The comments that follow, drawn from guest books, interviews, and casual conversations, testify that most sex museum visitors want more transgression than sex museums ultimately provide, though what that transgression should entail differs widely:1
The voyeuristic appeal of a sexual museum, an erotic art museum. You are looking into the personal artifacts, the personal effects of people that somehow made it into the collection of one collector. You’re kind of looking through the back door, up the skirt of someone’s collection of various things. This museum isn’t afraid to just smack it on the wall and throw it in your face.
Ramón, Visitor to WEAM, Miami Beach
Just FYI, we are Christian conservative, just so you know that. We are not all prudes and appreciate God’s creation!
Heterosexual couple, Visitor’s book, WEAM, Miami Beach
Have more ephemera like chastity belts, whips, cock rings. . . . I expected more pictures of abnormal penis or breast development, over-development of organs.
Male 31–55, visitor’s book, WEAM, Miami Beach
Need to take pictures and have sex store.
Female 18–30, visitor to WEAM, Miami Beach
The one criticism I have: it seems overwhelmingly hetero, made clearer by the fact that there is what appears to be a gay-themed room (with the Tom of Finland–ish stuff). I know there is some gay stuff throughout the collection, but I think it would be good to integrate it more.
Male 31–55, visitor’s book, WEAM, Miami Beach
We came, we saw, and then we came again.
Visitor’s guest book, WEAM, Miami Beach
Que era un poco más atrevido. Quiero más información sobre que son las posibilidades por el cuerpo en sexo. (I was expecting it to be more daring. I want more information about embodied sexual possibilities.)
Carla, a young Venezuelan woman on vacation with her friends, MoSex, New York
We wouldn’t be into reading the history of sex; we aren’t academics like yourself. We’re here to see stuff and laugh at it for about five seconds.
Simon, a young Irish man on holiday with his mates, MoSex, New York
I didn’t really expect anything. It’s the first sex museum I’ve been to.
Mei visiting from Canada, MoSex, New York
JT. What do you think you’ll tell people about the museum?
Sam. Really, I probably won’t tell anybody I came here.
JT. OK.
Sam. So, um, you might run into that a lot . . . married man, off on a lunch break . . .
JT. Uh huh.
Sam. Yeah, in reality, that’s probably a big percentage of [pause] of men that walk through here. Um, so probably I won’t tell anyone I’m here.
Conversation with Sam at MoSex, New York
Pues, pienso que les trata de dar un recorrido, pero recreacionado, o sea, de que usted diviertas, conozcas un poquito, veas algo de, pues, se podría llamarlo pornográfico, y es básicamente algo . . . es algo de diversión realmente este museo. No es algo de cultura. Es algo de diversión. (Well, I think that they are trying to give a broad trajectory of travel, but recreationally, so that one enjoys oneself, you learn a little, but more so you see, well you can call it pornography, and it’s basically this . . . it’s a diversion really this museum. It’s not culture.)
Jorge, visitor, Museo del Sexo, Mexico City
Si les falta algo? Yo creo que sí, algo en vivo. Una muestra de algo . . . yo creo que les falta esto. (If it’s missing anything? I think, yes, something live. A show of some sort . . . I believe that this is what it’s missing.)
David, visitor, Museo del Sexo, Mexico City
Todas las partes que ví de los albures, no era lo mismo esto que esto, pero realmente no te está aportando nada en el aspecto cultural sexual. Solamente, pues, es como diversión . . . No hay datos de mayor cultura, de mayor realidad, no tanto. Nada más el aspecto del morbo. . . . meter un poco más de la pasión sexual. (I only saw the information presented through jokes, not the same jokes as you went from display to display, but they’re really not exhibiting anything about sexual culture. It’s only, well, a diversion . . . there’s no facts about ancient culture, about actual reality, not much anyway. Nothing but the prohibited, the taboo . . . they should introduce more sexual passion.)
Rodrigo, visitor, Museo del Sexo, Mexico City
Sí. Me gustaría información para informarte más . . . serio. Donde sea asi divertido, yo prefería más serio, no? (Yes, I would like information that would better educate me. In the museum, where it’s more fun, I would prefer it to be more serious, don’t you agree?)
Ínes, visitor, Museo del Sexo, Mexico City
FedEx delivery man. What is this place?
Jeff. It’s an erotic museum.
FedEx delivery man. Oh. OK.
Frequent exchange related to me by Jeffrey Storer, LA&M, Chicago
I visited this “museum” last year and was stunned by its audacious chronicling of the most repulsive perversions [see pictorial story on IML (International Mr. Leather, a LA&M affiliated international leather conference)], e.g., “fisting.” The sheer horror and weirdness of the place makes it difficult to describe to a normal audience.
