Three
The culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s marked the first time when sexual difference became a viable topic for exhibition in museums. Previously, objects from queer cultures had always been displayed in museums, but they were never labeled or viewed as such (except of course by those sharp-eyed queers who were on the lookout for these unlabeled and publicly unacknowledged artifacts). When queer lives and in particular queer sex were displayed in museums, intense legal and social battles ensued. In response, supporters often used rhetoric based in First Amendment rights, academic freedom, and artistic prowess to further the cause. Among these debates, the controversy surrounding Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs in mainstream museums and art galleries marked a particular flashpoint in the history of public sexual display. According to Richard Meyer: “The experts who called Mapplethorpe’s work art . . . succeeded, at least in part, because they bracketed the centrality of gay subculture and sexuality to Mapplethorpe’s s/m photographs.”1 Referring to the problematic ways in which Mapplethorpe’s art was defended as valid and valuable, Carol Vance contends: “If we are afraid to offer a public defense of sexual images then even in our rebuttal we have granted the right wing its most basic premise: sexuality is shameful and discrediting.”2 The debates about the display of Mapplethorpe’s sexually explicit art offer this and other lessons about the often obscured decisions that go into the construction, execution, and duration of an exhibition. The Mapplethorpe moment and its controversies subsequently became the benchmark for why and in what ways museums should manage the display of queer sex.
For most museums today, and in particular for their boards and donors, the costs and risks of queer sexual display outweigh the financial and prestige gains of queer-themed shows. In the aftermath of Mapplethorpe, the museum battles of the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first depicted a clash between, on the one hand, an ingrained, though unstated, museum philosophy that excluded dissident “lifestyles” from the parameters of the exhibitionable and, on the other hand, the consolidation of a homosexual identity that required public display (in museums and elsewhere) for staging political urgency (e.g., the art/activism of Gran Fury) and the vital role of pleasure in queer political life. Against an emerging political and economic backdrop thatJanice Irvine has referred to as the rise of the New Right,3 arguments aboutwasting taxpayers’ money and emotional appeals predicated on shame and fear became powerful go-to methods for quelling entire exhibitions whenever they included queer sex. Anything and everything with a whiff of Mapplethorpe was suspect.
After Mapplethorpe, inventive display methods for managing the consumption of queerness in museums arise. These methods not only anticipate but project anxieties onto museum patrons. A new emotional habitus emerges to govern affective and embodied relationships between visitors and queer objects. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus, Deborah Gould defines emotional habitus as “the socially constituted, prevailing ways of feeling and emoting, as well as the embodied, axiomatic understandings and norms about feelings and their expression.” Gould examines the crucial role of emotion in the practices of activism, with a particular focus on the history of the direct action advocacy group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, or ACT UP. I borrow her affective adaptation of the Bourdiean habitus, particularly her emphasis on the role of emotion in personal and collective experience and the shaping of “political imaginaries and their conditions of possibility,” to illustrate how museum planners craft an emotional habitus through display choices that shape through their repetition anxious and shameful relationships between queer cultural objects and museum visitors.4 Curatorial techniques, such as exhibition layout, juxtaposition, and museum signage, shape the floor plan of an exhibition and suggest, if not prescribe, not only visitor itinerary and movement5 but also ways of feeling about the cultures from which the objects on display derive. Even when curators bravely display sexually diverse objects with the objective of expanding the parameters of acceptable sexual representation, they typically do so in ways that bracket the experience as shameful (for the visitors who look) and stigmatizing (for the bodies that are represented within the objects displayed).6 Ironically, it was not until after 1989, the fateful year of debates about Mapplethorpe’s exhibition The Perfect Moment and where I locate a tentative start for these kinds of stigmatizing museum practices, that explicit homophobia became unofficially institutionalized and part of mainstream museum practice.
In what follows, I revisit the history of controversial displays during the so-called culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s and explore some of the key exhibition events that led to the emotional stakes for displaying queer sex in public museums. Next, I visit the exposition or entrance to exhibitions with queer sexual themes. I consider how museum planners carefully stage the perimeter of queer sexual displays to play both with and against the taboo of encountering dissident sexual representations in public. In particular I focus on a post–culture war museum practice, the installation of warning signs, as a form of what Judith Butler has called implicit censorship.7 Warning signs serve as potent examples of how the culture wars continue to shape an emotional habitus particular to the museum management of sexual difference. At the centerpiece of this section is the 1994 New York Public Library (NYPL) exhibition Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall. I frame this show as the linchpin between the all-out battles against queer sex during the 1980s and 1990s and the later and quieter but more insidious ways of managing not only queer sex but also how museum patrons are made to feel about it, move within and around it, and view it in museums today.
Along with Becoming Visible, I will also reflect on exhibitions at museums such as the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, the Chicago History Museum (CHM), and the Museo del Arte Moderno in Mexico City. These different institutions all have their own history of internal and external pressures and licenses regarding whether or how to display sex. My purpose here is not to show the differences between these institutions but rather to explore how perceptions of economic and political constraints and the potential for backlash unite these museums on the level of policy. Certainly, museums are highly differentiated and composite sites wherein multiple forms of non-unidirectional power circulate, yet the consistently felt need to install warning signs at the entrances to exhibitions with sexual and especially queer sexual contents provides one point of connection between the museums I discuss and a bridge, I hope, across museum genres and for-profit and nonprofit status.
