The Museum out of the closet

The Museum Out of the Closet proposes a queer reading of Portuguese museum collections. Through guided tours of the permanent exhibition at the Museum of Lisbon - Pimenta Palace, André Murraças offers an alternative interpretation of selected artefacts, documents and artworks that can illustrate another history: the queer history of Lisbon.

The word ‘queer’ began as a pejorative term for ‘homosexual’, but since the 1990s it has been chosen by non-heterosexual people to define their identity. It is a concept that has also been embraced by the academic world and, in the theoretical context applied to the arts, it is a term used to describe the variety of identities, sexual and gender practices that deviate from heterosexual ideas or that demonstrate their ambiguity.

The Museum Out of the Closet thus dares to map the Lisbon of friends, sodomites, criminals, transvestites and queers.