Peter LaBarbera, Americans for the Truth about Homosexuality, Chicago
I was here when I was thirteen at a friend’s bat mitzvah. It fascinates me that a synagogue has become this sex museum. . . . You know, I’m Jewish. It doesn’t bother me. It’s used for a good cause. It’s a building that was . . . you know, I came here as a kid for a bat mitzvah. And now I’m involved in a museum.
Amy, Volunteer, LA&M, Chicago
May I just say, as an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Iowa, I’m so glad to see this history being carried on like this for people to see and educate themselves. Through education, the subject matter of what is displayed will in time become less taboo for the masses. Love, Brooke.
Visitor’s book, LA&M, Chicago
With varying degrees of attainment, sex museums set out to perform insubordination, upending the history of sexual display while providing new landscapes to experience the transgression of consuming sex in museums. The successes and failures of sex museums as self-reflective and not simply incidental sites for exhibiting explicit sexuality can be viewed as rehearsals for the dynamic and multinodal performances that public historians, LGBT archivists, museum scholars, performance theorists, and sexuality scholars will have to engage if they want their own public sexuality projects to be prosperous.
When I speak of sex museum failure, I refer not only to the financial, ethical, and theoretical instability of the sex museum project but also to the ways in which scenarios of missed or misfired display objectives shape the future of sexual exhibitions. While failure is generally uncelebrated, I propose that the infra- and suprastructural collapse of certain sex museums, such as El Museo del Sexo in Mexico City, offers examples of how not to rehearse the pleasures and problematics of sexual display for a diverse range of sex museum visitors. Studying where and when sex museums fall short can help us reconfigure the stuckness of the traditional museum to mobilize altered spatial relationships between sexual subjects and sex objects.
My focus on failure, however, does not promise the same escape from “the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development,” as Jack Halberstam’s does.2 Instead, I hold out for other prospects; in the case of sex museum failure, the reluctance to break those punishing norms in favor of disciplining and safe sexual display (not the same as safe sex, which can be very unruly) actually led to closure. What became clear to me is that museum visitors are ready to perform the role of active sex tourists and savvy museum critics. Certainly, the closure of some sex museums underlies the larger issue of inadequate spaces to learn about sex in public and, for those sex museums that do exist, the sexual deficit that results when those spaces are constructed to showcase only dominant, monolithic desires and binary approaches to sexuality. But these failures also communicate a lack of faith in the intellectual curiosity and capacity of sex museum visitors to be exposed to and to process new forms of sexual display that only sex museums can provide. Sex museum tourists want something smarter, sexier, and more daring.
To end this book, I want to examine one instance of sex museum failure, one that occurred at the precise moment that I set out to begin my research on sex museums in 2006. On May 7 of that year, the Erotic Museum in Los Angeles closed after only two years of business. Located on Hollywood Boulevard, and surrounded by a plethora of other entertainment options like Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and mainstream shopping destinations such as Victoria’s Secret and the Gap, the museum faced fierce competition from these other sites of popular recreation, but that only partially explains its failure to meet its monetary quota. A May 4 press release announced that it could not “make ends meet . . . without public money and with prejudices about erotica and sexuality still at play even in one of our country’s most liberal locales.” In the same press release, the museum’s CEO, Boris Smodorinsky, argued: “Given a real opportunity to explore their sexuality in an open and educational forum, people tended to be much shyer than we anticipated. Very often we saw couples linger at the door unsure if they wanted to come in.”3 Never having visited the Erotic Museum while it was open, I can only imagine the numerous pairs of people, their arms wrapped around each other as they shuffle from foot to foot in their indecision. They have mini-tiffs debating, “Should we?” or, “Is this really how we want to spend the afternoon?” or, equally plausibly, “What is this place, really?” But then, spotting someone they know from across the street (oh wait, is it Bob?) or noticing the other shuffling, undecided people around them, watching them, they decide not to enter after all or all of Hollywood Boulevard might discover that they are really, secretly, perverts. Or perhaps their eyes wander, they become hungry for something else, or they decide, still unsure of what they might step into, that viewing sex in public is not really on their menu of delights for the day. Instead, they saunter down to Ripley’s to see the two-headed calf and the shrunken torso exhibit, stopping off at Victoria’s Secret for the latest Wonder Bra.
As the spokesperson for the Erotic Museum and the primary voice of the press release, Smodorinsky partially blamed the failure of the museum on “recent natural disasters, the war, a drop in tourism.” Above all, he pointed to the change in Americans’ sexual consumption habits (“on the Internet, on TV, in the movies”) even while he cited the continuation of embarrassment, discomfort, and reluctance to engage sex’s “positive potential” in a public forum like the Erotic Museum.4 For Smodorinsky, the fault rested with the continuing sexual prejudices of the American public, not with the organizational, aesthetic, and affective atmosphere created by the museum.
