In early summer 2015, the Schwules Museum* (Gay Museum*,) in partnership with the German Historical Museum, will open a comprehensive exhibition on homosexual history and culture. The exhibition will be on display for five months in two spacious locations, spanning 1600m2. In documenting this rich and broadly unknown history, the exhibition pays particular attention to queer forms of love and desire and to how queer and homosexual people, through their sexual identities, have resisted heterosexual norms and other norms derived from binary concepts of identity.
Our exhibition will intervene into the current debate on the legitimacy of homosexual ways of life, arguing that the histories of ‘sexual outsiders’ are a part of our collective cultural heritage. As such, these stories and images are inscribed in the visual memory of mainstream society. We are inviting the LGBTIQ community across all ages, genders, and sexualities to become active participants in recording our own histories and advancing the debate on the future of gender and sexuality. We need your support for this great project!
We are seeking your personal stories, histories, and items that reflect your personal and/ or public experiences of Coming Out: things that are symbols of that moment. They will become part of the exhibition. We would also like to hear your stories about these memories and document them in audio, video or textual form. Can you remember the moment when you realized that you were different in that particular way? Where you were when you first came out to someone else? What was the situation, and who was there with you? Do you still know what you were wearing? Maybe you were nervously gripping something in your hands? Maybe you’ve kept something from that situation, an object that you associate with it. If you haven’t, you may still have a clear memory of that day, and a thing that can stand in for it: a pair of bathing trunks, if you were at the pool when you told your best friend. A glass of orange juice, if that’s what you were clinging to when you tried to find the right words.
Please send your object with your name, address and telephone number to the Schwules Museum*, Luetzowstrasse 73, 10785, Berlin, or by email to call@schwulesmuseum.de by November 20th 2014. Ideally, you could bring your object to us yourself, and tell us your story, on November 21st 2014 from 1pm – 8pm or on November 22nd 2014 from 10am – 6pm. We’ll have cameras, recording devices, and, most importantly, coffee and cookies. We look forward to meeting you!
Once the exhibition has closed, you can choose if you would like to donate your object and story to the museum or pick it up and take it home again.
Birgit Bosold
Detlef Weitz
Dorothée Brill