Without any warning, Instagram deleted the account of famous out photographer Tom Bianchi (above). And while the photo sharing app has since reactivated Bianchi, the censorship is just another example of LGBTQ content creators having to jump through hoops to avoid being deleted off social media platforms.
Bianchi is known for photographing the nude male form, having produced 21 books of photos and poetry throughout his distinguished career. Two of those books feature photos from Fire Island Pines, the popular gay retreat off the coast of New York.
Related: Instagram deleted these pics of Antoni for being “pornographic”; photographer speaks out
It seems one of the images he took on Fire Island was the reason his account was suddenly deleted. The photo in question, which you can see here, features a man sitting on a bed with his back to the camera.
On Saturday, Bianchi posted about the situation on Twitter:
My Instagram was deleted today, requested a review, will post an update when I have one pic.twitter.com/AT9P8q3QQF
— Tom Bianchi (@tombianchi) February 2, 2019
On Sunday Instagram reversed its decision and Bianchi’s account was fully restored.
Related: Instagram deleted this Harvard undergrad’s photos for being ‘too sexual.’ You be the judge.
He posted this update:
“Sorry for the interruption – the powers that be turned the music back on. Please continue dancing. I’m touched deeply by all of you who raised your powerful beautiful voices for my reinstatement here. Thank you”
Check out some of Bianchi’s work, via his now-functioning Instagram account, below:
Bob LaBlah
Queerty, to me your reporting on censorship seems like the pot calling the kettle black.
Brian
A double standard from Queerty? I couldn’t be more shocked.
jsmu
BITCH. PLEASE.
mc4bbs
Where’s the “thumb’s up” button?!? I’d click it a few times.
OzJosh
Totally agree.
gymmuscleboy
How true. Queerty has no right to be whining about censorship!
Vince
Oh well. Tom gets some good publicity from this and I get to look through the pics:)
iamru2
We can thank the perpetually offended for such nonsense, many of those trolls are right here on queerty lol!
jsmu
Impotent little Russkytrolls like you 🙂
cynicalsteve
@iamru2 – Hey there sweetie! I’m on the website and I clicked “reply” to your stupid comment. Please do yourself a favor and cram that trollish head of yours up what I think might be a tight little a$$. You’ll get more out of life that way. Thanks hon!
caliboy17
We have to actively FIGHT this Puritanism. In this climate, and you know what I mean, we must FIGHT for our right to be who we are. With no apologies. Has no one seen The Handmaid’s Tale?
gymmuscleboy
@ caliboy17 In this climate? The vast majority of social media and tech companies are in Silicon Valley with left-leaning senior management and culture. Haven’t you heard about James Damore?
Kangol
Instagram’s (i.e. Facebook’s) pseudo-Puritanism is notorious, and is only going to get worse as they gain more power and marketshare. A privatized, non-neutral internet means there’s less power in the hands of the majority and far more in the hands of these private corporations. Now, if Tom Bianchi had featured the same man facing the camera but wearing skin-tight briefs with a massive d!ck print, they’d have done nothing. Bare skin=total freakout. But hasn’t Instagram/Facebook deleted photos and suspended the accounts of women showing themselves breast-feeding? Is that really too sexual to be seen by other adults? Seriously?
Black Pegasus
It started with Steve Jobs and the Apple Store. Apple imposed a NO nudity policy on all apps. It’s the reason why Grindr is so damn puritan in its photo policy. And now Scruff is following suit with banning jock straps and any display of underwear. Tumblr has also scrubbed its platform of porn.
Quantum Singularity
This homophobic cyberbullying by major social media needs to end. Without much of any means of getting ahold of these people in charge, with everything being on automatic, it’s easy for all of this nonsense to get overlooked by the rainbow capitalist executives, no matter how much we talk and no matter how many accounts with LGBTQ+ voices get shut down for no legitimate reason.
My LGBTQ+ activist account was also shut down, and so was Antinous Gay God’s Facebook page, which is for a Gay/LGBTQ+ spiritual temple called Religioi Antinoi, based in Hollywood, CA. Antinous Priests only post appropriate things about Gay love and their Greco-Roman Love God named Antinous (despite it being not “straight” love).
It is gut-wrenching, the fact that these executives will sanction hate against the clergy of an officially non-violent, pacifistic LGBTQ-affiliated religion. This homophobic discrimination needs to stop, but it will continue to spread unless the LGBTQ+ community speaks out AND acts. The Antinous clergy are so peaceful, they don’t complain much, they just continue to love, and they hope the hate just goes away. Much respect to these peaceful, spiritually enlightened people, who only live to love. But the rest of us need to maintain our material world and protest against this homophobic silencing of LGBTQ+ voices on Facebook/Instagram.
The bigots on social media are now having their way, and yet they are still complaining that social media is taking “our” side. This is outright ridiculous.
I say we go to Menlo Park, CA and picket the bigots at the Facebook/Instagram buildings. Just for reference, the address is: 1 Hacker Way, Menlo Park, CA 94025, and their whole little corporate complex is right at the intersection of Bayfront EXPY and Willow RD in Menlo Park, CA.
In masses, the LGBTQ+ community has the capability of making headlines by speaking out big time and raising the pressure on these bigots or idiots or whatever they truly are, but we need to organize and we need to show up on their doorstep with signs and bullhorns! ????
