My Visit to the Museum of Sex

This past weekend I had the pleasure of visiting the sex museum in New York City and actually seeing the SEX in SEXuality studies.

I have been to a sex museum before, in Amsterdam, which mainly focused on sexual artifacts from different periods of history. In fact it was during that visit I realized how sexuality had been erased from mainstream history. For example: the total absence of ANY sexually explicit art or even hints of sexuality in history in school textbooks. That realization created a spark igniting my interest in the study of human sexuality.

In that first sex museum experience I was 19 and had just completed my first year of college – I hadn’t even declared a major yet!

Fast-forward six years. On my second sex museum trip I was 25, in the middle of my second year of the Sexuality Studies Graduate program and equipped with a very different perspective. This visit gave me a new realization: sex is absent from my study of sex. Although our class has talked about this before , it became real walking through the exhibits and reading someone’s theories and research on a wall next to a playing porn reel. This museum actually placed sex and the study of sexuality together.

After nearly three semesters of sexuality studies at SF State, standing the middle of museum I...

In November of 2008, only three months after I began pursuing a master’s degree in the Department of Sexuality Studies at San Francisco State University, tension and conflict between white gays and lesbians and both queer and straight people of color erupted after Proposition 8 passed. I was still adjusting to the stress of a graduate reading load and the fact that I was now living alone in a new city with no family and virtually no friends from back home when I realized that a racist blame game had manifested.

I’m sure readers are well aware of exactly what transpired. Frankly, white gays and lesbians unleashed a flurry of blame on people of color for the oppressive proposition’s success. People like Dan Savage blamed African Americans, calling them a “threat to gay Americans.” Others blamed Latin Americans, citing their “traditional family values.” And still others blamed Asian Americans. (Of course, in January 2009, Patrick J. Egan from New York University and Kenneth Sherrill from Hunter College-CUNY released a study titled “California’s Proposition 8: What Happened, and What Does the Future Hold?” that debunked the myth that race had much to do with one’s decision to either vote for or against 8.)