The story
The impetus for the founding of the Schwules Museum was a successful exhibition on gay topics at the West Berlin Berlin Museum (which would later be consolidated into the 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.
From Wikipedia’s article on Schwules Museum, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4