The Perfect Moment: Isaac Butler on God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars

“People ask me if I think Helms was really offended by this stuff, and I think Helms was having the time of his fucking life.” — Isaac Butler

A few days ago, Katy Siegel and Elise Armani came on the show to assess the state of American culture in 1976. What was America? we asked. Today’s guest picks up the story immediately afterwards, when the health of this culture sharply declines. Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment is a history of the eighties and nineties, when America’s culture wars became political cudgels of the right. It’s the story of an increasingly imperfect America in the age of Jesse Helms and Robert Mapplethorpe.

The title is Mapplethorpe’s. It was the name of his retrospective that the Corcoran Gallery cancelled in 1989. The same show that later resulted in a Cincinnati museum director being indicted for obscenity — a first in American history.

Butler reminds us of the strangely consensual world that existed before the culture wars. It was an America in which the CIA covertly funded the artists that the FBI was investigating. An America where Louis Armstrong was sent abroad as a cultural ambassador while the agency plotted in the countries he was touring. An America in which a congressman was convinced that drip paintings were encrypted maps of American military assets. A liberal America where the culture and the state maintained a polite, albeit tangled, relationship.

And then, with the birth of the culture wars, God, sex and art all acquired instant political charge. Butler’s argument is about power, not taste. He reminds us that a giggly Jesse Helms kept the Mapplethorpe catalogue in his office and showed his favorite (ie: most vulgar) pages to visitors. Butler suggests that Helms was having the time of his life. Perhaps. Although this culture war wasn’t a lot of fun for the rest of us. Certainly not for the under-fire artists. Nor for an art-loving public caught in its hysterical crossfire. That, I’m afraid, is what America has become.

FURTHER READING

•   The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America’s Culture Wars (Bloomsbury, June 2026). Butler also wrote The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act and, with Dan Kois, The World Only Spins Forward, an oral history of Angels in America.

•   “Anything Could Become a Battleground” — the Los Angeles Review of Books on why the first culture war was fought over photographs.

•   The Washington Monthly on the galleries where it happened, and the Boston Globe on Butler, AIDS and New York.

•   James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (Basic Books, 1991) — the book that coined the phrase, a year before Pat Buchanan made it a slogan.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Isaac Butler is a writer, director and cultural historian based in Brooklyn. He is the author of The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act and the co-author, with Dan Kois, of The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America