The following firsthand account from one visitor, the writer and filmmaker Steven Tagle, provides one moment of collision between the mood of the Erotic Museum and its publics. It offers a detailed description of the area hovering at the periphery of the museum:
A man in a worn leather jacket stands outside the museum handing out coupons. He looks homeless, a formidable obstacle. We consider turning back. This homeless man will know we were here.
“Discount on admission,” he says. “Two bucks off.”
Jim reaches for a coupon.
“Discount’s automatic inside,” the man whispers, pulling his hands up and away.
The lobby of the Erotic Museum seems clean enough, a sparse, intellectual art deco. Here they sell backscratchers and florescent dildos, t-shirts that say, “Just Did It,” and “Tough Love.” It lacks a sex shop’s grit, but just beyond that black curtain is who knows what. The lady at the counter looks bored, an art student, used to this scene.
“Two?” she asks.
Jim nudges me. “Do you have cash?” he asks.
“Are you going to put out?” It’s the first thing to come to mind, gliding out of my mouth with a flourish of male sarcasm. Though it easily ranks as one of the more unseemly things I’ve ever said to him, I figure, what the hell—we’re in the Erotic Museum. The lady at the counter coughs, and Jim toes a smudge on the floor.
“I’ll pick up dessert with my card,” he says quietly.
“Two,” I nod, sliding a twenty across the display case.
“Your first time?” the lady asks, counting out change. I notice the entwined symbols of Venus on her wrist, peeking out from a severe black cuff.
“Of course not,” I say.
“Just play safe.”
She hands me two tickets and change. I offer Jim one, but he shrugs it off, so I’m stuck with the dirty evidence.
Silence becomes our understanding. I agree to finance this trip knowing it’s something he’ll never tell his girlfriend, never tell our parents, the kind of lesson older brothers are supposed to teach.5
For some, entering a sex museum is a performance that places trust in the dominant institution of the museum to provide them with a clean, well-lit place to safely learn about sex. At the Erotic Museum, the theatricality of the black curtain sufficiently overwhelmed the museum genre, tipping the feelings with which some visitors entered into a danger zone. Tagle’s account, particularly the moments where he begins to incorporate the mood of the Erotic Museum’s exposition room into his verbal and physical exchanges, suggests that the details of feeling (dis)oriented depend on the symbiotic collision of how the space is furnished and the horizon of visitor expectations. Certainly, the details of that space, that is, the aesthetic and organizational choices made by museum planners and what kind of atmosphere these decisions potentially create, partially, though significantly, determine how or whether museum publics will continue onward to the sex museum experience. In the museum’s front room, the room of the least sex seen, visitors encounter a rare, though brief, opportunity to explore some of their erotic expectations and sexual fears when it comes to encountering sex in public. While the immediacy of this experience is most influential to their leaving or staying in sex museums, Smodorinsky was correct to say that the history of viewing sex in public informs any encounter with sex in museums. At the threshold of the sex museum, those memories come crashing in on the uninitiated visitor. Feeling and thinking sex in the sex museum either begins or ends here.
While most people I met at sex museums in the United States and in Mexico City (and Amsterdam, Paris, Copenhagen, and Barcelona) were open-minded, curious, and hungry for information about diverse forms of sex, there does exist a small but powerful contingent that would like to put some of the most vulnerable of sex objects—those deriving from queer cultures—at perhaps the most vulnerable of sex museums—the Leather Archives and Museum—back in the closet or even in the trash. But, while moral prescriptions are at work here, they are not the only factor affecting displays of sex in museums, just as there is more than one way to trash sexual history. More dangerous than the Peter LaBarberas, the Eric Cantors, and the Jesse Helmses of this world is the development of a museum culture where private capital dictates the boundaries of what can be exhibited and discussed in museums. Sex museums, especially for-profits, set themselves up as sites that can avoid this predicament, but, even in these environments, market forces have limited what and how curators think they can display sex.
Perhaps Jonathan D. Katz said it best when reflecting on the censorship of the Hide/Seek exhibition a discussion of which began this book: “What happened with my exhibition ‘Hide/Seek’ is not really about art at all. In some broader sense it is not even about queerness at all, it is about raw American politics.”6 The display of sex in museums—any museum—is at its core a performance that uses the unique affective and embodied qualities of sex to test and expand the boundaries of political discourse. While sex museums continue to enact practices of display and spectatorship unavailable to most museums, they do so within a political and economic paradigm where business concerns dominate the domain of the sayable. In the meantime, the raw materials for displaying daring sexual histories lie dormant in museum archives or, in the case of sex museums, in off-site storage. Any museum can be a sex museum.