Feature image by YAMIL LAGE/AFP via Getty Images
Last month, the National Park Service removed the words “transgender” and “queer” from the Stonewall National Memorial’s website. Just this past week, the National Parks Service removed references to transgender Washingtonians–the “t” in LGBTQ– from the DuPont Circle Park website. In real time, the histories of LGBTQ+ Americans are at risk of erasure, and by destroying this history, they seek to eradicate queer and trans lives from the past through to the present.
It’s time for major museums to stand up for trans and queer people in the public and among their employees — instead the National Gallery of Art and Smithsonian have shuttered their diversity offices. That’s why community members are shifting focus back to small grassroots LGBTQ+ museums, archives, and galleries that have done this historical labor for their communities for decades. As Toronto-based trans museum professional Amelia Smith said, these organizations recognize that “history often lends legitimacy to a community’s claim that it belongs in the here and now.”
“History is so often used as this way to say I exist, I am real, and that I belong,” Smith said quoting Trans, Time, and History. “If I have a history, then I have a present, and if I have a present, I can have a future. It allows us to imagine what can be.” These grassroots initiatives recognize and hold this belief at the center of their work, and I sat down with the Museum of Transology (MoT), the Transgender Museum of History and Art of Brazil (MUTHA), and the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art of the United States (MOTHA), as well as trans scholars, to learn how museums, archives, and galleries can be a political mechanism during times of violent queerphobia.
“Take the museum to the community”
Museum of Transology Founder and Curator E-J Scott recognized early into the process of collecting trans histories that many large-scale museums are not welcoming places for trans people. In fact, they can be downright dangerous and traumatic for a group whose histories have been erased, neglected, and interpreted only by cisgender people. “Just because museums woke up and said we’d like to do this work,” Scott said, “didn’t mean that communities necessarily trusted them or wanted to come inside and do the work for them.”
Chris E. Vargas, founder of MOTHA (the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art) has been exploring “what’s gained but also what’s lost in these moments of assimilation into mainstream institutions where the community had not been before. Not only what is great about it but also what’s lost in the process of having to deliver nuanced stories — to make it palatable — to a larger audience.” As a result, trans and queer histories have been lost even when large scale museums do feature trans and queer community pioneers and artists.
Yet, despite these experiences, trans communities recognize the importance of documenting their own histories of organizing and survival in the face of misinformation, violence, and murder. The popularity of Scott’s first exhibition of objects donated by trans oral history interviewees in a London queer bar and theater convinced him that his communities wanted to capture their own histories. But how could he foster trust among community contributors, collect ethically, and capture stories in his community’s own words?
After founding the Museum in 2014, Scott realized that he “had to take the museum to the community.” Scott began hosting collecting morning teas at a local pub, where people could bring their objects and share the stories they held, donating both to the new Museum. But Scott took this several steps further: He didn’t want to be a sole arbiter of history but rather empower representatives from trans pride events across the UK to become their own community curators. As part of the Trans Pride Collective, which Scott founded, these 30 representatives held collecting workshops in their communities where more people could contribute an object they selected, rather than one deemed valuable by an “expert” curator.
Trans People Telling Trans Histories
“They have the autonomy to choose the object they donate,” Scott said. “We flatly reject the colonial model of an expert who says whether or not this object is worthy of being preserved, and embrace the messiness of the en-masse everyday material culture that has sprouted as a phenomenon in this collection.” It’s a philosophy that largely reflects how trans and queer communities seek to collect the items that reinforce the everyday existence and survival of their communities, and fight the colonial idea of a sole community voice, or a voice outside of the community dictating historical value.
At MoT, these objects are then cataloged by trans people–the contributor tells its story in their own voice and trans museum workers incorporate this information into a database that will be accessible online in a year. Scott hosts late night archiving sessions both locally on his university’s campus and also virtually over Zoom so museum workers can learn vital collections management and database skills from anywhere in the UK and Ireland. “We like to think about it in this way: even though we’re putting the objects into an institution, we’re not putting the institution into the object, so for example, we write all of the search words ourselves.”
This way, Scott continued, “they’re in the community’s language and it means that there’s not a lens of categorization put on top of the objects so that they would be reinterpreted through cisgendered eyes. Similarly they’re not interpreted by production, they’re interpreted through the lens of consumption.” This latter part is especially important as the object’s initial creator may have intended it for a specific gendered group, but in the hands of trans, nonbinary, and intersex individuals, objects and the historical record are liberated from gendered constructs.
Similarly, artist and curator Ian Habib founded the MUTHA in a “country that has historically exterminated its ethnic and gender-variant population, since the history of Portuguese colonization.” MUTHA therefore “believes in education as the most important anti-violence basis.” Habib founded MUTHA after experiencing censorship himself at a performance festival in Santa Catarina and researching censorship of trans bodies in Brazilian archives. “I decided,” Habib said, “to create a space to disseminate archives that I found with the trans population, which did not yet have a space for this, managed by the community itself.”