In the last section, I juxtapose how mainstream museums discipline the relationship between queer sex and patrons through warning labels by exploring how a queer museum curates sexual explicitness. In particular, I analyze the first exhibition of the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco, titled Our Vast Queer Past: Celebrating San Francisco’s GLBT History. Of great interest are the ways in which the curators applied queer theoretical scholarship to the space of display. The incorporation of sex toys in the exhibition directly confronted the historical challenges of curating queer lives in an age dominated by financial concerns such as pleasing donors, the success of fund-raising initiatives, and opportunities for local and national tourism. Thus, I view the curatorial struggles of the GLBT History Museum to display queer sex as representative of a larger culture of gay-centric, nonprofit organizations whose leadership feels pressured to make particular ethical choices about what is and what is not seen. In this way, I focus on the important but often obscured social performances in museums that mediate the phenomenological and affective encounter between sex objects and visitors with political and economic implications.
Since the late twentieth century, museums have become culture war theaters wherein dramatic and affectively intense battles over the relationship between sex, publicness, and display are waged. While I concentrate on the display of queer and dissident sex, these debates show how sex has consistently been used as a political tool to silence all kinds of minority voices on issues that range from immigration to religion, to race, gender, and disability, to globalization, capitalism, and neoliberalism.8 These exhibitionary struggles demonstrate how we need queer display praxis in museums to interrupt the emotional habitus of negative affects that have gathered around a myriad of antinormative discourses and archives.
Sex without Feeling: Warning Signs Ahead
While the state of exhibiting diverse sexual history and art has met with some recent successes, most notably the opening of the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco, exhibitions dedicated to the explicit display of sexuality remain rare. When they do occur, they are often the focus of scrutiny and policing, as in the controversy surrounding the withdrawal of the short excerpt of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly from Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. In describing the obstacles to displaying sex and the stakes for doing so within the political environment of the contemporary United States, I intend to show that the history of public sexual exhibition is not a progress story; rather, the history of public sexual display is one in which temporary exhibition opportunities open up, only to be followed by new strategies for arguing against these projects on moral and, more recently, economic grounds.
The battles that marked the display of queer sexuality in museums at the end of the twentieth century shaped the methods and perspectives with which museums continue to exhibit sexualities in the United States today. The events surrounding sexual display in museums had a profound effect on the consolidation, application, and execution of cultural policy in museums that relied on a vague notion of community standards to determine the boundaries of acceptable speech and representation. Many of these policies are not official; that is, neither individual museums nor associations responsible for developing universal museum standards and best practices such as the American Association of Museums produce or distribute literature on what should and should not be exhibited; nor do these organizational bodies have any explicit directions on how potentially controversial topics, such as sex, should be managed when displayed. Rather, the effects of the culture wars on the museum management of sexuality require a collective reading of individual exhibition events and the environment of sexual politics in which these events played out.
Warning signs are museum labels that can precede and shape museum visitors’ interactions with the objects beyond them. The advent of warning signs marks a recently institutionalized but rarely discussed museum practice and a post–culture war strategy for managing the public display and consumption of certain kinds of controversial material in museums. Warning signage installed at the entrance to certain exhibitions serves as an example of what Judith Butler has called implicit censorship, a productive form of power that distinguishes itself from explicit censorship by way of the imposition of an illegibility that is not necessarily conscious. Warning signs function as highly legible (as clearly written texts) and illegible (as display labels) insofar as they allow museums to “speak according to a tacit set of norms that are not always explicitly coded as rules.” Butler argues that the social understanding of these implicit rules is an embodied activity; for her, as for me, “censorship produces the parameters of the subject,” and “those norms come to inhabit the bodily life of the subject.”9 I read warning signs as a material means for exploring how a tacit emotional habitus specific to museums developed around the topic of queer sexuality.
In museums, queer sex dominates the domain of the controversial, not in the sense that it is unspeakable (or what Butler calls impossiblespeech), but in that it marks the very edge of the speakable in museums. While material culture with any explicit sexual theme can also be grouped into this category, when the sex displayed falls outside the parameters of what the anthropologist Gayle Rubin famously called the charmed circle,10 we can begin to track the relationship between implicitcensorship and queer lives beyond speech to concentrate on other social and political aims such as “strengthening particular views of legitimacy, consensus, cultural autonomy, and national memory.”11 Warning signs are a subtle, seemingly innocuous way in which museums, wittingly or unwittingly, contribute to the production of subjects according to implicit norms.
In the museum context, warning signs as textual labels function beyond mere description: they are performative (they do things). What they do, I argue, is construct and theatricalize divisions between the display of sexual normalcy (e.g., traditional nudes) and sexual perversity (e.g., Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of sadomasochistic sex cultures). These often overlooked museum labels have a profound effect on the ways in which we consume and make meaning of the sexual materials that are exhibited beyond them. Warning signs affect notions of high and low culture by curating normative feelings about queer sex objects. They create an emotional habitus predicated on shame and anxiety. In so doing, they not only institutionalize taxonomies of normalcy in reaction to the culture wars of the late twentieth century; they also alert us to the fact that the culture wars, particularly around sex, never ended.12
While the culture wars are ongoing, the terms of the battle have changed. In 1994, the NYPL mounted the largest and most extensive display of lesbian and gay history up to that time. This exhibition, titled Becoming Visible: The Legacy of Stonewall, displayed art and social history artifacts to flesh out the highly policed and difficult-to-access sexual histories of LGBT peoples.13 The exhibition was visited by over 100,000 people and became a landmark event in the history of sexual display. For my analysis here, Becoming Visible serves as the turning point between the all-out battles of the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s and the ongoing culture war dominated by its incorporation into normative museum business.
