So the morning after our Forth of July party, Jon and I are out getting a bite to eat at Panera Bread, a nearby sandwich shop.   Jon is still playing with his new iPhone, and he wants to see how well it works with the free wireless hotspot at Panera Bread.

We sit down to a light breakfast (really light for me because I’m still feeling a tad hungover from the previous night…), and Jon calls up a few items on the Safari browser built into the iPhone.  Then for kicks and grins he tries to call up my web site.  But the wireless at Panera Bread blocks it, with a message that my site is being blocked because its content is pornographic.

WTF???  The most risqué this site gets is on the cartoon prologue to my cartoon series A Coming Out Story, where I talk about the time my straight high school pals dragged me to see my first X-rated movie.  I’d give the content of that one an R rating at best.  I just don’t do X.  X is obvious.  I don’t do obvious, I don’t feel comfortable treating sex that way.  It isn’t me.  (There’s a reason why the character of my Libido in A Coming Out Story is always wearing a fig leaf…)  I figure some blue nosed jackass took a look at my site and saw that it was full of unashamedly gay content and complained to the filtering software company.

The blocking message provides a link to where you can complain if you think you’re being blocked unfairly, and I give it some thought.  I’m not entirely happy about being accused of being a pornographer.  But on the other hand, I’m certain this isn’t about any suggestive content in my cartoons, so much as the political content of the blog, and perhaps the political cartoons.  I’m gay, and I’m fine with that, and as far as some people are concerned, that makes me X-rated.  Which makes this blocking notice I’m looking at a political statement.

Jon helpfully tells me that there are rating services I can subscribe to which will rate my website and help keep it unblocked, and I instantly have images of something like the old Comics Code Authority plastered on the top of my cartoons and I hate it.  No.  No.  That is not going to happen.  The only rating my cartoons, or anything else on my web site that I publish will ever have stamped on them, is the only one that matters:  My name.

I may still request a little clarification from the filtering company that Panera Bread is using.  In the meantime, if you have trouble accessing my website from some public place send me an email and I’ll tell you a few ways to get past it.  Jon and I eventually brought my website up at Panera Bread’s anyway.  And in the context of Kultar Kampf, being censored is more like a badge of honor then a stain on your reputation.

Yesterday, on the way to our weekly happy hour gathering, I tell Joe about having my web site censored for pornographic content.  He congratulates me.

"The Internet treats censorship as damage, and it routes around it."
-John Gilmore

[Edited a Tad...]  In the comments Jon tells me it was Panera Bread not Cosi as I’d originally said…