Went to the Holocaust Museum today, and honestly, I was less impressed than I had expected from all the hype.

It was okay, but… The hoopla about being given a card with the name of a person who you follow through the exhibit and then at the end you find out if they lived or died – well, that’s just silly – they hand you a small 4 page leaflet and you reach each page every few minutes or something. They even forgot to hand us, or anybody else we saw, the booklets.

Second, half the exhibit is illegible to anyone with eyes over the age of 25. The big descriptions of major events are in big font and readable, but the text accompanying all the small photos, artifacts, etc. is way too small for an adult eye to read, and the lighting on those objects is terrible. We finally gave up reading all the explanations because we were squinting against the glass like old people – I still have a headache. I suspect this museum cost a bit of change, and it’s about a rather important topic – I can’t believe they’ve had that horrible illegible text there all these years.

Third, it was just way too long and, honestly, kind of boring after a while. You have to read way through room after room after room after room of every single detail of every single year from 1933 to 1945. You don’t even get to the Holocaust itself until you’re halfway through the museum and totally exhausted. The second half of the museum is better – there’s more “stuff” and less reading, but still. We finally just breezed through the last several rooms because we’d had it – it was just too much. Someone could have done a much better job of making this more of a museum and less of a reading assignment.

And finally, they have this ridiculous – RIDICULOUS – ban against taking photos. It’s not clear why, since most of the stuff they have in the museum isn’t even real. It’s almost 100% copies (which is another very annoying aspect to the museum – it’s not really a museum if everything inside is fake, in my view). You certainly don’t have to worry about a flash damaging a new poster of a photo. I was at a temporary exhibit they had a few years back about gays and the Holocaust and they banned the use of photography. Everything was copied – there wasn’t, I seem to recall, a single “original” thing in the exhibit – which not only made me wonder why you couldn’t snap photos, but it also made me wonder why I didn’t just look at the exhibit online. After all, do you really need to go to a building to look at copies of photos and copies of documents?

Interestingly, they told me that previous time that you couldn’t take photos because of “copyright” issues, or some such bull. Putting aside the absurdity of that comment – I’ve never been to a museum and been told not to take photos because of copyright reasons – but even if that were the case, tell me you can’t ask the donor for permission to let people take photos so they can spread the word about the Holocaust around the world? I just found the restriction stupid, annoying, and in the context of everything else, one more reason to not really enjoy the visit.

Oh one more thing. Drop the word “homosexual,” please. In the one very small wall that talks about gays being killed during the holocaust (there’s also a tv screen above with pictures of gays who were arrested, along with pics of gypsies and I believe some others minorities), they use the word homosexual and homosexuals over and over again. It creeped me out. Most of the time they could have easily said “gays and lesbians,” gay men, etc. In the context of an exhibit about mass extermination including gays, reading the word “homosexual” over and over again struck me as a little out of date and more than a little clinical, and thus creepy. The word, today, is really only used by those who don’t know any better, or by the religious right in order to demonize us. “Homosexual” is akin to “colored” or “oriental.” It may have been fine once upon a time, it’s not now. Also, perhaps I missed it, but we deserve more than a paragraph on a wall. Why not one small little display case with a bit of the gay history too – they had more than a case devoted to gypsies (the “roma”), and I’m sure they deserved their mini-exhibit. I’m not competing, I’m just saying, it was a bit sparse on the gay side of things as compared to the other non-Jewish minorities.

I hate to pan the place, because it exists for an important reason. But man, I won’t bug any future visitors to DC to go to that place. It needs some work. Which is too bad.