An annual theater festival dedicated to showcasing the work of playwrights from countries that criminalize or censor the LGBTQ community has turned to online fundraising after the National Endowment for the Arts revoked the New York festival’s grant.
In December, the independent federal agency awarded a $20,000 grant to the National Queer Theater, a nonprofit theater company based in Brooklyn, for its 2025 Criminal Queerness Festival. It was the third year the company was awarded an NEA grant, which made up 20% of the festival’s total budget, according to Jess Ducey, co-chair of the company’s board.
The NEA began revoking arts funding for a number of organizations, including the National Queer Theater, on Friday. That day, the agency told the theater in an email that it “is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President,” according to a copy of the email that Ducey shared with NBC News.
“Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities,” the email continued. “The NEA will now prioritize projects that elevate the Nation’s HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions, celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again, support the military and veterans, support Tribal communities, make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful, and support the economic development of Asian American communities.”
The Criminal Queerness Festival, the email stated, “does not align with these priorities.”
The NEA did not immediately return a request for comment. The agency is currently experiencing a broader upheaval, with several of its senior leaders stepping down this week after President Donald Trump released a proposed budget Friday that would eliminate its funding, The Washington Post reported.
“It’s devastating and upsetting, because we’re a very small organization,” said Ducey, who uses they/them pronouns. “That grant is absolutely integral to the funding.”
Ducey said the festival, scheduled for June 11-28, has already hired a production manager and started casting and scheduling rehearsals for the three plays it will feature, which are set in Uganda, Indonesia and Cuba. The bulk of the grant goes toward paying the 50 artists hired for the festival, they said. If the company can’t make up that funding, it might have to scale back the set design for performances or pay some of the artists late.
Ducey organized a GoFundMe fundraiser to try to make up the grant funds.
“A lot of our time and attention is now going into scrambling to get this money, rather than preparing these shows, doing all the outreach we would be doing,” they said.
Ducey said the National Queer Theater suspected that it could lose the grant after it joined a lawsuit filed against the NEA by the American Civil Liberties Union in March on behalf of arts organizations over a new certification that required artists applying for 2025-26 grants to attest that they wouldn’t “promote gender ideology” with any potential funding.
The NEA added the provision due to an executive order from Trump that declared there are two unchangeable sexes and prohibited the “federal funding of gender ideology.”
Days after the ACLU filed the lawsuit, the NEA removed the provision and said it will decide how to implement Trump’s order. As a result, a court denied the ACLU’s request for a preliminary injunction last month. The lawsuit is still active, as the ACLU expects the provision to be reinstated. Additionally, the NEA, which provides awards as reimbursements to projects rather than providing them upfront, did not remove separate new eligibility criteria that would revoke awards from any projects that appear to “promote gender ideology.”
The ACLU argues that the initial certification requirement and the eligibility criteria violate the Administrative Procedure Act, the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment.
Ducey said the theater feared that joining the lawsuit could flag its current project to the NEA and result in the funding being revoked, but that the requirements would have made it ineligible for much-needed funding in the future.
“If you care about the arts, if you care about representation, this is about more than a grant,” Ducey said. “This is about the attack on artists and stories and the viewpoints that are considered American. The broader issue is of who’s being targeted — migrants, people of color, queer and trans people, gender-nonconforming people. The arts are one avenue.”
