Was Perth Museum's unicorn exhibition all it appeared to be?

This imposing exhibit was the grand finale of a show split across levels, taking visitors through the ancient history of belief in unicorns right up to their present-day association with LGBT culture. It was a journey of jarring tonal shifts that concluded with what turned out to be a “Trojan Unicorn” packed with symbolic objects and speakers playing testimonies about “growing up and living as a queer-identifying person in Perthshire and Scotland today”.

The label stated: “Those inside the Trojan Unicorn come in peace and love”, but doubtless that is how the original would have been advertised too. This one was, apparently, a “safe space, a sanctuary” for those who might not feel safe to “come out”. It was certainly a curious choice to create an association between closeted LGBT people and destructive infiltrators, but this was an exhibition full of curious choices.

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The journey towards the giant sculpture began downstairs, in a gallery full of treasures including late-Renaissance artist Luca Longhi’s beautiful Lady and the Unicorn, gorgeously illustrated bestiaries and a giant narwhal horn.

Visitors were walked through the writings and depictions that led people to believe that unicorns were not just real creatures but bestowed with medicinal properties.

It’s easy to see how the existence of narwhals and rhinos – along with some dodgy translations of texts and misinterpretations of drawings – led to misunderstandings, and the chance to profit from them doubtless helped keep the truth obscured.

We were shown how apothecaries peddled potions that they claimed contained powdered unicorn horn – all the more highly valued since the beasts were known to be very difficult to catch. Moving upstairs to the contemporary half of the exhibition, “Hunting the unicorn” displayed heads in the style of taxidermy trophies that had been customised by six artists “who identify as queer or as part of the LGBTQIA+ community”.

The 'Trojan Unicorn' on display at Perth Museum (Image: Newsquest) This seemed to suggest the existence of people who are so queer they must identify as such twice – or that those putting on the exhibition perhaps did not give much thought to their deployment of acronyms.

Certainly it’s hard to see what an artist identifying as asexual has to do with the persecution and discrimination of homosexual people who are, as the exhibits reflect, “still hunted today” in countries around the world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the artists chose to focus on those persecuted for their gender identity rather than sexuality.

The theme of gender fluidity was carried into the section aimed at children – a nursery-like nook with drawing tables, a mini library and a dressing-up box beside a mirror with three check boxes at the top. Beside “Girl” and “Boy” were crosses; beside “Unicorn”, a tick.

Innocent fun, you might think – what child wouldn’t choose to be a unicorn rather than a boring old boy or girl, especially after walking past two colourful displays of unicorn plushie toys and clothes sourced from local people to “highlight the enduring power of the unicorn in contemporary culture”?

It must have been a challenge for the gallery staff to stop children from grabbing some of exhibits, but there was scope to instead steer them towards reading material such as Gender Identity For Kids, or Gender Heroes, a book for age five and up that profiles “gender trailblazers of past and present” including Elliot Page, who experienced homophobic abuse as a young actress before undergoing an elective double mastectomy and publicly identifying as a man; and Alok Vaid-Menon, who once described “little girls” as “kinky” and “deviant” in a screed arguing against the need for single-sex spaces.

Perth Museum opened earlier this year

Again, it’s impossible to know whether the exhibition curators were aware of the content of these books and approved of it, or were simply ticking “inclusion” boxes on funding applications. The youngest visitors will have skipped past the section about persecution to get to the toys, and were perhaps unlikely to question why anyone would be hiding in a Trojan horse – though some may well have been informed enough to know that such a thing is, by definition, not “peaceful”.

By the time I saw, inside the wooden belly, a unicorn plushie wearing a T-shirt advertising LGBT Youth Scotland, the controversy-dogged charity once run by a paedophile, I was questioning whether the exhibition might actually be a form of protest against the stealth operation to convince even the youngest of children that sex is merely “assigned” rather than fixed and that they might be happier, less anxious, more popular if they assumed a different gender identity, joined a waiting list for puberty-suppressing drugs and started saving up for surgery.

It seems our national animal, despite being so fleet of foot, still cannot outrun those who wish to exploit it to peddle pseudoscience. A future exhibition may question why so many were complicit in teaching damaging new myths to children.