’ hearts.

Max Friedman is a rising third-year law student at the University of Memphis.

Censorship in the name of combating antisemitism has become a fact of contemporary political life. Whether through retaliation against individuals expressing protest slogans on campus, state laws codifying the deeply flawed IHRA Working Definition of antisemitism, or overbroad Title VI enforcement, state actors have exploited fears of antisemitism in ways that suppress pro-Palestinian activism.

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To be clear, FIRE takes no position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and fears of antisemitic conduct are far from unfounded given widely publicized reports of rapid increases in antisemitic violence. It also goes without saying that identifying and condemning perceived antisemitism is protected speech under the First Amendment. Yet all too often, activists and governments blur the line between arguably unpleasant but protected speech and unprotected conduct like true threats, discriminatory harassment, and incitement to imminent lawless action.

Implicit in this campaign against allegedly antisemitic speech is the idea that some “hateful” or “dangerous” speech should be suppressed because it might inspire others to discriminate or commit violence against Jews. These paternalistic arguments are not new, and they are deeply flawed. To illustrate, let’s turn the clock back a century.

In 1923, New York police entered Broadway’s Apollo Theater and shut down an English-language production of a popular Yiddish play, Sholem Asch’s Got fun nekome (“God of Vengeance”). Officers arrested the entire cast and production team, including prominent First Amendment lawyer Harry Weinberger of Abrams v. United States fame. The raid led to a sprawling obscenity trial that sharply divided the New York Jewish community.

Got fun nekome was supposedly “obscene” because it portrayed a Jewish family that defied norms of gender and social status. A violent and controlling father operates a brothel in his basement, masks his corruption with hypocritical piety, and desecrates a Torah scroll. His daughter rebels from an arranged marriage and falls in love with one of the brothel’s female prostitutes, whom she caresses and kisses in the rain (the first kiss between two women to appear on a Broadway stage). Needless to say, none of this is “obscene” under modern constitutional standards. But ultimately, the jury found each of the defendants guilty of obscenity, relying on the prosecution’s description of the production’s “immoral” and “salacious” contents.

Some Jewish leaders at the time feared that the play’s portrayal of Jews would inflame antisemitic stereotypes. They argued it portrayed the father’s immorality as uniquely Jewish — contrary to Asch’s intended broader social critique that happened to feature Jewish characters. Rabbi Joseph Silverman, a prominent leader in the New York Jewish community, noted the rampant anti-immigrant sentiment directed against Yiddish-speaking Jews and claimed that the play “libels the Jewish religion.” (Rabbi Silverman, in fact, had filed the criminal complaint that led to the raid.)

The judge overseeing the trial even cited these concerns in his statements following the verdict. As reported in the Yiddish newspaper of record, Forverts (“Forward”), the judge proclaimed, “God of Vengeance has been condemned by Jews, like Silverman and others. According to them, the play does not communicate the right message about Jewish life and doesn’t paint the Jewish woman in a good light.”

Meanwhile, the play’s advocates relied on principles of free expression. Weinberger, defending himself and the rest of the cast, argued that the case implicated bedrock civil liberties (and later succeeded in having the convictions reversed on evidentiary grounds). Prominent figures, including the editor-in-chief of Forverts, testified to the play’s artistic merit. And as Asch himself wrote in an open letter, “Jews do not need to clear themselves before any one. . . . I think that the apologetic writer, who tries to place Jews in a false, even though white light, does them more harm than good in the eyes of the Gentiles.”

Asch’s response draws on a cornerstone free speech principle: what we consider “true” or “dangerous” can change, sometimes very rapidly. John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty that we must embrace speakers’ right to express controversial, unpopular ideas, because those ideas may in fact be true. And even if they are not, the proper remedy is truthful speech, not censorship. Got fun nekome is a case in point. Today, the play’s rejection of racialized essentialism and embrace of same-sex relationships are points of pride for many Yiddish theater aficionados; and its radicalism in its own era inspired Paula Vogel’s award-winning play Indecent. Suppressing Got fun nekome — even assuming it might have prevented some gentiles from believing negative stereotypes about Jews — would have erased what many view as a transformative work of Jewish art.

So let Sholem Asch’s words guide us now. The mere fact that a message could provoke ill will toward Jews does not justify stamping it out in the name of Jewish safety. Indeed, as the Got fun nekome scandal shows, the nebulous notion of “dangerous” speech has encompassed controversial expression by influential Jewish cultural figures like Asch. The government may regulate select categories like true threats, discriminatory harassment, and incitement, but the First Amendment protects most provocative and uncomfortable speech. And often — especially with time — “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.”

Athena Rem is a rising junior at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Televangelist Jerry Falwell once confessed in an interview to drunken sex with his unconscious mother in an outhouse. Except it wasn’t a real interview. It was a fake Campari ad in a 1983 issue of adult magazine Hustler.

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Falwell sued the magazine and its publisher Larry Flynt for emotional distress, libel, and invasion of privacy. Flynt defended the ad’s publication as protected by the First Amendment. What came next remains one of the most famous free speech cases in American jurisprudence.

Flynt won the case, Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (1988), because parody is not a statement of fact made with “actual malice” and because print media, shows, or any other publications can generally criticize public figures under the First Amendment.