Becoming Visible can also be considered a watershed moment for studying the internal debates that arise when a public sexual history project is temporarily displayed in a mainstream institution. One of these debates concerned the display of sexually explicit material: some NYPL staff anticipated certain negative reactions from patrons visiting the library for reasons other than to view the exhibition, while the Becoming Visible curators, Molly McGarry, Fred Wasserman, and Mimi Bowling, felt that some explicitly sexual materials needed to be included in order to accurately represent the communities they were discussing. Among the exhibition’s myriad objects included were full-frontal nudes, a short history of porn, a section on cruising, sadomasochism, and works by art collectives such as Fierce Pussy. A compromise solution was found: Warning signage was installed at the entrance to the exhibit. The sign read, “WARNING: SEXUALLY EXPLICIT CONTENT.”
By 1994, warning sign usage had become a well-established but rarely effective and sometimes counterproductive strategy for flagging an exhibition as controversial. This failure was spectacularly demonstrated in 1990 when Dennis Barrie, the director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Cincinnati, was arrested even after his decision to include warning labels for the Mapplethorpe exhibition The Perfect Moment. By 1994, at Becoming Visible, it became a rebellious and transgressive performance to push back against the fervor for warning signs. According to one of the curators, on the exhibition’s opening night the small warning sign installed at the entrance to the exhibition was humorously ferried away numerous times by several individuals and once by the famous historian of gay and lesbian history Martin Duberman, much to the delight of the gathered crowd. After the opening event, the warning sign was resituated at the exhibition’s entrance.
Some warning signs are immediately placed on exhibitions that contain materials deemed irrevocably controversial on the basis of past events. For Becoming Visible, the Mapplethorpe storm four years earlier certainly influenced the choice to include warning signage. At other times, as in the case of Cyber Arte: Tradition Meets Technology, the exhibition in which Alma López’s now (in)famous piece Our Lady was displayed in 2001, warning signs were installed in response to protests already under way.14 Richard Meyer has characterized the controversy surrounding the display of Our Lady as a potent example of how “the culture wars persist, though in ways that most often remain unspoken or not consciously recognized.”15 In the case of Our Lady and the exhibition of a related artistic interpretation of an iconic and sacred symbol, we can trace and unpack how the events and practices that have historically disciplined the exhibition of sex in museums can also illuminate historically and geographically contingent archives of anxieties and affections about the supposed antisocial and disruptive force of sex’s intersection with issues of race, religion, and mythic narratives of nation.
3.4 Our Lady, by Alma López (iris print on canvas, © 1999). Special thanks to Raquel Salinas and Raquel Gutiérrez.
López’s digital print reinterpreted the Virgin of Guadalupe to portray her as a confident, strong, and sensual Latina, rose wreathed, draped in a cape covered in Aztec symbols, and supported from below by a bare-breasted female angel. López’s virgin was not the first artwork to resex La Virgen de Guadalupe. The Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa initialized this trend when she called for the destruction of the whore/virgin dichotomy through a visual relinking of Guadalupe and Coatlicue, the Aztec-Mexica fertility goddess.16 As the quintessential symbol of Catholic female virginity, Guadalupe was Coatlicue stripped of her sensuality. The warning sign that eventually accompanied the volatile scenario of Our Lady’s display cautioned against this relinking of the sensual/sexual indigenous goddess as well as the queer insertion of the bare-breasted female angel that supports her.
Previously, in 1988, Rolando De la Rosa went a step further when he displayed a mixed media collage that superimposed the head and breasts of Marilyn Monroe onto the Virgin of Guadalupe in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City. The piece titled La Virgen de Guadalupe con la cara de Marilyn Monroe was part of a triptych displayed nicho or altar style that explored the intersection of popular, religious, and indigenous cultures. Alongside the image of this Marilyn/Guadalupe, two vertical phrases read: “Ni mi hermana / Ni mi madre” (Not my sister / nor my mother). As was the case with Our Lady, a heated debate ensued over the artwork’s combination of religious, artistic, and sexual iconography. As for La Virgen de Guadalupe con la cara de Marilyn Monroe, outraged religious and civic groups threatened to burn down the museum and even demanded De la Rosa’s home address so as to murder him. Ultimately, the piece was removed, and the director of the museum resigned shortly thereafter.17 While Our Lady was not removed from display, the curator and López received ongoing threats (some of them violent), and the scheduled extension of the exhibition was canceled. Warning signs, then, not only anticipate and create visitor response to the materials on display; they also serve as reminders to curators of the sometimes violent consequences of representation.
For Becoming Visible, framed as an exhibition of social history, not art, there was no apparent precedent. The culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s were largely focused on visual and performance art, as in the case of the censorship of Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, the NEA Four, and other artists. Similarly, Our Lady and La Virgen de Guadalupe con la cara de Marilyn Monroe were displayed in art museums. Becoming Visible provides a rare example of how social history exhibitions also meet with obstacles when displaying dissident sex in public. In this instance, the performative effects of the culture wars on the museum management of sexuality crossed museum genres and demonstrated how the politics of display in one genre disciplined the exhibitionary performances in other kinds of museums as well.
