A Sense of Safety and Solidarity in Museums

Spider-Man, Valencia, Spain, 2009. Alberto-g-rovi, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

You don’t have to be bitten by a radioactive spider to develop a Spider-Sense, and it’s quite common for queer people to have their own version of this survival instinct. According to that trusted source, Marvel Animated Universe Wiki, Spider-Sense grants Spider-Man the ability to “detect danger before it happens and warns him of it in no time.” and the “greater the danger or how close the danger is increases the tingling sensation.” As a queer kid and teenager, I experienced this sensation or hypervigilance routinely, as it was the only way, apart from retreating to the safe space of my family home, that I could hope to avoid homophobic incidents.

However, there were other safe spaces where the tingling would ease off, such as cinemas, comic book shops and supportive secondary school teachers’ classrooms during breaks and dinners. These spaces were invaluable because I didn’t need to be overly cautious and could temporarily escape heteronormative reality through a film, a graphic novel or an extracurricular activity.

For those from marginalised and vulnerable groups, the preoccupation with whether a space is safe or not can last well into adulthood, consuming a fair amount of their subliminal energy and time. So, any action that a space, such as a museum, can take to alleviate this intergenerational concern can only be a good thing.

The Safe Access Research Project, led by Queer Kernow, initially in collaboration with the now-closed Cornwall Museums Partnership and currently with the Association of Independent Museums, has been looking into how to do this. The overall aim of the project has been “to ensure that heritage organisations create safe and healthy cultures for their workers, freelancers and consultants, especially those from marginalised backgrounds.” 

The project's first two phases - Research and Test - which ran from 2023 to 2024, were funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund's Heritage Innovation Fund. This funding has been secured for a third phase - Grow - which will build on the previous phases to “work with freelancers and move towards supporting museums and heritage organisations to be safe spaces for everyone”. 

During the second phase, in late 2024, I joined the project as a consultant to provide extra support with the development of the emerging wellbeing framework, which is being further developed alongside other tools in the third phase. By the time I arrived, it was evident that everyone was deeply committed to this critical, complex and comprehensive work, as Queer Kernow had already completed 18 extensive interviews and received 31 survey replies. This in-depth and empathic research, conducted in a way that safeguarded both researchers and participants, identified practices that both enable and impede safe spaces.

The outcomes of Safe Access will undoubtedly help museums grow as safe spaces while also strengthening trust, solidarity and allyship with marginalised and vulnerable groups. This work is critical because marginalised and vulnerable groups continue to face conditional allyship, in which organisations show solidarity "until there is a social, political, or economic risk, and then excuse themselves to a safer position," as Jabari C. Jones puts it in his 2021 AGU Advances journal article We Need Accomplices, Not Allies in the Fight for an Equitable Geoscience. Moreover, with rising levels of violence, hate speech and disinformation directed at these groups, as shown by the 2024 racist riots that began in Southport and spread rapidly, strong allies and safe spaces are more important than ever. 

I witnessed firsthand the significant benefits that genuine safe spaces in museums can offer when I was hired in 2023 to deliver an evaluation workshop for the Preservative Party, a group of young curators from diverse backgrounds at Leeds City Museum. The young curators, along with Professor Abigail Harrison Moore at the University of Leeds, were directly involved in my recruitment to ensure that my values and practice were compatible with the safe space that they had created. 

During the workshop, it was abundantly clear that their shared sense of safety enabled their creativity, confidence and care for one another to flourish. But don't just take my word for it; in the second episode of their inspirational Whose Power? podcast, young curators Rahesa stated “the creating of the safe space, that was a huge part for me”, and Bobby added the Preservative Party is “the place in the world where I feel the happiest and where I feel the safest.”

Bobby's response was both profound and fundamental, because a safe space should also be joyful. The importance of spaces for marginalised and vulnerable groups that combine safety, solidarity and satisfaction was articulated perfectly by DJ Honey Dijon in her 2024 interview with Mixmag, in which she discussed the vital role Chicago's house music clubs played during the AIDS epidemic, “So clubs were not only places for people to go and release, but also to find safety, to find community, find health resources, to be able to leave the world.” Museums can learn a lot from these types of creative and community spaces, including what makes them so safe.

Community activists and organisations are frequently the first to alert museums to the need for reform, as Queer Kernow was in creating Safe Access. To effectively develop and maintain safe spaces, museums must actively listen to, learn from and collaborate with such activists and organisations. Otherwise, they risk compounding performativity and perpetuating the kinds of harmful experiences that poet Franny Choi recounts in her poem Field Trip to the Museum of Human History from 2022. In it, they describe the oppression that occurs during a museum visit and the relief on departing, “We threw open the doors to the museum, shedding its nightmares on the marble steps, and bounded into the sun, toward the school buses or toward home, or the forests, or the fields, or wherever our good legs could roam.”

With the possible exception of the Museum of Horrors in Stoke-on-Trent, no museum should be giving people nightmares. This can be prevented, in part, by museums taking the necessary steps to foster allyship and solidarity in order to co-create spaces where marginalised and vulnerable people can feel safe and, at least for a few hours, switch off their Spider-Sense.