Oct 10, 2022
The Sex Ed Class You Never Had
Queering Museum Content & Public Engagement
By Sean Kramer and Mari Longmire
This piece is a part of our Spark series: Living an LGBTQIA2+ Life
Contrary to what the title suggests, the video series The Sex Ed Class You Never Had is not exclusively about sex education. Rather, it is a set of short, creative, sometimes humorous interpretations of personal histories, exploring the various means through which individuals encounter cultural values around intimacy, sex, identity, and relationships. This essay outlines how a desire for representing community narratives mindfully, responsibly, and creatively led to experimental reimaginings of the distinctive role of art museums as platforms for marginalized perspectives. In what follows, Sean Kramer and Mari Longmire, the curator and creative director of the series, dig into the conceptual and methodological grounding of the project and discuss how it formed the basis for other forms of dialogue and engagement with its host institution, the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA).
The Sex Ed Class You Never Had series was conceived as a companion project to the exhibition at UMMA, Oh, honey… A queer reading of UMMA’s collection, which examined what it means to approach an art institution from a queer — or queering — perspective. The exhibition opened in August 2021 after a year-long delay due to pandemic-related campus closures. In the meantime, Sean began working with UMMA Manager of Public Programs Lisa Borgsdorf to find ways to facilitate more intentional relationships between queer communities and the Museum and to represent experiences omitted from the Museum’s art collection and not easily encapsulated by lectures, discussions, and workshops.
The idea for a project around “sex ed” predates the pandemic, however. Credit goes to Jacob Ward and his colleagues on UMMA’s Student Engagement Council, who championed content that would address the widespread lack of LGBTQ+ representation in classroom discussions of sexual health and development. Lisa and Sean invited Mari Longmire to lead the project as writer and creative director, and the three were joined by a team of undergraduate art-makers including David Forsee (videographer), Emily Considine (illustrator), and Jacob Ward (creative consultant). Over the course of a year, this team met regularly over Zoom to produce a set of videos, presented in a non-linear, anthological format, which feature subjects like first crushes, encounters with authority, clandestine internet searches, fairy tales, and the benefits and drawbacks of utopian thinking.
As the creative director, it was Mari’s responsibility to help shape a creative process for the video series’ development. The main goal was to use art — the videos — as a means of documenting a creative confrontation of oppressive institutions, like the educational industrial complex, that leaves many queer people without a sense of knowing or understanding of themselves, particularly through the lens of intimacy. Mari was inspired by Sara Ahmed’s concept of “queer phenomenology,” which by their interpretation means that to queer something is to subject it to a process of socio-political interrogation through acts of disruption to its norms. Through intentional disorientation, the videos offer the opportunity for possibility and clarity through which a new reorientation can emerge. This approach was in many ways the crux of a creative and “educational” pursuit of decoding, disrupting, and ultimately reimagining “sex education” in the series. Through this creative process we tackled queering three elements of sex education: knowledge, learning, and community engagement. And so, for our purposes, “queering knowledge meant moving from the idealized, heteronormative body to connecting with authentic, lived queer experiences.” An oral history approach presented itself as a strategic and meaningful method to gather stories, ideas, and beliefs from which to “teach.” With this project taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an additional need for opportunities to practice community in the midst of shared isolation.
We designed virtual interactive dialogues for queer-identifying individuals, which included an identity-exploratory game show, a queer dystopian simulation experience, and even modeling conversations for intra-community critique after fine dining experiences. These participatory, engaging approaches made the dialogues not only informative for the creative team but also enjoyable and memorable community experiences for the participants. What emerged from the discussions were the experiential seeds from which the series would grow. In one dialogue for example, a participant shared about being taught sex education from their high school principal and his wife, which eventually became the narrative of the second video.
One of our strategies in developing the interactive dialogues was to encourage participants to reflect more on social, cultural, and personal elements of queer community beyond physical intimacy. Inspired by Octavia Butler, another community dialogue focused on surviving a dystopian collapse on earth by traveling to a new planet. This conversation gave participants an opportunity to explore what they would bring with them, what values and beliefs would inform their decision-making, and what sort of future they would hope to build in this new world. This approach highlighted many of the more expansive topics related to comprehensive sex education, such as personal skills, society, and culture. By utilizing imagination, discovery, and play, we were able to elicit queer experiences that connected to larger themes of queer life, such as radical potential, choice, memory, and community.