While the precise origin of museum warning signs is unclear, the institutionalization of contemporary warning signs can be viewed as a post–culture war tactic for managing the display and consumption of certain kinds of sex in museums.18 In this way, warning signs are also emotive: they are emotionally charged interpretations of something that is not already or otherwise observable.19 Yet what warning labels mean for queer representation in particular remains an important question. Queer theorists might argue that the act of marking queer materials as deviant or obscene can be viewed as a means for celebrating the disruptive social qualities of queer. But I suggest that we view contemporary installations of the textual labels known as warning signs within a larger history of museum practices that have always strictly managed and shaped notions of deviance and perversity. Indeed, warning signs are sites of negotiation and tactical compromises that allow museums, as businesses in a competitive edutainment market, to display some allegedly controversial sexual materials that are typically considered outside the vague boundaries of community standards of consumption. But the installation of a warning sign is also a social ritual that forms and reformulates subjects in museums through what Butler describes as a “modality of practice [that] is powerful and hard to resist precisely because it is silent and insidious, insistent and insinuating.” Furthermore, warning signs as instruments of implicit censorship act as social and ritual performatives that influence not only subject formation but also “the ongoing political contestation and reformulation of the subject as well.” Butler argues that, “if there can be a modernity without foundationalism” (and perhaps, she muses, this is what postmodernity means), “then it will be one in which the key terms of its operations are not fully secured in advance, one that assumes a futural form of politics that cannot be fully anticipated: and this will be a politics of hope and anxiety, what Foucault termed ‘a politics of discomfort.’”20 Museums that dare to display queer sex often disregard this “politics of discomfort” in exchange for a too easy “pedagogy of comfort” (especially for the heterosexually identified and masculine viewer), and warning labels negotiate but more often forgo a queer aspirational hope to cater to a prepackaged notion of the social and political subject whose primary emotional register is presumed to be anxiety.
3.5 La Virgen de Guadalupe con la cara de Marilyn Monroe, by Rolando de la Rosa (mixed-media collage). Rolando De la Rosa/La Jornada, Mexico.
Warning signs as emotives impose an emotional habitus of shame and anxiety on queer sexual consumption. In this way, the objects of queer sex themselves become misinterpreted as always already constitutive of a visual or legible substance that is dangerous if left unmarked. Warning signs as emotives direct the widely varying affective responses to consuming queer sex into a monolithic narrative, one marked by shame, disgust, anger, distress, fear, and, perhaps, with its embodiment described as a raising of the lip, dissmell. Actual encounters with queer sex in public, as my research in sex museums will show in the following chapters, inspire museum visitors to feel a wide range of unexpected or anticipated emotions that do not always correspond with the set of affects that Silvan Tomkins gathered under the qualifier negative.21 Visitors to Becoming Visible, for example, wept on finding photographs of deceased friends displayed. Others danced, conversed, or expressed their critiques to the curators, who listened to them. Contrastingly, warning signs micromanage affect on the basis of who they project their publics to be, and, in so doing, they create those publics and a negative set of feelings in relationship to queer sexual lives.
Ironically, the installation of a warning sign is often viewed as a museum practice performed in the service of visiting publics. Rhetorically speaking, the practice is often encouraged in the service of protecting children from precocious exposure to certain imagery. Not just any children are vulnerable; rather, it is the persistence of the Victorian trope of the culturally innocent and nonsexual “Child” that necessitates the preparing of public space, such as museum space, for her possible entrance.22 Along these lines, to label a museum experience with a warning is a mode of communicating information that allows visitors to make decisions, such as leaving an exhibition or the museum altogether, before seeing or being exposed (or exposing an actual child or one’s symbolic Child) to the potentially offending materials. Again, warning labels are not benign in this aim; by placating a binary notion of public sentiment regarding sex and other historically controversial topics (i.e., there are those who are for it and those who are against it), warning signs create divisive museum environments and communities that pit an imaginary set of sex-negative publics against sex-positive publics. With this binary then in place, museum practitioners aim to accomplish the impossible goal of catering to those who may object to or be offended by the display without alienating supporters of sexual display themes and techniques. In other words, warning signs are symptomatic of a business-driven museum culture that is unequipped for tough conversations about display, sexual or otherwise.
It is important to note that the installation of a warning sign is in no way the same thing as explicit censorship. Explicit censorship, in the words of Richard Meyer, “provoke[s] unanticipated responses and counter representations, unforeseen pictures of difference and self-conscious stagings of deviance.”23 The performative effects of warning signs as vehicles of implicit censorship are different; instead, they force the hand of curators to stigmatize that which they mean to liberate and, at the same time, silence those who object to the display of certain materials. In effect, warning signs take the responsibility of cultural dialogue off the museum and place it onto the viewer (“it’s not our fault that you chose to enter and be offended by what we already anticipated you’d be offended by”). But, perhaps more egregiously, warning labels contribute to a culture of respectability within which political efficaciousness is achievable only when certain groups, including gay and lesbian communities, separate good sex from bad sex by distancing themselves from certain sexual practices that the dominant culture considers obscene, perverse, or abnormal. When it comes to the display of sex and, to a lesser extent, sexual identity, the former being dependent on a nonnormative and embodied repertoire of what Foucault called bodies and pleasures, what themes and materials motivate museum curators to warn visitors actually reveal the local, national, and/or international boundaries of sexual normalcy. Warning signs should be examined not as commonsense installations in contemporary museums but rather as historically rich markers of what constitutes normalcy. I propose that we view warning signs as sexual artifacts in their own right and use them to trace cultural fears, anxieties, and affections about queer sex.
