Happy Pride Week, NYC! There are places you immediately think to go to celebrate Pride in the city- the parade along 5th Avenue, Stonewall Inn, pretty much any bar in Hell’s Kitchen. Unless you have a marble statue fetish (no judgement), the Metropolitan Museum of Art did not make that list. Well, I’m here to tell all you #LoveWins art lovers that now it can and should! No, not because of the Rei Kawakubo fashion exhibit!

Museum Hack, the only museum tour company I’ve ever truly loved, is joining the citywide Pride festivities with a Big Gay Met tour!

If you went on a middle school field trip to the Met in the late nineties, there was probably some little shit in your class named Kyle or Matt who shuffled along through the entirety of the museum muttering, “That’s so gay” under his pubescent breath. Turns out Kyle/Matt/Brad was RIGHT.

Big Gay Met with Museum Hack

There’s a lot of gay under the glass ceilings of the Met, you just have to know where to look! The silly, stuffy plaques tell you NONE of the good stuff! 

Lily, our fabulous Big Gay Met guide, told us alllll the good stuff. How the subject of painting is actually a very famous drag queen, who chose to be painted naked and vulnerable rather than beat, by none other than Sigmond Freud’s son! What of that would we find on the plaque?

LITERALLY NOTHING.

Museum Hack is a kick in the pants to these sparse, stuffy plaques. It’s the rainbow antidote the snooze fests those blurbs are notorious for inducing! Museum Hack prides themselves on making their tours fun for ANYONE, even and especially people who claim to hate museums. The passion, knowledge, and goddamn joie de vivre all Museum Hack guides is infectious. You get sucked in, you laugh your ass off, and you remember how freaking fun it can be to learn.

Some art is well, hella gay, just at a glance. Like the above of boys in Thomas Eakins’ “Arcadia” who are just hanging out naked in a park together, ya know, blowing pipes. Then there is the majority of LGBT art – you have nooooo idea the sexual orientation of the artist! Or her struggle in a society where woman couldn’t even wear pants! Lily lead us into the Met’s “closet”, a place I’d never been before which exists as “visible storage” of the museums vast collection.

Coming out of the Met’s Closet…

It was here she let dozens of artists out of the closet, busting up the hetero-normative, straight-laced facade of academia and letting artist’s true rebel rousing, non-conformist, creative AF, brave-ass, PRIDE flags fly! YASSSSS QUEENS!

I brought my little cousin on this tour, he is one of the more hetero-normative people I know and he totally enjoyed it. I dare you to not have a blast on a Museum Hack tour. All of them are so fun and you learn so much!

Some things I learned on the Big Gay Met Museum Hack tour:

Which STD completely revolutionized medieval fashion! Why Gertrude Stein is a terrible, horrible, no good LGBT icon! Finally, I got answers to a question that’s bothered me since middle school: Why are all Greek statues missing their dongs!?

 

Where in the world could you maybe find ALL those ancient peens? Museum Hack has the answers! And so much more!

Big Gay Met has one more tour for Pride Month, ONE! So book it now HERE and trust me, you’ll have more fun than glitter on a man’s pecks at the Pride Parade. If your Pride Weekend is already chock-a-block full…Museum Hack has many other fantastic tours in NYC, and even in other cities!  Check them out!

If Lily is your guide on any Museum Hack, I bet she’ll throw in a little big gay dish, if you ask her!