There are few places in the world with queer history stitched into its tapestry quite like New York City, from the Stonewall riots and ensuing queer liberation movement to the first Pride parades; the birth of ball culture to the formation of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis and ACT UP—organizations that became a blueprint for HIV/AIDS activism across the country and around the world.

It only seems natural, then, that New York will be home to the American LGBTQ+ Museum, dedicated to preserving and celebrating the rich and complex history of American LGBTQ+ life—opening in the spring of 2028.

“In part, New York made sense because of its particular role in LGBTQ+ history and the global impact it has had,” Ben Garcia, who has served as director of the museum since 2022, tells me over a mid-May Zoom call. “But also when the team was conducting market research, we found that the city has the largest number of both LGBTQ+ households and tourists in the country. We wanted to make sure, when starting a cultural institution like this, that we were situated in a prominent position for the community.”

The idea for the institution was formed in early 2017, when the founding council—a collective of community pioneers including Richard Burns, Kevin Jennings, and the late Urvashi Vaid—“started conversations about what this museum could be,” Garcia says. They would soon bring in other organizations and leaders to further inform the vision for and scope of the museum’s future programming—and invite the likes of Michael Kors and his husband, Lance Le Pere; Imara Jones; Erik Stegman; and Leti Gomez to serve as trustees. “It was important that our team represent the breadth of queer identity, intersectionality, and community here within the United States,” Garcia tells me.

The museum has found a partner in The New York Historical on the Upper West Side, the oldest museum in the city. “Finding a partner that has a long and trusted history as a cultural entity really supported the belief in this project,” says Garcia. “But also to have American LGBTQ+ history situated within one of the nation’s longest-standing museums holds an enormous amount of symbolic value.” The American LGBTQ+ Museum will occupy the top floor of The New York Historical’s new Tang Wing for American Democracy, a 71,000-square-foot addition to its Classical Revival building on Central Park West. “All visitors will come through a single entrance where they can buy one ticket to access both museums,” Garcia explains.

The new museum will include a core exhibition space that considers American history through a queer lens. “We will start off with Indigenous American communities who were the first people that lived on these lands, exploring what same-sex relationships and gender fluidity looked like during those times,” Garcia explains, “then moving into early colonial life, as well as the start of the American Revolution and how queer people were a part of it all.” Following that, the space will explore how the 19th-century urbanization boom, driven by the Industrial Revolution, helped LGBTQ+ people find one another across the country.

Moving into the 20th century, the space will highlight how wartime, the civil rights movement, and the HIV/AIDS crisis variously impacted the American queer community, and note when the American Psychiatric Association ceased to consider homosexuality a mental disorder. Rounding everything off will be the dawn of the internet era, when the web and then social media allowed the community to connect in new and dynamic ways.

Indeed, that idea is a central theme in the museum’s storytelling. “From printed publications that were mailed to people in brown envelopes to the hanky code, where people wore bandanas in their back pocket as signals,” Garcia says, the museum “will show how our community has found each other throughout time.”

Another portion of the space will be devoted to temporary exhibits spanning changemaking activists and politicians; queerness in fashion, athletics, and music; and broader areas such as Black, femme, and trans life within American history. “The plan is for curators from all around the country, in every part of the community, to come to the museum and work on these rotating exhibitions with our staff, who will ensure they have the resources and platform they need to tell these stories,” Garcia says. The rest of the museum space will host a variety of public programs with local partners—some of which have already begun, in an effort to build the museum’s visibility and get first-hand feedback from the community itself.

The American LGBTQ+ Museum is still growing its collection of queer historical artifacts, which will also be on view—but one piece already donated sets a powerful tone. “The first thing we accessioned was a brick from the original façade of the Stonewall Inn,” Garcia says. “When it was being demolished to build a new one, the owner very smartly grabbed some bricks and has kept them safe since. Although it’s apocryphal that bricks were actually thrown during the Stonewall riots, the power of that time is encapsulated within this brick. To have the literal material from the original Stonewall Inn serves as a metaphorical seed within the building that is germinating into all these other examples of American LGBTQ+ history, all under the same roof.”

I ask Garcia what his biggest hope for the institution is. “On one hand, I want queer people to come to this place and know that this is for them, that they belong, and to see the people that have been fighting for them,” he says. “On the other, I want to show everyone that walks through these doors that American LGBTQ+ people have created and participated in some of the most monumental moments in this country’s history.”