Jonathan David Katz: "a larger isue", December 6, 2010

Jonathan David Katz, co-curator of Hide/Seek, email to group organizing to protest censorship, NYC, December 6, 2010. Republished with his permission.

. . . I want to suggest that we use this controversy to air a larger issue. Namely, that no other museum since 1989 has even considered doing a thematically queer show--sure individual queer artists are shown, but queerness as such is excluded from consideration as a museum theme.

Let's protest NPG , but also ask why MOMA has not done such an exhibition, or even acknowledged the full content and context of the Wojnarowicz images they have mounted on their walls even now?

Or why the Met, Whitney and Guggenheim have not only refused to acknowledge the import of sexuality in the work of living artists like Johns or Twombly (and Rauschenberg, who was alive when his retrospective was up) in their recent exhibitions, but dead ones, too, as in the Metropolitan Museum's Eakins retrospective.

Yet worse, let's ask why 25 plus years of queer studies scholarship has been purged from the catalogs for these show--and queer studies books and articles even purged from the bibliographies.

Why has the New York Historical Society never once so much as used the word gay in an exhibition when the singular, defining event in the modern LGBT movement, Stonewall, happened in New York?

Why do we see same sex desire everywhere in evidence in the Met's Classical Art galleries, but never referenced in any wall labels--and this after a modern redesign?

In short, let's not let the other museums, long complicit in this 2 decade long blacklist off the hook while pointing a finger at the only museum willing to defy it in the first place.

If we just protest the Smithsonian, it will be another 2 decades before any other museum dares attempt a queer show. Instead, let's use this incident to underscore that the museum world in general is and has been systemically and profoundly homophobic since the Mapplethorpe controversy in 1989.