GALLERY
More Popular at Met than on Grindr
Oscar Wilde Tours visits “Unhung Heroes” of art history
A penis-shaped vase from the sixth century BCE in the Greek art section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
BY MICHAEL LUONGO
Don’t say you’ve never noticed
before. If you want
to look at penises, few
places match a museum.
That’s the premise behind the
new two-hour “Unhung Heroes”
tour of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, run by Professor Andrew
Lear of Oscar Wilde Tours. As the
name indicates, it’s not about the
well-endowed but rather why so
many penises in classical art —
from the Ancient Greeks through
the Renaissance and beyond — fail
today’s Grindr expectations.
Lear is known for other unusual
themed tours of the Met, including
his “Shady Ladies and Nasty
Women,” examining female fi gures
in art who are powerful and defy
expectations. I have also been on
his “Gay Secrets of the Met” tour.
Oscar Wilde also runs tours to Italy
and Greece, the original penis
source — well, at least where art is
concerned.
Why are museums so special?
“The Met is the encyclopedic museum,”
according to Lear, and as a
result, “the borderline between art
and anthropology is very thin. It is
so big and so diverse, it is a great
place to begin to design all kinds of
interesting explorations.”
Certainly, thousands of years of
penises are included there. In fact,
the tour was something Lear said
he had long thought about.
“As I specialized in Greek art
and gender and sexuality, I knew
well where all the penises were” in
museums, he said.
Lear started, where else, but in
the ancient Greek art section on
the main fl oor. The fi rst object was
an unusual sixth century BCE terra
cotta vase shaped like a penis
with holes on the edge of it, as if it
might also have also been a pendant.
As Lear explained, “Penises
were central to ancient Greek culture,
but just what it means individually
is unclear. To some extent
it might just be a joke.” The vase
seemed to have contained an oil at
one point, possibly medicinal for
erectile dysfunction. Ancient Viagra
MICHAEL LUONGO
if you will.
Hercules was next on the list,
and this was a counterintuitive
experience. For someone so virile,
Lear explained, his manhood
is “tiny, it’s really tiny. That is not
what we would expect if we depicted
Hercules. Our culture has
become obsessed with whether a
penis should be large, but it is so
recent that idea.”
This gets to the heart of some
of what Lear is trying to explain
on the tour, which also takes in
the portrayal of women’s breasts
through the ages too, as demonstrated
mostly by medieval and
Renaissance art. Beyond prurient
titillation, the tour offers a chance
to learn about changes in thought
about the human body over time,
as evidenced by art.
“I think like all of my tours, there
is a pretty strong implication that
sexuality and gender things have
varied a lot by culture. It’s not a
simple or a simplistic issue, instead
one that is really complex and interesting,
and certainly same-sex
stuff has a lot to do with that, attitudes
toward same-sex things are
certainly very connected, certainly
to the Greek stuff,” Lear said, explaining
why his tours are especially
popular for those with queer
sensibilities.
Lear, who has taught at Pomona
College and New York University,
also believes that our modern-day
obsession with penis size came out
of gay culture.
“There is a fi xation in our culture
on penis size,” he said. “In
fact, we live in a world right now
in which penises are either large
or small, there are no normal penises.
In fact, as we all know, 90
percent of penises are in a pretty
normal range. But guys have become
completely obsessed with
penis size, and this being a recent
phenomenon just interests me.”
Men are now being made to adhere
to standards long projected
onto women, he argued.
“It could just be the kind of attitude
we have had toward women’s
bodies is being applied to men’s
bodies,” according to Lear. “After
all, large breasts are not more
attractive than small breasts or
more sexually functional, but we
have for a long time, in our culture,
large breasts have been perceived
as better.”
Consumerism, or “bigger is better,”
is also a part of it, he believes.
It’s not only European art on
the tour, which also includes the
Oceania area boasting an exhibit
of bis poles that once adorned the
men’s lodges in a village in Papua
New Guinea. They are not ancient,
but rather from the 1960s.
“Here we are in a culture with a
somewhat different view of penises,”
he said, his hands pointing up
into the air at the poles, some 20
feet in height, adding, “It’s from a
culture in which penises occupy a
pretty central location.”
It’s also clear that one depicts
two men having anal sex.
“Men’s lodges are responsible
for organizing initiation rites, and
initiation rites in this tribe apparently
involved anal intercourse and
➤ UNHUNG HEROES, continued on p.31
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