A Question Box in the Great Court: Anonymous Q&A at the British Museum

I once got an email from Ashley Almeida, who runs the Young People's Programme at the British Museum, asking if I'd be up for spending an evening answering anonymous questions about sex in a lecture theatre full of adults. That's how I ended up on a panel at (No) sex please, we're the British Museum, alongside the journalist Sophia Smith-Galer, chaired by Tom Furber from London Metropolitan Archives.

The evening was curated by the Museum's Youth Collective. The pitch was simple: sex has a very long history inside this collection — as symbol, as taboo, as obsession — and there's a reasonable argument that a museum is actually the right place to talk about it honestly with grown-ups. They were right.

How it worked

From 5:30 in the evening, there was a box in the Great Court with a sign inviting visitors to write down any question they had about sex. Anonymously. On a piece of paper. Drop it in.

Two members of the Youth Collective, Gabby and Gerald, spent a couple of hours lightly sifting the questions — removing anything outright offensive or off-topic — and then carried the box down to the lecture theatre at 7pm. Sophia and I had thirty minutes to talk about attitudes to sex across time through objects in the collection, and thirty minutes to work through whatever was in the box. No screening by us. No prep. Just reach in and read.

That's a format that either works or doesn't. It worked.

What the questions were actually like

I went in braced for either silliness or shock-value. Very little of either. The questions people had put in that box were, overwhelmingly, the questions people have carried around quietly for years and never asked anyone. How do I know if what I want is normal. How do I talk to my partner about something I don't enjoy. What does consent really mean when you've been together for fifteen years. Should I be worried about this symptom. Why didn't anyone tell me this at school.

A real adult audience, in a real public institution, handed an adult-level version of the same thing young people ask us all the time.

That is, on its own, worth noting. We spend a lot of energy in this field debating what the right content is for RSE at age fourteen, and we assume that the adults who've been through school are more or less sorted. They aren't. Most people over thirty had no sex education that contained the word consent as we now understand it. Most people of any age have unanswered questions they've never had permission to ask out loud.

Why the format did what it did

Anonymity is the obvious piece. Nobody had to put their name to anything. Nobody had to sit next to their partner with their hand up. That matters, and I don't think it can be replicated by just saying "this is a safe space."

But there was also something about the setting. The British Museum is a place that, by its own logic, says "serious things happen here." Putting sex inside that frame, next to a two-thousand-year-old object that treats the same subject without embarrassment, does something quietly useful. It reminds people this has always been an ordinary thing to talk about, and that the squeamishness is relatively recent.

The third thing, which I give full credit to the Youth Collective for, was curation rather than control. Gabby and Gerald were the gatekeepers on the night. Not a comms team, not an academic committee, not me. That shaped the tone of the questions that came back down to the theatre, because the people deciding what counted as a question worth asking were peers of the people writing them.

What I took away

Two things. Firstly, that adult RSE is a gap nobody is really filling in this country, and there's a large, polite, quietly desperate audience for it when a trusted institution sets up the conditions. Secondly, that the question box — genuinely anonymous, genuinely handed back unedited — is a format I would use again tomorrow in any audience, any age, any venue.

If your institution is thinking about running something like this — adult or otherwise — and you want to talk through how to design it so that people actually engage honestly, get in touch.