Displaying the Queer Past: Purposes, Publics, and Possibilities at the GLBT History Museum

In San Francisco’s Castro District, a storefront tucked between a gay dance bar and a pharmacy might at first glance appear to house nothing more than another neighborhood merchant, yet the space has attracted international media and visitors from around the world since January 2011. That’s when the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender History Museum opened its doors there. A project of the GLBT Historical Society, the Museum covers just 1,600 square feet. Factors other than size clearly account for the interest. One of the keys to understanding the attention is the general invisibility of LGBT experience in the settings where societies convey their histories; another is a growing recognition that this absence causes harm by reinforcing the marginalization of LGBT people. Given these factors, a queer museum opening anywhere would merit notice. In the case at hand, circumstances distinctive to San Francisco also play a role.

The GLBT History Museum doesn’t just display history; the institution also embodies a history of its own. We can trace its early roots to events a century ago in Germany, and we can follow the more recent history across three decades of LGBT cultural and organizational development in San Francisco. The Museum and its parent organization have been involved in a practice of queer worldmaking from the start, gathering fragments of once-lost histories to reconstruct past LGBT worlds while continually interrogating the very products of that reconstruction. In the process, the institution has brought together at times disparate individuals and communities to deploy LGBT public history as a tool for critiquing the worlds in which we live today and imagining the possibilities for queer futures.

Historical Context

The GLBT History Museum is one of the first institutions of its kind, but it’s not the oldest. To my knowledge, no one has yet undertaken systematic research on the genealogy of such museums; we can, however, readily identify one distant ancestor. The first known effort to fill the queer void in the world of museums dates to the early part of the twentieth century, when Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) created his Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Hirschfeld was already a public figure at the time, well known as a progressive sex reformer and in particular for his leadership of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first homosexual rights organization in the world, which he cofounded in 1897.¹

When Hirschfeld opened his Institute in 1919, one of its most visible initiatives was a multidisciplinary museum highlighting the diversity of sexual identities, customs, and behaviors in societies around the world. Although the Museum was not devoted solely to displays about what we would now call LGBT people, it gave pride of place to homosexuality and to transgender identities, making them the subject of representation, learning, and discussion in the setting of a museum for the first time. The Museum drew upon, interpreted, and displayed holdings from another of the institute’s major initiatives: its extensive archives and research library.²

The Institute for Sexual Science was destroyed by the Nazi regime shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, but the memory of the institution and its fate lived on, providing an impetus to the archives established in several countries during and after the period of gay liberation in the early 1970s.³ As a founding member of the GLBT Historical Society, I can say that we certainly were aware that our work served in part to repair the loss of Hirschfeld’s archives. The GLBT Historical Society even has an indirect link to this illustrious ancestor: The papers of the Canadian-American lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow (1898–1986), which her estate donated to the society, include her unpublished journals; an entry for November 15, 1928, describes her meeting with Hirschfeld at the Institute for Sexual Science.⁴

Also in Berlin, but much closer to the present, an elder relative of the GLBT History Museum is still going strong: the Schwules Museum, a gay museum and archives founded in 1985.⁵ I use the term “gay” advisedly, because the Museum’s [End...