By Nurat Uthman
Amid the bustle of Warsaw’s busiest street with trams whizzing by, Poland’s first LGBTQ museum opened Friday, dubbed a landmark moment by the community still striving for full legal rights.
Tucked between a kebab shop and a second-hand clothes store, it hosts almost 150 artefacts offering a timeline of Poland’s LGBTQ movement’s struggle for recognition.
Its interior is minimalist, verging on the austere.
The institution was set up by the nonprofit rights group Lambda and is the first of a kind “in all of post-communist Europe”, said its director Krzysztof Kliszczynski. He was “overjoyed” to see it coming to life.
Its exhibits trace 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