One notable exception to the tyranny of warning sign usage in mainstream museums occurred at the Out in Chicago exhibition (CHM, June 2011–March 2012). No warning signs appeared anywhere in or before the exhibition, but the curators, Jennifer Brier and Jill Austin, fought and lost numerous battles to include in the exhibition more erotically oriented materials especially as they related to queer women. One particular drama centered on the proposed display of the “Wheel of Debauchery,” a sexual chore, dry-erase board stylized as a roulette wheel that was a permanent fixture at the Capricorn Party, an annual and multiracial event for women who love women in Chicago. Chores included “Spank yourself while you sing for us,” “Suck someone’s nipple,” “Flash the room,” and “Give a 30-second lap dance to someone with good energy.” Out in Chicago curators were thrilled to find this artifact, which so beautifully and sensually depicted a long-running, cornerstone event of lesbian erotic history in Chicago. That the sensuality of the object was communicated through language, not visuals, made this the perfect sex object for inclusion as they anticipated some reservation from senior museum staff when it came to visual depictions of homoeroticism. They were surprised when the curatorial review of the exhibition layout led to the denial of this object for display: “In the process of undergoing curatorial and design review for Out in Chicago, the museum’s leadership expressed a concern that the wheel could become the ‘Mapplethorpe of the exhibit,’ referring to protests over photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1988 exhibition, The Perfect Moment.” The Out in Chicago curators went on to recount the pressure they felt from museum officials as they planned the opening of the exhibition in the immediate wake of the National Portrait Gallery debacle over Hide/Seek and Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly: “The fear of similar protests over an object with the term ‘debauchery’ in its title happening at CHM seemed to be at the forefront of everyone’s mind. After much struggle over what it would mean to depict these lesbian sexual practices in the exhibition, we agreed to remove the Wheel of Debauchery from the gallery.”24
While the brouhaha about A Fire in My Belly started by Bill Donahue of the Catholic League and escalated by Congressmen Boehner and Cantor concentrated on what they saw as the blasphemous misuse of religious imagery, the call for a closure of the entire exhibition demonstrated how religion had become a new rhetorical tool to argue for absenting queer representation in museums. But, in the case of Out in Chicago, it also showed how museum officials interpreted the Fire in My Belly moment as one that foreclosed opportunities to display certain objects, not for religious reasons per se, but for the potential religious and political backlash that their display could cause. The curators’ recounting of the struggle to include the “Wheel of Debauchery” reveals how mainstream museum leaders psychically construct a genealogy of controversial museum events beginning with Mapplethorpe that sways them from including explicit representations of queer sex, even when the objects that can represent it do so through text rather than image.
This particular struggle between the Out in Chicago curators and the museum staff also uncovers the questionable conjuring of the innocent Child (who I would assume is not yet fully literate) as the justification for what constitutes the limits of display. The idea of the Child, like the now mythic figure of the Woman who is constantly victimized by her exposure to pornographic materials, may instead stand in for the more vulnerable museum constituency of straight men who feel threatened by representations of female sexuality that are not meant to hail their desire or by homoerotic imagery that implies an admiring beholder. Unlike the display choreography I described in chapter 1, where the white patriarchal and heterosexualized gaze was hailed into being through the meticulous crafting of the sex object’s dance-like reveal, here warning signs as cultural artifacts mark a space as potentially disorienting to the masculine gaze and inspire curators to enable a choreography of avoidance of the sex object that lies beyond its location.25 In museums, children become discursive proxies for anxious straight male viewers.
While spectacularly dramatic moments of censorship and creative responses to them have been well documented, the relationship between warning signs and what and how museums display sex has remained under the radar of scholarly analysis. While warning labels have become a taken-for-granted, go-to strategy for negotiating the present tense of an exhibition, they also possess deep and often overlooked connections to the history of museum display and presumptions about what constitutes the sayable. In the shadow of the politics of displaying warning signs, there exists a collective reluctance on the part of most museums to exhibit anything potentially offensive or political. Those museums that receive federal funding, no matter how little, are even more likely to succumb to politicized pressure, as the National Portrait Gallery debacle so recently demonstrated.
Museums today continue to play influential but overlooked roles in the reinvention of the categories of normal and perverse, and warning signs can be viewed as artifacts in the history of policing certain kinds of display in museums in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first. These museum labels continue the myth of the museum as an apolitical institution and perform a curious sort of cultural amnesia about its historical roots in the birth of nations and nationalism and its origins as a civilizing entity and a purveyor of national notions of taste and high culture. The ubiquity of warning labels signals a collective attempt on the part of the museums who use them to avoid political or politicized displays and an implicit strategy for rendering certain other objects and exhibitions as normal, not by nature, but through the juxtaposition to what lies behind the sign labeled “Explicit.”
Queer Is Dead (?), Long Live Queer (. . .)
What happens to queer sex when it is visually displayed in a museum dedicated to representing queer lives and nothing else? Do issues of implicit or explicit censorship leave the building, or do they factor consciously and unconsciously into curatorial decision making about what is to be shown? What structures of feeling most consistently influence which artifacts are shown and whether the museum ultimately displays sexual practice and eroticism as part of the aesthetic and historical trajectory of queer lives? Or are LGBT museum curators forging a new brand of emotional habitus, a queer curatorial habitus, and, if so, how does it cope with business pressures? To explore these questions, I take as my case study the first exhibition of the GLBT History Museum in San Francisco, titled Our Vast Queer Past: Celebrating San Francisco’s GLBT History.
