Poland’s first LGBTQ+ museum, which houses almost 150 artefacts offering a timeline of Poland’s LGBTQ movement’s struggle for recognition, opened its doors on Friday, December 6.
Dubbed a landmark moment by a community still striving for full legal rights, the museum was set up by Polish LGBTQ+ rights group Lambda and is the first of a kind “in all of post-communist Europe”, said its director Krzysztof Kliszczynski, who is “overjoyed” to see it coming to life.
The museum traces the history of LGBTQ+ people living in Poland back to the 16th century, illustrating it with letters, pictures, and early examples of activism — often clandestine out of fear of oppression.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony gathered dozens of LGBTQ+ Polish campaigners, some of whom have spent decades fighting for equal rights.
Among them was Andrzej Selerowicz, who in 1983 launched the first Polish newsletter for gay men.
Poring over a glass case in the Warsaw museum, Selerowicz pointed at a pocket-sized, circular picture showing two young men, hugging cheek to cheek, smiling to the camera.
“This is a photo of me and my partner to the present moment, taken 45 years ago,” said the 76-year-old author and translator who lives in Vienna.
Researchers say it has not always been easy to gather artefacts documenting the often-forgotten struggle of the LGBTQ+ community.
“A huge part of this queer history is also very private… and very often destroyed after the death of these people, and often deliberately so,” said Piotr Laskowski, a University of Warsaw historian.