At MUTHA, “trans people participate in all processes, from the most technical in the area of museum studies and archiving items, to the creative ones.” A person can choose to donate items, participate in shared curation, and tell the story of their own items. At MoT and MUTHA, trans people do the collecting, curation, and education. They are at the heart of history work from day one. “We can choose how to create these narratives ourselves,” Habib said, “since before we were more in the position of being objects of research.” Instead of cis museum workers curating the histories of trans communities as outsiders looking in, trans people are getting to tell their stories and speak honestly about the problematic nature of this former approach.
Be Sustainable and Intersectional
When trans and queer people can tell their own stories, they foreground issues that are central to their communities: intersectionality, sustainability, and crowdsourcing. The first 1,000 objects that were cataloged by the Museum of Transology are open to the public in the museum’s 10-year retrospective exhibition TRANSCESTRY, which opened today at the Lethaby Gallery at Central St. Martins.
TRANSCESTRY is also a useful model for intersectional activism. The exhibition utilized the same furniture pieces that were made in 2016 for a previous community exhibition, and every piece included in this exhibition was sourced from materials within the community. Scott was explicit about charting the Museum’s carbon footprint from the start, as sustainability and conscious consumption is a focus within his trans communities. Museums remain large consumers of energy to regulate temperature and humidity in galleries and storage, so starting an institution with an intention of climate justice aligns with other community goals.
Similarly, Scott and the MoT team were intent on building accessibility into the exhibition from day one. The galleries have quiet dwell spaces, a big desk of access aids, including masks and headphones, and include vitrines at lower and different heights for greater, more equitable access. Exhibition contributors crafted 20 audio descriptions for objects through community conversations about the objects, and sensory labels throughout the gallery visualize what objects mean emotionally to contributors and community members. Although they only have 20 headsets and MP3 players, the gallery makes all access content available via QR code.
The MoT is also planning to host an accessibility weekend with Ebony Rose Dark, a Black blind trans woman who will lead audio tours of her favorite objects. These tours will allow participants to touch replica objects sourced from within the community.
MUTHA is managed by and for the trans community, without any type of incentive fixed government funding. For MUTHA, mutual aid campaigns are especially difficult as the vast majority of the trans community in Brazil is socio-economically vulnerable, but the community does rally around emergency care–one of the Museum’s most effective initiatives was a collective donation campaign to lay to rest and build a collection of memorabilia related to trans TV personality Demétrio Campos. Thus, Habib said, “[MUTHA] has in one of its programs the formation of community activism networks as one of its central activities.” Similarly, TRANSCESTRY team members crowdsourced local trans support groups to include in the exhibition catalogue.
MoT and MUTHA are not the first institutions dedicated to community action. As Francesca Medda shares in her article about the Victoria and Albert Museum, museums are much more than repositories of art but rather are active agents of social change, acknowledging that documenting and sharing histories is political. To fight for recognition, representation, and liberation is also inherently political and sits at the heart of these grassroots initiatives.
Trans people have been doing this work for years. Giuseppe Campuzano founded Transvestite Museum of Peru in 2003-2004 and his work challenging museums dates back into the 1980s. There’s a clear throughline from Campuzano’s work deconstructing the museum to what Vargas is doing with MOTHA.
When All Else Fails, Start From Scratch
Vargas is one of several trans artists and museum workers razing colonial and cis institutions and creating something new in their place. When he was creating a collage artwork featuring ancestors and living icons, he sat down and created branding for the fictive Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art, without intending to make it a reality. “Because also at the heart of this project is a spirit of institutional critique,” Vargas said, “I’m looking at museums as a pillar of dominant culture that contains all our cultures’ biases.”
Vargas was dedicated to extrapolating the cultural capital of museums for himself and for other artists, specifically asking, “How can I use this conceptual art project to fool people into thinking this exists and also use the power built into just the very idea of a museum and pass that on to other people?” Vargas, Christina Lindan, and David Evans Frantz’s written collection Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects intentionally parodies the “history in 100 objects model” by foregrounding the omission — the stories and experiences that are lost to history as a result of a pointedly cisgender narrative.
Vargas, Lindan, and Frantz’s book is more relevant than ever, as trans and queer people are erased from the record once again, and the grassroots trans museums, galleries, and archives that Vargas, Scott, and Habib created speak to importance of returning to the museum model, deconstructing it, reinventing it, or throwing it away to pilot a path forward.
As Scott said, “Re-harnessing what museums can teach us about who we are, the world we live in and the values of the society that we want to see rise above the clatter. It’s about breaking down stereotypes, busting myths, and using research to fight the misrepresentation and disinformation surrounding the trans community. In a time of crisis, I actually think new museum practice is an incredibly strong weapon to wield in the pursuit of trans human rights.”