I analyze this exhibition by focusing on what I perceive as the curatorial strategies for negotiating the display of queer artifacts in hegemonic museums and the emerging ambivalence of some academics about the potential of queer as a disruptive, antisocial, and transgressive word, identity, and culture. I should say at the outset that I still cherish the project laid out by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner of “frustrat[ing] the already audible assertions that queer theory has only academic—which is to say, dead—politics.”26 Museums—theatrical spaces of everyday drama and veritable contact zones between bodies and objects—provide one underutilized site for continuing this struggle, and display—the interactive and public museum practice that frames much of contemporary Western understandings of knowledge and culture—describes an embodied activity through which to construct, deconstruct, and analyze the shifting contours of queer. While I operate from the assumption that in its theoretical and quotidian lives queer is not dead, the ruminations on its many moments of demise do suggest that any project that claims to be queer must negotiate with its remains.27 If queer is dead, Michael O’Rourke ruminates, “then its ghost comes from the future as well as from the past.”28 O’Rourke suggests that queer is made dead, made to die, or killed off when a future for it is not imagined. To apply queer theory and the “wrenching sense of recontextualization” it can give to museums29—what I have been calling a queer curatorial praxis—is one potent way of playing with the lives (and afterlives) of queer theory.
One such site of queer praxis in the museum is the GLBT History Museum located in the Castro district of San Francisco, which remains the sine qua non site of queer pilgrimage on a national and international level.30 The Castro represents perhaps the original of the now-vanishing twentieth-century phenomenon of the gay neighborhood. The Castro began to show signs of its future life as a gay enclave in the mid-1960s when the first gay bars started opening. Before this time, the neighborhood was largely populated by working-class Scandinavian and Irish blue-collar communities whose members worked in the waterfront industrial economy. After World War II, San Francisco started to deindustrialize, and the children of these workers moved from the city into single-family suburban homes, leaving the Castro district a veritable wasteland. It became an attractive location for the cultivation of gay bar culture owing to the economic depression of this area coupled with its historical designation as a vice zone (which established this district as a site for the easy acquisition of liquor licenses). As one of the few areas in San Francisco whose Victorian homes survived the 1906 earthquake, it provided quaint, historic, and at the time low-rent locations for lodgings and businesses. The formation of the Castro as a gay neighborhood picked up in the 1960s and 1970s when mostly white gay men began to buy homes in the area.
Forty-five years later, the men who originally moved there are now in late middle age or older. Many men of that generation died of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s. Macroeconomic forces such as the dot.com and the high-tech boom astronomically raised the price of property in the Castro (as in all of San Francisco). While the Castro is still a place where young queer folk remain active, the neighborhood has shifted to become a far less gay residential neighborhood. Young queer adults today find themselves priced out of it. And, while it remains a fairly strong gay business district, the number of gay bars has markedly decreased in the past twenty years. Thus, the GLBT History Museum finds itself in the home of what continues to exist in the popular global imaginary as the homosexual ground zero, while in reality the demographics of the district are shifting so that it will soon be populated primarily by straight, white, well-to-do couples.
The days of Harvey Milk’s famous camera shop, Castro Camera, are over. Aside from the Metropolitan Community Church, the Castro Country Club (a clean-and-sober community space), and the Trevor Project Call Center (for crisis intervention and suicide prevention), no gay-owned or -themed spaces exist in the Castro today except for consumerist ones that cater to drinking and shopping. Beyond the sex toy and accessories shops, bars, and silly T-shirts stores that line the main drag, the GLBT History Museum (an outgrowth of the GLBT Historical Society, an archives and public history organization founded in 1985) established a permanent space for remembering the diverse individuals and organizations rooted in the communities that did and do live and visit the Castro. After a successful trial run with a small exhibit at a pop-up location, the museum opened on January 13, 2011, at 4127 Eighteenth Street (a few doors west of Castro Street and directly adjacent to a popular gay dance bar).31 Its first exhibition was, as noted above, Our Vast Queer Past.
The museum pulls its display objects from the archives of the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. As the first exhibition in one of the world’s only physical museums dedicated to queer lives, Our Vast Queer Past set out to honor the GLBT Historical Society’s twenty-fifth anniversary by selecting one object for display from nearly every year of its operation history.32 Curators—led by Gerard Koskovich, Don Romesburg, and Amy Sueyoshi—chose an inspirational object or set of objects for each of the twenty-three display areas. They aimed to render the collective look and feel of the entire exhibition queer. That is, they aimed to queerly perform the transgenerational transmission of sexual heritage by not conforming to linear narratives, progress stories, or heroic tales stylized after the much-critiqued “It Gets Better” model of mainstream lesbian and gay political discourse.33 Instead:
We hope to raise new questions about familiar gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender stories and evoke largely untold stories that speak eloquently about our diversity. The resulting exhibition offers a kaleidoscopic view of nearly a century of queer experience in San Francisco and the Bay Area. It does not form a single narrative; our history is too varied and unruly to be limited in that way. Instead, we bring together multiple stories, sometimes interlinking, sometimes isolated, sometimes in conflict. All of them reflect deeply human themes: the search for companionship and pleasure; the struggle for self-determination and respect in an often-hostile society; the value of individual and collective expression; and the spirit, ingenuity and wit that have been keys to our survival.
The resulting thematic display arrangement expanded traditional definitions of cultural heritage to include the tangible and the intangible objects of queer cultures.34
More than anything, heritage describes a process of naming a thing or an idea as a culturally valuable artifact. The process of endowing value happens across spectacular sites of reverence, as in Plymouth Plantation, and theatricalized performances of remembrance and honor, as in any opening ceremony for the Olympics. In the museum world, remembering and honoring function through the less spectacular performances of collection, display, and spectatorship. Heritage, then, is a socially determined performance dictated by the political prerogatives of the local and national moment and the influence of cultural policy constraints and allowances in museums and other heritage sites and monumentsof national reverence. In the GLBT History Museum, the making of heritage is not, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has described the term’s relevance to mainstream museums, “the transvaluation of the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead, and the defunct,” nor is it a concept that solely “depends on display to give dying economies and dead sites a second life as exhibitions.”35 Instead, heritage at the GLBT History Museum describes a sensual, sensory, and affective practice that embraces the always vital relation between bodies, things, and spaces, past and present.36 The irony of displaying queer history in a neighborhood whose demographics are rapidly shifting away from its past as an exclusively gay enclave should not be lost, however. While the application of queer theoretical frames to the exhibition created a new emotional habitus of reverence, hope, and belonging for museum spectators, the changing demographic of the Castro and the perception of who might visit the museum led the historical society leadership to question and ultimately remove a display that incorporated objects pertinent to queer sex.
