On Friday, Poland inaugurated its first museum dedicated to LGBTQ history, a milestone in a country where legal recognition for gay rights remains limited. Located in Warsaw on Marszalkowska Street, the museum was founded by Lambda, a Polish nonprofit rights organization that has also worked extensively in recent years with queer refugees arriving into the country.
“We are opening the first queer museum in the world in a country where the legal situation for queer people is the worst in the whole of the EU,” said Miłosz Przepiórkowski, Lamdba’s president, in a statement at the museum’s opening last week.
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The museum’s collection features nearly 150 artifacts, including letters, photographs, and early activist materials, chronicling LGBTQ history in Poland as far back as the 16th century. In a statement, Lamda’s Director, Krzysztof Kliszczynski, described the museum as the first of its kind in post-communist Europe.
The ceremony attracted key figures from Poland’s LGBTQ activist circles including writer Andrzej Selerowicz and Ryszard Kisiel, who both worked as activists in Warsaw the 1980s. At the time when the two were most active, Polish security officials had launched a wide-spread campaign profiling gay men in the city and building registry of their information. The two men donated personal materials to the museum’s collection. Kisiel contributed a decades-old safe-sex leaflet, while Selerowicz gave a photograph of himself and his partner that’s dated from 45 years ago.
Kliszczynsk emphasized how preserving these histories has been a challenge, as much of Poland’s LGBTQ records have remained private or been discarded.
While organizers of the museum project say it marks progress, queer activists still stress the ongoing legal barriers to their collecting and displaying archival materials in public spaces without backlash. Same-sex partnerships remain unrecognized by law, and Polish officials have been scrutinized in recent years by international organizations over discriminatory anti-LGBTQ policies.