Representing these larger themes became a much more interesting creative endeavor. Ultimately what was learned went beyond a monolithic body or physical orientation but instead was a response to a cultural and sensorial expression of documented queer experience.
For example, in the first interactive dialogue, one participant shared how the visibility of queer musicians helped them to feel grounded in their identity, which then became the inspiration for the series’ last episode, a music video. This experience was among many that revealed sex education as a process that happens beyond the classroom. For several participants, their knowledge sources for understanding what it meant to be queer were media arts, community networks, and the internet, to name a few. These different sources shaped the aesthetic shifts that are visible in the series. From illustrated manuscripts to conspiratorial internet searches, the video design elements more honestly represent the pathways through which queer ways of knowing reach those interested.
We wanted to resist the need to minimize the educational potential of our work because of its divergence from hierarchical forms of learning prevalent in the U.S. Particularly in a university context, there are high political, social, and economic stakes in defining learning, because it is connected to many different kinds of capital. Our prioritization of an oral history approach and a dialogic, collaborative content development process kept these didactic expectations at bay. Still, we understood that we had a responsibility to provide our viewers with access to credible and accessible information concerning sexual health, especially in a time when access to comprehensive sex education and bodily autonomy is being compromised. Because sex education is subject to intense political scrutiny and regulation in the U.S., the “Never Had” element of the series grapples with both the queerphobic result of this hyper-politicization, which marginalizes queer experiences (as deviant or unnatural), and the absence of vital validating and objective knowledge, necessarily empowering individuals to make more informed decisions.
Crafting a series of animated videos to be posted on the Museum’s website allowed us to explore new forms of online engagement; nevertheless, it limited the opportunities for direct interaction between the series’ creators and the anonymous, disembodied masses of the internet. Because of this, we sought to devise ways both to advertise the videos and discuss the issues they raise with real-live humans. Our first strategy was to include talkbacks at the end of each video. These were one-minute conversations (we timed them!) in which we sought to make transparent our own individual engagement with the videos’ themes. So much of this work was about asking for community members to be vulnerable and to share their experiences, so we thought it important to match that vulnerability ourselves. Our team provided additional interpretive framing through a panel discussion led by Editorial Director of Pride Source Media Group, Chris Azzopardi, at the Museum’s first-ever Queer Night, which concluded the run of the Oh, honey… exhibition in February 2022.
While we didn’t intend for the videos to serve as sexual health resources per se, we still wanted to connect visitors to the website with campus and community organizations. We also provided free packets of condoms at the entrance of the gallery on which were inscribed a QR-code link to the videos. These were an unconventional takeaway for an art museum. They also responded to a public health need that was, according to The Michigan Gayly, underserved on campus. All 4,000 were taken well before the exhibition closed.
Against the backdrop of the pandemic, it was never guaranteed what the outcome would be when creating these videos. We were trying to envision ways the Museum could build a virtual queer community at a time when the notion of community itself was completely upended. The videos, which remain now on UMMA’s website, are the digital artifacts of this year-long effort. Through these videos, we–the entire team and our collaborators–were able to transform uncertainty and vulnerability into experimentation and co-creation, which helped in turn to disrupt the Museum’s norms and conventions around public engagement.
Sean Kramer (he/him) recently completed his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan and now serves as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. His scholarly research interests revolve around late nineteenth-century French and British depictions of the common soldier in painting, print, and photography, examining these through the lenses of men’s sexuality, medicine, militarism, and empire.
Mari Longmire (they/them) is an Ed.M. candidate in the Learning Design, Innovation, and Technology program at Harvard Graduate School of Education and previously served as the assistant director of the University of Michigan Educational Theatre Company, where they utilized arts-based pedagogy and participatory storytelling to enhance social-emotional learning, meaning-making, and skill development for undergraduate and graduate students. With growing experiences in media design and gamification, Mari is passionate about leveraging interactive storytelling and innovative learning design to build individual, team, and organizational capacity through creative deeper learning initiatives.