Seeing sex, and not just sexuality as an identity, in any museum is a political act and one fraught with complicated histories of visualizing pleasure and power, particularly for historically oppressed sexualities. As Mark Graham has argued, to “exploit the potential” of sexual things requires an approach to sexuality as a series of “connections and reconnections” and “an artifactual literacy that enables us to read the sexuality of things, or rather, of the assemblages of which they are a part.”37 For the curators of Our Vast Queer Past, this included a section of the exhibition that affectionately became known as the “Vice District” and the “Red-Light District.” The layout of the museum allowed for a certain number of displays to take up the entire length of one wall in the main gallery, a portion of the museum that cannot be seen from the street windows, the entry, the museum store, or most of the front gallery. These displays examined the politics of inclusion and exclusion of bathhouse culture, the divisive events of the lesbian sex wars, and the “dark desires, public pleasures” of leather. In another case titled “Erotica: Drawn Out,” drawings from three sexed perspectives fleshed out some of the historical society’s extensive erotica collection. Collectively the “Vice District” offered multiple points of entry for visitors and posed different sets of questions and critiques about sex and power. While the museum met with some early criticism that repeated the rhetoric of the Right’s moral attacks of the 1980s and 1990s, the criticism gained little traction, and the “Vice District” remained untouched and unthreatened.38 Only one display that punctuated the “Vice District” in the museum’s informal itinerary stirred controversy.
The display titled “Sex Toys: Implementing Erotic Expression: 1960s–2000s” drew from three collections of the GLBT Historical Society. It included dildos, vibrators, butt plugs, and prosthetic fists from the Willie Walker collection, SM sex toys from the Gene Webber collection, a historic 1960s vibrator from the estate of Helen Harder plus a scrapbook featuring 1950s mail-order ads for sex toys, and a 1980s mail-order catalog from the San Francisco feminist sex toy store Good Vibrations. The display text read:
The vast majority of historical archives and museums would consider sex toys irrelevant if not inappropriate for their collections. For the queer community, however, sex toys are valued artifacts that reflect key aspects of our lives. They provide opportunities not only for pursuing personal erotic adventure, but also for expressing collective purpose and cultural belonging.
3.6 Sex toy display at the GLBT History Museum, San Francisco, June 2011. Photo by author.
For queers whose intimate lives have historically been deemed unnatural and degrading, refusing shame and forging sexual pleasure becomes a political act of reclaiming and rejoicing in a stigmatized identity. Sex toys help us implement this process both practically and symbolically. Additionally, the toys you use can help you claim a place in GLBT culture. For example, those who favor restraints or floggers might consider themselves part of the leather community.
The GLBT Historical Society recognizes the centrality of sex toys in queer life. We collect them to honor a history that moral authorities have sought to erase. Whether they are homemade or artisanal objects, underground commodities from the mid-20th century or products of the sexual market economy that has grown exponentially since the 1970s, sex toys embody a claim to sexual expression as a form of social justice.
In this display, the curators queerly interpreted the archive as a site for historicizing sex objects as a place of residue, a process that Rebecca Schneider describes as “flesh in a network of body-to-body transmission of enactment—evidence, across generations, of impact.” Schneider continues (and the curators would agree): “We understand ourselves relative to the remains we accumulate, the tracks we house, mark, and cite, the material traces we acknowledge.”39 While museum spaces are so often predicated on the ocular and traditional articulations of knowledge through objectivist and perspectivalist lenses, the curators at the GLBT History museum enacted a queer praxis when they chose to play with the emotional habitus of the spectator experience by displaying, without warning, a different and valued cultural imaginary having to do with dissident sex objects. The display of various sex toy collections, and, with them, their erotic and embodied traces, boldly retained the centrality and materiality of sexual performance to queer heritage. In the history of the late capitalist museum, queer sex had so consistently been forced underground or out of sight that even at this queer museum the “Sex Toys” display did not go unnoticed.
The other displays in the “Vice District” disappeared from public comment and concern, partly because they were mostly literary and referential in their presentation, but also because they lacked the explicit embodiment of the “Sex Toys” display. For example, for those in the know, the display of a Samois T-shirt and a leather cap screams leather woman and leather daddy and all the sexual practices of submission and dominance that might go with those objects. The display of an original invitation by the transgender writer and activist Pat Califia to a women’s BDSM, hand-balling party in the Catacombs where gay men cruised women’s hands for anal sex would have, perhaps, met with opposition if proposed for inclusion in the Out in Chicago exhibition, but this ephemeral artifact worked within the context of the GLBT History Museum owing to its literary quality. In the bathhouse display, the lockers, keys, and towels served as props in a small in situ installation where visitors could imaginatively situate themselves cruising for sex. Few images were included, and, when they were, they consisted of drawings, publicity materials, or photo shots that zoomed in on particular parts of the body (e.g., a mouth strapped with a ball gag).