MountainCowboyMan
Life is just to short for the censorship that is appearing in 2019 one would think this is the 1950’s & needing the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval(which was only a logo bought & paid for by companies there were never any people who approved or denied). In the 1970’s Fire Island, Daytona Beach & Cape Cod Dunes were all alike and no one said boo! Today you bring the human body in pictures into the social pages on the internet & you would think it was the 1st time ever done. I do not see naked in any of these pictures posted, in fact they all look like frozen frame shots from underwear commercials broadcast on TV for the past 20 years. I have a picture of myself from 1975 pool side in my speedo in the U.S. Virgin Islands on my Honeymoon laying full length and if I posted it today I could hoodwink Facebook & Twitter & any other of these web sites thinking it was 2019 and not 1975. After some years on Facebook I closed my account with Facebook they have sold out the users and Twitter is about to get the ax from me. Just be whom you are in real time. Genuine, Real, Honest, Caring, Enjoyable In The Going Into & Cum’n Out From In Life. Make the most of living with all the pleasures of the up times & down times in living. No one has a easy life & when one is having a enjoyable time you will have those great memories no one else can ever take away from ya. At this point in my journey I have stopped saying good-bye to so many amazing & gifted people & only want to say hello. If you do not understand what I am saying you will one day & realize we are all pink on the inside & on the outside handsome is in the eye of the beholder. To capture in our youth fun times has no place to ever be censored by anyone nor at any other time in life’s travels.
Geeker
I’m not a fan of Tom’s “work” but Instagram truly sucks for the way it goes after LGBT related content.
gymmuscleboy
@Geeker Instagram uses AI to censor posts, presumably targeting those perceived as containing nudity. If AI suspended his account because it appeared to contain mostly nudity, how is that “going after LGBT related content”?
Bruce Garner
The point being missed here is that if the pictures had been a mixture of male and female, there would not have been an issue at all. That is the true hypocrisy of most of the social media platforms.
I am an adult well beyond legal age. It is not anyone’s business that some of the pictures are of bare chested men in bathing suits being affectionate with each other. QUEERTY and the rest of similar apps need to get a life and focus on things that have a negative impact on us as queer folks, starting at the White House.
If you think the situation is not dangerous and getting worse, you are not paying attention. We need to learn from history to avoid repeating it. For those of you who did not learn much world history, I suggest you check out what began in the late 1930’s in Germany.
Until LGBTQ+ folks are treated exactly like our non-LGBTQ+ counterparts, we have a problem. So let’s get our head out of the sand or wherever we have stuck them and remember that the 50th anniversary of Stonewall is this year. It is time for another rebellion!
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
It is all part of the far right and their increasing power in this administration. Our rights gained in the last 20 years are slowly being erroded. They have installed a record number of Federal Judges all vetted by Liberty Counsel. If RGB passes away, EVERY bit of progress we made will most certainly be put before the SCOTUS and most likely lost…..
Bob LaBlah
Speaking of her (RBG) I think its her fault that the court will be as far right as it will be once she’s gone. Common sense should have told her once she hit eighty years old (and Obama was still in office) that it was time for her to go in order to protect the future but she wouldn’t do it. The country really does need to get rid of this appointment for life b/s. These people age like everyone else and its not fair to allow them to become popes.
girldownunder
Move away from platforms that only want to spy & collect data. You DO have a choice:
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da90027
Lots of double standards on Instagram whose moderators like Facebook are all High School dropouts or someone in India on a computer. I see attention hoes daily posting bare ass pics on there yet there they are. It’s bullshit.
HairyHunkBerlin
Did you change your Pills again or WTF is wrong with you?
I recommend that you put your self in front of a mirror and speak out loud those words:
I always support measured censorship on social media.
Look in your eyes while you speak those words and tell me what you see!
Are you proud of what you have become?
HairyHunkBerlin
Seriously, the LGBT+ Media should focus much more on the growing homophobia on Social media.
I was blocked on fb, because I posted a photo which was deleted on IG, showing me in regular Swimwear standing next to a Sign which said “Sometimes you have to be your own kind of beautiful”. I posted it on fb to show everybody what stupid things IG is censoring and that it is very homophobic. Just one hour later the photo was deleted from fb as well and I was suspended for one week. As everybody can see, the BIG BROTHER Control fb and IG works very well.
I made a test after and reported a Muslim Hate Preacher who was guest in a Mosque in london and on his fb page he called everybody to kill Gay People and behead them.
Guess what, fb send me a mail, telling me they checked the Profile and it is NOT VIOLATING their Community Guidelines.
THIS SHOULD BE ALARMING
HairyHunkBerlin
I would like to bring every bodies attention to what is happening right now on tumblr. They changed their Community Guidelines and their Censorship is an attack on our Right of Freedom of Speech and a threat for our Freedom and for Democracy.
They have Bots now which control EVERY Post you make. As soon as there is a piece of skin visible they make the posting invisible and you have to appeal (which you can only one time and after you have no chance to protest or talk to them)
It happens now more and more that everything gay related is geting censored and made invisible, even if it is going conform with their updatet community guidelines (which nobody in the Community wants).
They manipulate what you can see, they manipulate the search results and the hashtags.
After they made two political anti trump cartoons invisible (with the reason that it was Adult Content), I protested and posted them again and they flagged my complete Blog as “Explicit” and made it invisible for public view. Only after I made it public and named and tagged them on twitter, fb, newspapers, congress and everybody I found, they suddenly made my blog visible again. All the time there was no communication between tumblr and me.
This is really a danger and George Orwells 1984 Society of total control will become reality soon if we do not fight against this.
dbmcvey
We used to call his books “A-gays frolic.”
adje
Why just rejoice that he’s back on this demonic, data-stealing, homophobe, intolerant religious fanatic, family values, service.
Obviously we’re not part of their family. Why put up with it?
Is this the American way now?
I pity those who fall within their “community standards”
adje
or maybe we’re all masochists, who love to be punched in the face, pushed over, dismissed, rejected ? Or is it we all are waiting for the days when we can proudly say “I was banned from Instagram and fakebook”, like surviving the McCarthy years or the aids decade ?
CarlIsle
Meanwhile there are thousands of photos of bare male and female asses on Instagram that no one seems to mind.