“Thanks to the Met’s extensive collection, this tour is a whirlwind, and thanks to Lear’s boundless knowledge and excitement, it’s a true treasure.”
— Out Magazine, March 2015
Tour Itineraries
Greenwich Village
Walking Tour
(Two-hour walking tour)
On this tour, we explore the heart of the West Village, where the gay liberation movement took off, with the Stonewall riots in 1969 and the first Gay Pride parade a year later.
But the Village’s gay history goes back a century before that, to the time of Walt Whitman. Since that time, like Paris’ Left Bank, the Village has been the center of all of the city’s many countercultures and artistic movements, from the creators of Off Broadway to the Beats and the Factory—and of course the gay liberation movement. During this tour, we see the places where Villagers have lived and loved, including the sites of the drag shows and gay bars which have dotted the Village for 150 years—and of course the Stonewall Inn, where our tour starts and ends.
The list of LGBT greats we discover reads like a history of American culture, from Herman Melville to Eleanor Roosevelt to James Baldwin to Harvey Fierstein.
Advance purchase is required. Discounts available for seniors and students.
Gay Secrets of the
Metropolitan Museum
(Two-hour tour)
Join us for an entirely new concept: an exploration of homoerotic art in the Metropolitan Museum. On this tour, we discover some of the Met’s queer treasures, from ancient Greek nudes and erotic vase-painting (on which Professor Lear is a world expert) to homoerotic paintings from the Renaissance—as well as a panoply of modern works, some by LGBT artists, some portraying LGBT people and some expressing same-sex desire.
We learn about famous pieces—from Michelangelo’s Cupid to Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein—but in addition we explore lesser-known artists and works that are often ignored.
And we delve into the fascinating forms of homosexuality in other cultures, such as same-sex initiation rites in New Guinea, represented in the Met’s Oceania collection. It’s all part of the hidden gay story in one of the great museums of the world, which you’ll never look at the same way again.
Advance purchase is required. Ticket price includes museum admission. Discounts available for seniors, students, and Metropolitan Museum members.
Unhung Heroes Tour of the
Metropolitan Museum
(Two-hour tour)
Nowadays people seem to consider the size of certain male body parts terribly important. The subject even came up in the presidential campaign, as absolutely nobody has forgotten, and ads about whether “size matters” are a dime a dozen. And yet when we go to the art museum, the guys without clothes are distinctly below average real-life size.
Have you ever wondered why that is? Were men really smaller once upon a time? Or did they prefer it for aesthetic reasons? Some other reason? Ever since Professor Lear was interviewed on this very subject on NPR, people have been asking us to give a tour about it, a tour that explains why the world’s art museums are full of unhung heroes.
So here it is. On this fun and informative 2 hour tour, follow the theme of the n*ked male around the museum. Learn about the ideals of Greek culture and how they have affected the whole history of art without clothes. And discover the contrasting cases as well—cases that exaggerate the other way…. You’ll come away with a whole new understanding of art, and maybe even of size.
Professor Lear has decided to include breasts on the tour as well, as they are the other body part most fictionalized in art.
Penises shrink and grow according to social ideals; breasts grow and shrink, rise up the chest and sink down, move to the side and back to the center—according to fashion.
Advance purchase is required. Ticket price includes museum admission. Discounts available for seniors, students, and Metropolitan Museum members.
Bust of Antinous, about 130 AD
Antinous was the Emperor Hadrian’s kept boy—and his great love. We don’t know much about his life or their relationship, except that he was a strikingly good-looking Greek boy from modern-day Turkey and drowned in the Nile at age 19. The most interesting thing, though, is what happened next: Hadrian declared him a god.
And this must have been popular, since there are more than 100 statues and busts of him, all presumably from temples and shrines. In fact, he is one of the most represented Classical people, along with Julius and Augustus Caesar and Hadrian himself.
Musicians, Caravaggio, about 1595
Caravaggio responds to the tradition of representing the art of music as a lute-playing woman with this group of louche boys. Their Classical clothing and partial nudity eroticize them, as does the presence of a Cupid (of doubtful gender) behind them. Above all, the lute-player himself is markedly sexualized. Like the Cupid he is effeminate: it seems possible that his eyebrows are plucked, and he may be wearing make-up. His unusual facial expression is also noteworthy: both his eyes and mouth seem to belong in the bedroom more than the concert hall…
The Sofa, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1895
Toulouse-Lautrec was fascinated by the Lesbian relations between the sex-workers in the bordellos where he painted and at times lived. His interest does not seem to be voyeuristic but instead to derive from a sense of identification with the prostitutes, whom he saw as outcasts like himself. Thus in this scene, one of the women is nude from the waist down, clearly indicating an intimate relationship with the other, but there is nothing erotic about the painting. Instead, the theme seems to be the intimacy between the women—a subject as rare in art as are their expressions of fatigue, boredom, cynicism….
Gay Secrets of the…
Museum of Fine Arts Boston
(Two-hour tour)
Boston is known for its Puritanism, but somehow, the Museum of Fine Arts never got the memo. In art circles, it is well known that Boston’s MFA has the world’s greatest collection of LGBT-themed Classical Greek and Roman art. It is less well known that the MFA’s collections are extraordinarily rich in LGBT art of other cultures as well.
On this tour fun and informative 2 hour tour, we will discover:
the male/male couple that were ancient Athens’ Uncle Sam
the god Priapus and what he did with his huge appendage
the sexiest Jesus of the Italian Renaissance
painter John Singer Sargent’s secret obsession
and an intersex figure we bet you’ve never noticed in a famous impressionist canvas!
Come on our tour, and you will never see the MFA the same way again!
Advance purchase is required. Ticket price includes museum admission.
Shady Ladies of the
Metropolitan Museum
(Two-hour tour)
Courtesans, royal mistresses, scandalous women of every sort–the
Metropolitan Museum is crammed with them, from ancient Greek “hetaerae” to Sargent’s Madame X and beyond.
These sexy–and often intelligent, educated, wealthy, even powerful–women were key members of political and cultural elites, fascinating patrons and artists alike, from Praxiteles to Titian to Manet. But who were they? What were their stories?
To find out, join us as we explore the lives and loves that lie behind the paintings.
Advance purchase is required. Ticket price includes museum admission.
