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Queer heritage and LGBT+ cultural history is unique in that it’s rarely passed down through families, or through communities based in a certain location, and so is jagged and harder to preserve.But this preservation is vital, said Galliano, and Queer Britain has the opportunity to teach young LGBT+ people about their culture and history.“I want people to be seen, to feel celebrated,” he said.“I want people to feel like they’re connected to a deeper heritage, that they haven’t just emerged from nowhere. I want people to look backwards in order to be able to understand who they are now. So that we can all imagine the best of all possible futures together.”

the museum is free, it’s accessible, and it fiercely emcompasses all folk under the queer umbrella

“We had an opportunity to create a platform, to create space, filled with trans people’s stories, women’s stories, stories of people of colour, that would look at some of the hard stories, but also would be a joyous celebration of those communities as well.”

The rise of authoritarian right-wing governments has tended to be viewed as a phenomenon confined to the countries on Europe’s eastern ‘peripheries’. This view is derived from an assumption that political authoritarianism is spreading westwards from eastern Europe, potentially destabilising the political democracies in the west. This account is erroneous in two ways

Once in power the right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland began to dismantle many of the checks and balances of the liberal democratic system. This has included such things as gaining control of the courts (including the Constitutional Court), politicising the public media, and partially reducing the independent functioning of NGOs. Simultaneously they have adopted a nationalist ideology, replete with hostility towards groups such as refugees and the LGBT community. The governments of Fidesz and the Law and Justice Party have partly allied with and contained far-right parties and movements, adopting many of their policies and rhetoric.

Fidesz (partly due to Hungary’s electoral system) has had a constitutional majority in parliament, allowing it to push its reform programme further than its counterparts in Poland

Though divisive and polarizing rhetoric has long been a campaign staple for Erdogan, the ruling party’s current election campaign has featured unprecedented levels of homophobic narrative ahead of presidential and parliamentary polls on May 14.  Earlier in the day, Erdogan wrote on Twitter that LGBTQ movement is “the strongest current threatening the future of Western nations.” 

Over the past two months, Erdogan and his government officials have galvanized homophobic sentiments among their conservative voter base.Speaking at a campaign event last week, Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu went so far as to claim that LGBTQ “also includes marriage between animals and humans.” 

While Turkey is a constitutionally secular country where homosexuality has never been criminalized, discrimination and violence against LGBTQ individuals are rampant.