The institution, set up by nonprofit rights group Lambda, is the first of a kind "in all of post-communist Europe", said its director Krzysztof Kliszczyński.
Seeking to document the history and culture of the country’s LGBT+ community, the QueerMuzeum was created on the initiative of Lambda Warszawa, Poland’s oldest LGBT+ association.
“I’m very moved because this is a truly historic moment for Lambda Warszawa,” the NGO’s president, Miłosz Przepiórkowski, told at a press conference. “Lambda Warszawa functions primarily as an aid organization, so our activities aren’t visible from the outside, but that’s changing today. It is a statement, we are on Marszalkowska Street, right in the heart of Warsaw—this should also be a message to the politicians: ‘look, we are opening the fifth queer museum in the world in a country where the legal situation for queer people is the worst in the whole of the EU’.”
Of Lambda Warszawa’s collection, around 150 items have been placed on display, including a 1932 edition of the Journal of Laws, its yellowed pages turned to a text abolishing the persecution of same-sex relations.