An American Music Awards Kiss: Censorship, and the Politics of Morality in American Pop Culture

Jennifer Lopez woke it up with a same sex kiss on the AMA stage! Hopefully she isn’t black listed tomorrow.

In 2009, singer Adam Lambert made headlines following his performance of “For Your Entertainment” at the American Music Awards. During the live broadcast, Lambert kissed his male keyboardist on stage — a moment that sparked widespread backlash and controversy. “Christian parent groups were writing in, the censors were freaked out,” Lambert recalled in a later interview. The fallout was immediate.

When CBS’s The Early Show covered the incident, the network blurred the kiss. In contrast, they freely aired footage of the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards where Britney Spears and Madonna famously kissed — underscoring a cultural double standard. Sensuality between women, especially when framed through a heteronormative lens, was acceptable; open displays of queer male intimacy, however, remained taboo.

This pattern of selective censorship is not new. In January 2025, an Oklahoma lawmaker introduced a bill proposing a total ban on pornography under the banner of “Restoring Moral Sanity,” with proposed penalties of up to 10 years in prison.

While framed as a protective measure, laws like this risk being used to censor a wide range of creative expression — including art, recorded music, and live performance — under subjective definitions of “obscenity.”

In 1989, R&B star Bobby Brown was arrested in Columbus, Georgia, for violating local anti-lewdness laws during a concert. Just a year later, during Madonna’s Blonde Ambition tour, police in Toronto waited backstage to potentially arrest the singer if she performed provocative choreography featured in her documentary Truth or Dare.

Hip-hop artists also faced intense scrutiny in the 1990s. Groups like Public Enemy, N.W.A., and 2 Live Crew were sued over the lyrical content of their albums. The legal and political pressure eventually led to the creation of the now-iconic “Parental Advisory” label — both a warning and a badge of artistic resistance.

Across decades, American artists — especially those who are queer, Black, or otherwise marginalized — have repeatedly been targets of censorship when their work challenges conventional norms. These moments are not just about performance or music; they reflect deeper cultural battles over who gets to speak, whose stories get to be seen, and how society defines morality.

The recurring clash between expression and censorship reveals that what’s truly at stake is not public decency — but public control.