Europe's best LGBTQ+ museums celebrating queer history
euronews.comPink News. “I want people to feel like they’re connected to a deeper heritage, that they haven’t just emerged from nowhere.
I want people to look backwards in order to be able to understand who they are now. So that we can all imagine the best of all possible futures together.”The International Gay and Lesbian Information Centre and Archive in Amsterdam has been cataloguing queer history since its opening in 1999 and has a collection of more than 100,000 items, including books, journals and magazines, films, documentaries, posters, photographs and other objects.IHLIA's goal is “[to reserve] the information of yesterday and today for tomorrow [to] keep LGBTI history alive for target groups in the future".The museum was founded on the principle that archives are not neutral organisations; if queer history is to be documented, the community cannot rely on the selections of non-queer historians.
IHLIA’s current exhibition “The Archive in Progress” examines this lack of neutrality in archives, delving into the history of queer archiving in the Netherlands.The first museum in the world dedicated to queer history, the Schwules Museum was founded in 1985 and displays items dating back as far as 1896.
Schwul is a slang German word meaning gay, and – having previously had mostly derogatory overtones, but having been reclaimed by the community – is comparable to the modern-day use of queer in English.Alongside its huge archive, the Schwules Museum also hosts exhibitions on queer history and community.
