The Schwules Museum (English: Gay Museum) in Berlin, Germany, is a museum and research centre with collections focusing on LGBTQ+ history and culture. It opened in 1985 and it was the first museum in the world dedicated to gay history.
The museum archive holds periodicals dating from 1896 and a collection of photographs, videos, films, sound recordings, autographs, art works, and ephemera. Its library holds approximately 20,000 books on homosexuality.
The museum was first located at Mehringdamm 61 in Kreuzberg when it was founded in 1985, and since the summer of 2013, it has been located in a former printing factory (1,600 m²) at Lützowstraße 73 in Berlin-Mitte, more than doubling its exhibition space.
The impetus for the founding of the Schwules Museum was a successful exhibition on gay topics at the Berlin Märkisches Museum in summer 1984, called “Eldorado – Homosexual Women and Men in Berlin 1850-1950“. It was the first public exhibition shown in Germany of recent research on gay life. In 1985 the Verein der Freunde eines Schwulen Museums in Berlin e.V. (Society of Friends of a Gay Museum in Berlin) was founded and opened its own museum dedicated exclusively to LGBTQ+ topics at Mehringdamm 61 in the district of Kreuzberg. The building acquired the nickname Homo-Hof (“the gay courtyard”) because it also housed the gay nightclub SchwuZ, a gay-friendly café and the Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft, a support group which campaigns for LGBTQ+ rights.
In December 2009, the museum received its first allocation of public money, a two-year grant from the cultural funds of the Berlin Senate. This was used to broaden its focus to encompass other minority sexual identities besides male homosexuality, mainly to put more emphasis on lesbian and transgender people.
