Kennedy Center contract employee strips nude in protest video and is promptly fired

A Kennedy Center contract worker strips nude in a new YouTube protest video and asks if they should quit their job with the Washington, D.C., arts institution targeted by President Trump: “Is my complicity inevitable, or am I holding a line on the inside?”

Tavish Forsyth, the associate artistic lead for the Washington National Opera’s Opera Institute, released the video of them performing a 35-minute spoken-word poem of protest on Wednesday. By Thursday afternoon, Forsyth had been fired.

“Trump has taken over the Kennedy Center and that’s a place where I work,” Forsyth says at the beginning of the video while sitting fully clothed on a bed. “He has vowed to ban drag performers from its stages, and as the saying goes, ‘We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.’”

Forsyth, who is queer, then snaps their fingers and their clothes disappear, revealing Forsyth with a small digitally generated rainbow heart over their groin. Forsyth delivers the rest of the prose poem naked. The poem’s refrain is, “Should I quit the Kennedy Center?” while the verses examine what remaining in their job might mean, and what the benefits or consequences of quitting might be. The video discusses the meaning of art in this political moment and the ways protest is an essential form of artistic expression.

“The video is extremely disturbing considering this individual worked with minors,” Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, wrote in an email to The Times.

In response, Forsyth said that art is a “vehicle for truth,” and that the “truth is that this administration is harming young people more than any campy piece of protest art ever could.”

“Any implication that I am corrupting the youth is laughably false, intentionally misleading, and is underscored by decades of hate targeted at LGBTQ+ educators,” Forsyth wrote. They added that they intend to continue working with people of all ages, and to be an “advocate for their authenticity, dignity, and growth.”

Forsyth’s provocative video came as many Trump critics have been intimidated by the personalized form of retribution practiced by the president and his allies, including Elon Musk, who has made headlines for targeting individuals on his social media platform X.

“Does staying make me a collaborator or somehow complicit in a hostile government takeover that’s systematically targeting the livelihood and liberty of poor people, queer people, black/brown people, people of color, immigrants, Muslims, victims of war-torn countries and ethnic cleansing, women?” Forsyth asks early in the video before indicating that the “obvious” answer is yes.

“But on the other hand, is staying holding the line and living to fight another day? Do I take up space and defend the vision for this institution that is diverse and inclusive, unlike Trump’s vision for America,” Forsyth asks. “Do I stay to defend the beautiful people that come to visit? Do I covertly raise my nose at the regime, raise the peace sign high and do everything in my power to preserve the values of cooperation, creative freedom and transformative storytelling that I hold so dear?”

Tavish Forsyth, the associate artistic lead for the Washington National Opera’s Opera Institute, photographed at an event in Baltimore.

(Lucas Shipley / Green Globe Theatre)

In an interview, Forsyth, 32, said that they laughed when they first heard the news in mid-February that Trump intended to take over the center as its chairman. It was a nervous response, they said, one that gave way to “waves of shock” because of the president’s attacks on transgender people and drag performers.

“Initially I thought I would just let it ride and see what happens,” Forsyth said. “I didn’t have an immediate intention to quit or to protest, but to sit and watch with the deep feeling that I was going to be fired, if not in the near future, then certainly at some point over the next four years, because my lived experience is in opposition to everything that this administration represents.”

Forsyth’s bio on the Kennedy Center website said they are a practitioner of theater for social change. Forsyth also facilitates the Arts & Social Justice Fellowship at Strathmore, a music center in Maryland, and the queer Soloist Showcase at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in D.C. At the Kennedy Center, Forsyth was part of a group that administers a Washington National Opera summer training program for high school singers from across the country, many of whom come on scholarships and financial aid. The program took place in an area of the center called Reach, which is used for education, collaboration and experimentation in the arts.

“My work at the Kennedy Center is one of the best jobs I’ve ever had,” Forsyth said. “Specifically with my team, the Opera Institute, there was just so much love and support, and a sincere commitment to reimagine the ways that we create art, and also to take a really critical look at some of the more problematic ways that we’ve created art in the past.”

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Sometimes that work took the form of studying the traditional opera canon “in conversation with modern-day voices that represent a diverse range of exchanges.”

Forsyth said speaking out felt scary but necessary. They hope their video “inspires conversation around the role of the artist, and more generally, the role of the citizen,” Forsyth said, and that it, “encourages people to divest from oppressive institutions, to divest from systems of hate.”

“As they dig their claws deeper into the administrative fabric of the Kennedy Center,” Forsyth said of the Trump representatives who have assumed control, “they’re going to continue dismantling it and undermining all of the values that everyone at the Kennedy Center holds dear.”

When Forsyth posted the video, Forsyth knew that colleagues might not agree with the tactic and that the video could result in termination. In the video Forsyth says, “Can me and my colleagues hold the line behind enemy lines? Can we oppose a machine while being its engine? And at the same time, can we protect a space that we love? A space that we believe in?”

Forsyth adds later: “If this is your fight, fight. If you believe you can douse the fire from inside the house in which it burns, then I bow to you. You are an angel. But I would ask you to consider that this fire is bigger than this house. ... The Kennedy Center is not the first and it will not be the last.”