Outward Making Room to Move In an era of right-wing suppression, imagining life outside the “norm” can be hard. Luckily, a renegade group of artists has already shown us the way. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Abrams Press. This piece is adapted from Nonstop Bodies: How Dance Shaped New York City , by Rennie McDougall. Copyright © 2026 by the author and reprinted with permission of Abrams Press. American artists faced two waves of suppression—one national and one local—near the end of the 20 th century. Nationally, neoconservatives attacked artists whose provocations, or even simply their identities, threatened their mission to reestablish the predominance of a white, Christian, heteronormative base of the country. American art, they feared, had grown worryingly accommodating (celebratory, even) of queer people, women, artists of color, sexual freedoms, bodily autonomy, criticism of religion.…