Anniversaries: The Museum of Sex

I am overwhelmingly not an internet shit-talker, even though sometimes I have every reason in the world to air my dirty laundry and could easily use my blog to do so. I also have never told the story of me and the Museum of Sex, and I think it’s time to do that, as the museum is celebrating its fifth anniversary this week. I’m in a reflective mood, and I no longer hold (much of) a grudge against the whole experience, though I do sometimes get emotional when I think about it.

I am, as you know, passionate about my work (oh hai, iz make understatement). So much so, that the line where personal and professional are differentiated is blurry. I like to joke that I’m always and never working – I always have lots to do, but I love it to death so it’s fun and doesn’t feel like a job, plus I take regular masturbation breaks.

However, my inability to distinguish between personal and professional was much more damaging six years ago, when I was a shy, focused, and overly intense senior in college. I am older, wiser, and tougher than I was at 21, when I first started to work for the Museum of Sex. I also have confidence that whatever project I am working on, I will probably be awesome at it, and that project doesn’t have to be the be-all end-all of my existence. In so many ways, my identity is deeply entwined with my life’s work. However, I am not any one job I do – and when I worked for MoSex, I often found myself believing that that job was what was interesting about me, it was what gave me shape.

At the Museum of Sex, I found what I thought was home. I had been working in publishing, for an academic journal and then an indie book company, and I loved knowledge and the presentation of knowledge for public consumption. I was studying gender and sexuality in school, which delighted and terrified me, and I wanted to integrate it into a career but I wasn’t interested in writing about blowjob tips. Though I’d been thinking I would continue my education straight on through my PhD because I couldn’t imagine another outlet for thinky awesomeness, in my junior year of college I discovered museums as a workplace, and I was smitten. Then MoSex happened, and I jumped in with relish, despite the fact that I worked as an unpaid intern for my first nine months there and wasn’t granted a real (thought shitty paying) job until several weeks before graduation (on my 22nd birthday, actually).

The summer of 2002, before the museum opened its doors for the first time, I worked like a crazy person alongside 9 other devoted and determined people. Our boss, the owner of the operation, paced around like a maniac and made regular displays of screaming at people over his cell phone and in person. In the final weeks before the museum opened, when we were all working 14 + hour days, he made me and my coworkers cry more than once.

But I believed – I believed in my coworkers, I believed in the mission of the museum, I believed this was my calling. In the final weeks ramping up to the museum’s opening, it became increasingly clear that we weren’t going to be able to open on time. Opening day was supposed to September 23, 2002. A week out we knew it wasn’t going to happen, so we pushed it (not far enough) to September 28th. I’ll never forget that meeting at 7 pm on September 27, everyone screaming at each other, nearly everyone in tears, knowing the next morning was not a reality. In the morning, several of us showed up for work, while others didn’t. The crowds wound around the block, wanting to know why the museum wasn’t open for business like every paper in town said it would be. Some of us stayed inside, installing exhibits, other staff members went outside to greet the crowd. On October 5th, after 36 hours in the galleries, our doors opened. We were still installing art in the last gallery as those doors opened. I remember finishing that task, going to a co-worker’s apartment for a nap, and coming back several hours later to confirm that it was real, we made a museum.

The exhibit got mixed reviews. There was of course the usual punnery, heh heh, Museum of Sex garbage. But the main criticism was that the show was overly academic, that we didn’t have enough fun with telling the story of NYC Sex. We did have fun – just of the deeply nerdy kind.

Within a year of the museum opening, the staff that worked tirelessly to open it was gone – quit, fired, weird shades of gray in between, but gone. I was let go in August 2003, told that having staff curators was an overexpenditure. I was heartbroken and extremely resistant to getting a normal job, thus launching my wobbly leap into the world of sexual entertainment, on the naked girl side of things.

In the ensuing years, as I’ve gained distance from the experience there, I think the most disappointing thing about the museum (other than its perhaps questionable conservation efforts) has nothing to do with the collections or the shows they put on (I’ve heard good things about a number of the exhibits), but its tenuous (at best) connection to local communities built around sexuality. I know there are people, folks I very much admire, who are involved with the Museum and see it as a valuable and important resource. And I think it could be, but it really isn’t.

In San Francisco, despite it’s consistent problems with acquiring and securing space, the Center for Sex and Culture is truly at the center of things. Founders Carol Queen and Robert Lawrence are active members and supporters of a vast array of sexual communities. The Museum of Sex does has no such people and does no such thing, and that’s pretty sad, a lost opportunity. Though I’m no longer waging bets about how long the museum will continue to keep its doors open (I did, once upon a time, make bets like that), I do think it’s a serious bummer that the museum hasn’t made more of an effort to integrate itself into the various communities in New York, and furthermore, that communities built around sexuality in NYC don’t see the museum as an immediate ally and first choice as a venue or support organization for various endeavors. That in itself says volumes about the museum’s place in the sexual landscape of this city.