The Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Community Center was an amazing experience, from seeing a large organization dedicated to LGBT issues including a great youth oriented department that helps not only LGBT youth but issues that they face including bullying, homelessness and drug addictions. They are connected with a lot of other organizations all over America and were interesting in creating ties with Canadian LGBT centers as well.
The center was the most gender neutral place I encountered in NYC. Not only did they have the only All Gender bathroom that I encountered, but they catered to all sorts of gender expression in the way I would expect – but never see - from all areas of North American institutions. Levels of education about gender expression limit most institutions from embracing the political correctness of gender and sexuality. The LGBT center understands permutations of gender and sexuality, and it was reflected in the interactions and publications to the public.
The Museum of Sex was a very interesting institution that contradicted most of what we saw at the LGBT center. While being a place for sexual exploration and learning, the Museum of Sex based their exhibits in the history and popular culture of sex but failed to represent alternative sexuality or gender in any way. Entering the museum, we encountered the gift shop first and had a couple of minutes to browse while Marie got our tickets. The shop was my first indication of the narrow view of sex in the museum. They relied on heteronormativity and focused on heterosexual sex almost exclusively. I came across one deck of gay male Kama Sutra cards and one book that focused on lesbian sex. Upon inspection, the lesbian sex book was not a book for lesbians, it included images of heterosexual sex that changed the context from lesbian to heterosexual male fetish. The entire room of books, cards, sex toys, clothes and miscellaneous objects were directed towards the heterosexual in every way.
Entering the museum itself it mimicked the heteronormativity of the gift shop. The first room was dedicated to sex in film and only had one example of homosexuality, but based within heteronormative culture. Most of the exhibits reflected society’s bias towards the female body showing videos only in major mainstream culture, which often depict the female as sexual object.
The second room looked at fetishes including BDSM, sexual art (including a Picasso print), erotica and sex dolls, and the next room contained prophylactics from throughout history as well as media and art surrounding aids and other STIs. The entire floor excluded any homosexual paraphernalia including dental dams, which would be easy to include in the displays of prophylactics. Even the AIDS ads somehow managed to avoid any reference to queer culture, they chose modern ads that refer to heterosexual transmission of AIDS, rather than including some historical ads (which was done elsewhere in the room) which seemed to deny queer culture.
The final room, The Sex Lives of Animals, compared animal behaviour to human behaviour in an interesting look at varying sexuality but the language within the exhibit just seemed a little off. Subtly suggested in the grammar of the text panels, possibly an unintentional language style of the curators, making it sound like homosexuality in humans is different than how it exists in the animal kingdom. This allows the exhibit to stay within safe heterosexual boundaries to avoid offending potential customers. This is something also often seen in Art Galleries to avoid controversy, a censoring of images and material to cater to the largest demographic.
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