Notes on The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History

The Pop-Up Museum of Queer History started life somewhere between a party and a temporary autonomous zone—a very temporary autonomous zone, because we were shut down by the police some five hours after we opened our doors. By then, over 300 people had crowded into my Brooklyn loft to experience more than twenty-five exhibits on topics ranging from lesbian communities in Haiti to seventeenth-century Baroque opera. A gingerbread replica of Stonewall, complete with sugar-cookie cops, shared a table with an altar to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. A timeline of American queer history—with nearly fifty hand drawn illustrations—snaked throughout the warren of small rooms my roommates had created from two-by and plastic.

It was January 14, 2011, and I’d spent the last few months thinking about the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly¹” from the Hide/Seek show² at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. I was furious, of course, but I also realized that the chances of my getting to DC to see the show were next to nil. They could have pulled the entire thing, and it wouldn’t have directly affected me. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have directly affected anyone I knew. I say this not to criticize Hide/Seek, but because in the context of the near total silence on the part of all museums, everywhere, with regards to queer history, the removal of one piece of art was simultaneously enraging and downright pedestrian.

I vented on Facebook, which felt like pissing vinegar into an ocean already full of it: one more stream of hot invective disappearing with barely a splash. The worst part was that I couldn’t even really blame the National Portrait Gallery. The rules were stacked against them. For all their art world clout, they were but a political football for conservatives to hurl for a home run (or whatever it is they do with their balls). They weren’t going to be the institution I wanted, and even if by some queer miracle they had been, they’d still be one museum, in one place, with one specifically themed queer show.

Entrance to Pop-Up Soho 2011.

Photo credit: Tinker Coalescing.

I wanted a space where queer people could learn queer history as told by other queer folks. I didn’t want to stroll through a great exhibition waiting for the homophobic shoe to drop, or be forced to read between the lines to find the queer content, or go to yet another gallery where there was no bathroom my friends could use comfortably. I wanted a queer museum.

So I made one.

Just for one night, just as an experiment, to see what we all knew. I released a call for exhibits online, and was shocked when so many people responded so enthusiastically. In fact, as the date got closer, people began to ask when and where the next one would be. The closest I’d come to planning for “the future” of Pop-Up was recruiting people to put the living room back together before breakfast. But it was obvious that it had struck a nerve; that people were hungry for the chance to learn and share their history—our history—in a space that was made for us, not one that deigned to allow us, on occasion, when we weren’t too loud, too weird, or too queer. So along with Buzz Slutzky (Pop-Up’s first volunteer curator) and Graham Bridgeman (our fundraising wizard), I set about turning a one-night party into a national organization.

The pop-up format was a natural choice for us, living as we were in the middle of the Great Recession. It turned every empty storefront into a potential gallery, kept our costs down, and allowed us to be mobile. It provided us with a method by which to leverage the resources of our urban center for the benefit of the larger, more geographically diverse queer world. This...