In contrast, the “Sex Toy” display isolated these objects from the banal details of private erotic life, in which they might go unnoticed or unread. The impressions left on the objects in the exhibit, carefully set off by the glass-plated display case, made manifest sexual moments of longing, connection, and arousal. When objects such as these are displayed in museums, it does more than simply stimulate the senses. As the past exhibitions director for the GLBT Historical Society Paul Gabriel wrote: “There still exists a disjuncture between providing sensory input and offering sensory pleasure.” Gabriel inquisitively ruminates on the seduction involved in a successful museum exhibit focusing on queer eroticism: “Have we seduced our visitors, excited ardent curiosity and boundless desires in them, and abetted crushes on our exhibitions, so that they must be visited again and again? If after a flurry of initial attention, the exhibitions are abruptly dropped, no matter: No one forgets their first kiss, their first passion, their first time with something wondrously new.”40 “Sex Toys” successfully did just that.
The uproar over the sex toy display began days after the museum opened. Tours of school-age students prompted historical society officials to consider ways of veiling the adult-themed cases, and in particular the sex toy display, to make the entire exhibition age-appropriate.41 Curators defended the decision to include sex toys in the show and discussed the recent withdrawal of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly as proof of the urgent need for a queer museum that would push back against such imperatives. The executive director of the GLBT Historical Society, Paul Boneberg, issued a statement that seized on the trope of the innocent Child to appease the critics: “We want the museum to be seen by the broadest group possible,” he explained. “If curators are choosing to put sexually explicit material in their show, we ask them to do it in a way so it can be covered if questioned by a school group.”42 No doubt Boneberg felt pressure from his board of directors as well as the museum’s sponsors, which range from the local gay bar Badlands, to the Human Rights Campaign, Walgreens, and dozens of highly influential individuals who hold conflicting opinions on the costs and benefits of including explicit sex objects in the GLBT History Museum.
Boneberg was not alone in his concern about exhibiting sex in the sexuality museum. While local, national, and international news reports overwhelmingly celebrated the museum’s first exhibition, a small but vocal group of online contributors to sites such as Gaycities.com, Yelp.com, and the Huffington Post expressed their opposition to the explicit display. Those who identified as straight cited popular strategies such as wasting taxpayer funds and the “spoiled identity” of the already hypersexual queer (e.g., OMG what’s next a bestiality museum?, dmezz1962, Huffington Post). Those who identified as members of the LGBT community lamented the inclusion of explicit sex objects in the GLBT History Museum and blamed the display for perpetuating the stereotype of the promiscuous gay man. HuffPost Super User Carter2004 was perhaps the most vocal representative of this stance:
I agree that sexuality isn’t something to be ashamed of, and gay sexuality in particular is something that is sorely missing from popular American dialogue. But the fact is that embracing a culturally-created stereotype does nothing to accomplish that, and in fact hurts the efforts of those of us who are fighting those stereotypes in our day-to-day lives. Do you think your average red stater sees a rational discussion of human sexuality when they look at an exhibit about sex toys? Or do you think they see something that confirms their own biases and beliefs?43
For straight commentators who objected to the display, the exhibition of explicit sex in the museum confirmed that queer sex equals “bad” sex. For LGBT commentators embarrassed by the display, the sex toy display made queers look bad. By February, online thread contributors—even those who supported the inclusion of explicit materials—felt the need to warn potential visitors to avoid that part of the exhibition.44 The sex toy display, a small part of a small museum on LGBT history and nothing else, had become (in)famous in the blogosphere. As I wrote this chapter, sources told me that it was removed and replaced with a new thematic display titled: “Premarital Bonds: Family Before Marriage Equality.”45
What kind of sexual inheritance a queer museum like the GLBT History Museum seeks to transgenerationally pass on suggests a new kind of sexual future that eschews biological reproduction (reproductive futurism) as well as the call made by Lee Edelman to proclaim no future for queer individuals.46 Performing sexual heritage as cultural work is an undeniably queer practice, one that, to draw from Muñoz, “can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.”47 Displaying sexual heritage in contexts of sexual nonimmediacy such as museums can make important contributions to the queering of sexual history. The collection and display of sexual material culture in the present becomes a mode of communicating what has been possible (in terms of the expression and performance of sexual desires and sexual practices by sexual cultures and communities) in the past.
Museums perform sexual heritage queerly whenever they reorient the emotional habitus between visitors and queer objects. That is, when museums interrupt, create a performative rift, or transform the habitual ways in which bodies relate to these objects, they forge new relationships, queer relationships, and thus a queer kind of sexual heritage that exists nowhere else. For some scholars of sexuality, the queer museum neither does nor should exist (even if and when it displays LGBT intimacies or eroticism).48 With these prominent voices in mind, and despite the tentativeness with which most museums exhibit queer sex, I argue that it already does, but not without struggle, even in shows and museums dedicated to displaying queer lives. Whether newly emerging LGBT museums resist the enfolding of queer heritage into an economic calculus that regards it as a problematic asset and a risky investment for normative cultural capital is currently playing out. Grounded approaches to queer theory will help us weigh the economic benefits of popular exhibitions that attend to the more financially stable base of white gay male populations with the value of more challenging and critical shows that display materials about nonnormative sexual practices, queers of color, transgender lives, and critiques of the status quo. Whether or not the gatekeepers of queer theory predict its death, its ludic utility to the exhibition of queer subjects in museums is just beginning. Above all, these museums and their exhibitionary struggles remind us that now is not the time to abandon queer theory. Now, more than ever, we need queer praxis.