Vision & History

Qwien is Austria’s first queer cultural center.
We are an extensive archive, a library, a research center and, more recently, an exhibition and event venue for changing exhibitions, lectures and events. We have been collecting, researching and communicating queer history and culture for more than fifteen years.

We are here to discover, collect, communicate and preserve the past and present of queer life in Austria. Our aim is to question normative history and inscribe queer history into it.

The QWIEN Center is a research center with the vision of giving queerness to general history – and queer people their everyday history.

Qwien has been in existence since 2009. However, its origins date back to the early 1990s and are closely linked to the Ecce Homo association.

The association Ecce Homo (Vienna is the other way around) was founded by the German Rabenhof dramaturge and activist Jochen Herdieckerhoff. His device was to bring gay and lesbian culture to Vienna through cultural activities. With this goal in mind, Herdieckerhoff built up the annual festival “Wien ist andersrum”, a large Viennese cultural and entertainment festival with gay and lesbian artists, around the Rainbow Parade from 1996 to 2001 against great resistance. With cheeky posters and spectacular performances, the festival captured a remarkably large segment of the Viennese cultural audience.

After Europride 2001 and the largest festival to date in the circus tent in Sigmund Freud Park in front of the Votive Church, Jochen Herdieckerhoff retired and handed Ecce Homo over to the historian and curator Hannes Sulzenbacher, who had helped organize the festival since 1998.

New editions of the festival took place in 2002 and 2004. After that, a greatly enlarged team prepared for Ecce Homo’s biggest undertaking, the exhibition “geheimsache : leben. Gays and Lesbians in 20th Century Vienna”, which was shown in the Vienna Neustifthalle in the fall/winter of 2005/06. A team of five curators (Andreas Brunner, Ines Rieder, Nadja Schefzig, Hannes Sulzenbacher and Niko Wahl) and eight researchers told the story of lesbians, gays and trans* people for the first time in Austria with over 700 objects.

As a result of the research activities and realization of the exhibition – and by diligently collecting materials in the years before – the largest archive and probably the largest library in Austria on lesbian/gay culture and history was created. (The Viennese women’s and lesbian archive “Stichwort”, which undoubtedly has larger holdings, exclusively collects evidence of women’s and lesbian history and is only accessible to women*).

Ecce Homo renamed itself Qwien – Center for Gay/Lesbian Culture and History in 2007 and restructured its areas of responsibility.

The original tasks and goals of the Ecce Homo (Vienna is the other way around) association have changed considerably in the last few years of its existence. This is partly due to the changed position of gays and lesbians in society and partly due to a discourse regarding homosexuals that has changed fundamentally.

While in the early days of Ecce Homo’s cultural activities, the main impetus was to bring gay and lesbian culture to Vienna (within the framework of the possibilities promoted by cultural policy at the time), these traditions have now become part of mainstream culture. To see Georgette Dee, Max Raabe, Irmgard Knef or Die Geschwister Pfister, the Viennese cultural public now has access to numerous institutions, and no longer needs its own “section”.

However, Vienna’s queer history and culture has not yet been fully researched. The Qwien Center was officially opened in 2009. In addition to setting up an archive and a library, which primarily contain written and material evidence of queer life, the center’s task is to carry out academic research projects, to communicate queer history, in particular with guided tours of the city (Qwien Guide) and with lectures and publications.

On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, Qwien renamed itself the Center for Queer History. An increase in subsidies from the City of Vienna made it possible to establish a permanent position for the library and archive in 2021. The catalog of our library, which contains more than 10,000 volumes, went online and can be searched at katalog.qwien.at. In 2022, the catalog of over 600 journal titles and almost 25,000 individual issues was also put online.

In 2024, Qwien moved to a new location in the 5th district and has been Austria’s first queer cultural center since its opening in June 2025. In addition to the library and archive, Qwien also operates an exhibition hall and an event space called the Forum. Two major exhibitions are planned each year, while smaller exhibitions, presentations, readings, discussions and events for the queer community will also be held in the forum.

The Center Qwien is supported by the City of Vienna – MA 7/Science and MA 13/Education with an annual grant.