Yet such critical speech is under fire today more than ever before. And these modern efforts to silence critics risk blunting Americans of the cultural institution of satire. Late-night shows like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live routinely mimic and mock public figures, and it’s important they be able to do so. Because humor isn’t merely entertaining — it’s also one of the most powerful forms of political commentary.

Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel speaks about political issues in his opening monologues. When his show airs, that is. A notable exception occurred when the FCC pressured ABC to suspend his show in September 2025 over anti-MAGA commentary about Charlie Kirk’s murder. Without resistance, this incident may not be the last of its kind. “Unless we resist each attempt at government-driven censorship,” says Garrett Gravley, FIRE’s program counsel, “the next suspension may not be so brief.”

Despite how significantly FCC jawboning can threaten the flow of information, the legal response to date has been scarce. The unique rise in First Amendment violations within the last year that specifically target this niche of entertainment make it even more necessary to find an effective corrective measure.

Looking back to the 1950s provides some insight. The House Un-American Activities Committee, following McCarthyism and the Second Red Scare, encouraged the denial of screenwriting and acting jobs to supposed communists through repeated investigations and contempt citations. Though the recommendation in and of itself was problematic, a primary reason the problem persisted and grew was that studio heads refused to ignore or deny unconstitutional calls for blacklisting by the government.

Indeed, cultural change occurred only when Universal Studios allowed a blacklisted producer to receive credit at the end of a movie in 1960. At the very least, cultural response, indignation, or desire to change is a prerequisite to stopping sanctions on entertainment.

Falwell lost because the Court understood an essential truth: a democracy confident enough to laugh at its leaders and other powerful figures is stronger, not weaker. If that principle no longer holds, satire won’t be the last casualty of censorship.

An American heavy metal band says it was contacted by the Secret Service for holding a mock execution of President Trump onstage.

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The group is Gwar, a theatrical science-fiction musical project formed in 1984. They describe themselves as former members of an elite extraterrestrial fighting force called the Scumdogs of the Universe, who were banished to Earth for bad behavior, accidentally created humans through fornication with apes, and now tour the globe playing concerts. Their current lineup consists of THE BERSERKER BLÓTHAR on lead vocals, BÄLSÄC THE JAWS ‘O DEATH and GRODIUS MAXIMUS on guitar, BEEFCAKE THE MIGHTY on bass, and JIZMAK DA GUSHA on drums.

…so you know they’re serious.

The band has been doing this at concerts throughout their recent tours — the latest occurrence happening during the group’s performance at Warped Tour in Washington, D.C. this month. A now-viral video depicts someone in a Donald Trump costume walking onstage and being disemboweled by the band, his fake blood spraying on the first few rows of concert attendees.

For this, Gwar is allegedly being reviewed by federal agents. Their manager, Sleazy P. Martini, could not be reached for comment.

Anyone familiar with Gwar knows that the band is famous for its often grotesque, shocking, and bizarre stage shows. A staple of those performances for decades has been the gratuitous mock killing of public figures. Their victims have included former President Barack Obama, former President Joe Biden, Queen Elizabeth, Elon Musk, Hillary Clinton, and Kanye West, among others.

Puzzlingly, however, this is the first time the band has drawn the attention of government agents for it.

“For years, GWAR would do whatever the fuck we wanted,” BLÓTHAR said in a recent interview. “We would kill politicians from both sides of the aisle. We would kill famous people. We never had any backlash.” But when Trump was re-elected, he said, “people started getting extremely upset about politics and music and politics in art.”

For anyone concerned about free expression the last few years, the actions of the federal government will come as no surprise. President Trump and his administration are notorious for wielding government power and the legal system to bully perceived enemies — including universities, law firms, media companies, political opponents, and even private associations.

Apparently, not even heavy metal groups are small enough potatoes.

Despite the anger it inspired among some Trump supporters, and despite drawing the attention of the Secret Service, Gwar’s onstage antics are First Amendment-protected speech. While true threats aren’t protected, a true threat is a serious expression of intent to commit unlawful violence against an individual. It doesn’t include hyperbole, satire, or artistic expression that simply references or depicts violence, however provocative it may be.

The obviously over-the-top theatrical context of Gwar’s mock execution, and the fact that the band has done the same thing to other politicians and public figures, make clear that they weren’t actually threatening the president’s life. There’s also no credible argument that the performance amounted to unprotected incitement, which applies only to speech intended and likely to result in imminent unlawful action.

Mock executions may be crude, offensive, or disturbing, but they are hardly new. Americans have used symbolic depictions of violence against political figures for centuries to express dissent. In 1919, angry suffragists burned President Woodrow Wilson in effigy outside the White House. In 1842, protesters did the same with then-president John Tyler. Former Vice President Aaron Burr was hanged in effigy in Baltimore following his trial for treason in 1807. Lincoln was subjected to public effigy burnings throughout the South during the Civil War. And of course more recent presidents, including Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Trump, haven’t been spared this tradition.

All of it was protected speech, and Gwar’s blood-spewing onstage execution is no different. We doubt this investigation will go anywhere, but even the Scumdogs of the Universe have First Amendment rights — and if they’re threatened, FIRE will be ready.