It was a very unhappy Thanksgiving for Lawrence Brose. On Nov. 25, the CEPA Gallery executive director and filmmaker was charged with possession of child pornography in federal court. He remains in his position at the gallery, an institution he has led through almost a decade of growth, as he awaits his next court appearance on Jan. 7.

This has put Buffalo’s tight-knit arts world into a moral conundrum.

What are the conceivable defenses for allegedly possessing images of children engaged in sexual activities? If the images, as Brose’s supporters claim, are strictly for research purposes, what –if any –weight does that argument hold?

We would do well to avoid the reactionary lunacy that sometimes accompanies accusations of this sort. The rush to be the first one to proclaim the man despicable for fear of being viewed as a silent accomplice can have a tendency to mask the issue at hand.

That issue is whether an artist who uses illegal images for artistic research –if that is what Brose was doing – deserves an exemption from a law that tries to protect children from sexual predators.

There is little doubt that the images in question, which News staff reporter Dan Herbeck wrote portrayed “‘nude young boys’ in sexually explicit poses,” are illegal. Such images are illegal because their consumption creates a

market that in turn causes actual harm to actual children.

Therefore, intentionally seeking out the images under any pretense, including research for art, becomes indefensible.

CEPA Board President James E. Rolls said he had not seen the pictures and declined to speculate about what they contained. “Our position is that there is no kiddie porn [in the confiscated images],” Rolls said. “It’s all an allegation at this point.”

Rolls offered an explanation of Brose’s approach in collecting images to use in his films.

“He’ll go on different sites, and if there are pictures he thinks he might be able to use in the future, he’ll save them,” Rolls said. Adult pornographic images factor heavily into many of Brose’s films, most prominently in his widely exhibited 1997 piece, “De Profundis.”

Whether the prosecution or penalty should be tempered if the images are proven to have been for research purposes is up for debate. But comparisons to the case of University at Buffalo Professor Steven Kurtz seem entirely inadvisable here. The reason is simple: Kurtz’s work with biological agents was neither remotely illegal on its face nor materially harmful to any person, anywhere in the world. But there is an implicit correlation between the consumption of child pornography, whether paid for or acquired for free, and the mental and physical abuse of children.

As Buffalo News reporters Lou Michel and Susan Schulman showed in their extensive 2007 series, “The Child Porn Pipeline,” the consumer shares responsibility for the abuse with the producer.

To be clear, the existence and artistic confrontation of an illicit desire should not be subject to regulation, nor should any government subdue or censor it. Indeed, the darkest of these desires sit at the heart of some major artists’ works, from the paintings of Francis Bacon to the novels of Dennis Cooper. Their art is properly protected by the First Amendment, no matter how despicable some deem it. And that’s as it should be.

But the game changes if the artist himself steps into the illicit area he interrogates in his art. In doing so, he leaves the province of free speech protections and enters a perilous territory where even our brave First Amendment fears to tread.

We don’t know if Brose has done this. It’s for the courts to decide.

Brose has often explored the outer limits of sexuality in his work. “De Profundis,” Brose wrote on his Web site, “fractures boundaries established by a conservative gay movement and gives voice to the radical margins of sexual dissidence.” But what are those boundaries, where are those margins, and what, exactly, is the nature of that “dissidence?”

Before, Brose left us to wonder. Now, he points our minds in darker directions.

Our most transgressive painters, filmmakers and writers –who often double as our most valuable artists –spend much of their time diving off the edges of legal and sexual propriety in their work.

They have to be allowed to make work about the untamed and often disturbing landscape of human temptation. But if they enter that arena themselves, they take their fates in their own hands.