The Stonewall National Museum, overflowing with LGBTQ+ history, seeks a bigger space

One of the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ archives is overflowing with queer history. Literally. CEO Robert Kesten says shelves have been added to every office of the Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library. What’s left over has been shipped to off-site storage units.As a result, boxes of periodicals and posters may poke out during conference calls, and assembling artwork for an exhibition can require a piecemeal search through South Florida warehouses.“At this point, we have no choice,” Kesten says. “We really had to do something dramatic. And that meant [to] look for a new space.”The Fort Lauderdale-based museum recently launched a $40 million capital campaign to move to a new location with a bigger storage capacity. The search for a new spot is ongoing, but museum leaders say it has been undermined by a cancellation of federal and state grants — part of President Donald Trump’s push to defund so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion programming.The museum has lost up to $125,000 in anticipated grant funding from the federal government and the Florida state government amid anti-DEI efforts, according to The New York Times. Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library in Fort Lauderdale, FloridacourtesyThe politicization of this funding, at a time when the museum’s operational costs and projected expenses are rising, made it all the more surprising when the museum received grant approval for a historic exhibition to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Kesten says.“They weren’t going to be giving money to what they considered DEI organizations,” says Kesten. “We figured that there was very little, if anything, that we could do.” The museum submitted a grant proposal for an exhibition on Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a military strategist who helped organize the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War.Von Steuben is believed by many historians to hav