The only museum in the world dedicated to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender history is located in Berlin. Called the Schwules Museum, the museum sits on two floors in the back hof or courtyard of a large building on Mehringdamm in Kreuzberg, directly above the legendary gay club Schwuz. For a couple of months this spring, I volunteered at the museum once a week, checking tickets, selling books, postcards and posters, and dispensing information from the front desk.
The museum is relatively small—one can see the entire permanent exhibit in a couple of hours—but it draws visitors from around Germany and the world. About half of the museum’s visitors seem to come from other countries, including especially large numbers from England, France, Italy, Spain and Brazil. For these international visitors, the fact that I’m a native English speaker proved quite useful. But the fact that my German isn’t perfect also caused some confusion. People would come in and naturally expect that the person behind the desk in a museum about gay German history is, well, gay and German. As it turns out, I fit only half that bill.
Sometimes people would come in and start speaking to me in German so fast that I could only nod and smile back. Others would come up to me with questions I barely understood, forcing me to simply say, Es tut mir leid, aber ich weiss es nicht – I’m sorry, but I don’t know. Other visitors would approach the desk and ask me, usually very tentatively, whether I could speak English.
My funniest interaction happened on my next-to-last day staffing the exhibit. About twenty minutes after he came into the museum, an older German man came up to me and started speaking in a quite urgent tone. I didn’t catch any of what he said except for the last few words, kleine Jungs, or little boys. Just minutes before, I had been thumbing through an old gay guidebook to Berlin, in which I had read a section about men’s therapy groups – including one focusing on pedophilia. So I was particularly taken aback by the question from this friendly-looking old man.
“No, I am sorry,” I informed him somewhat sternly. “We don’t have anything on that subject here.” The man said something back to me which I also didn’t understand, but then he started to make a gesture indicating he had to use the toilet. Suddenly a light went on in my head—perhaps he was simply asking if we had a “Little Boys’ Room”! Ach so, meinst Du die Toilette? I asked. “Oh, do you mean the toilet?” He nodded and, our mutually evident relief, I pointed him toward the restroom door just behind him. All in a day’s work at the Schwules Museum.
