POver May half term, I had the chance to ask Dr Galliano-Doig a few questions about pride and entrepreneurship (both topics are scattered throughout!).
After training as a journalist at the London College of Printing, Dr Joseph Galliano-Doig co-founded the first and only LGBTQ+ history and culture museum in the UK, Queer Britain, in 2018. The museum then opened its doors in May 2022 and has since seen over 100,000 visitors! Dr Galliano-Doig was awarded an MBE for his work in ‘heritage and diversity’ in 2024.
What motivated you to start queer Britain?
We show what communities are important by lifting them up and paying attention to their histories and I think museums are a really good way of showing that […] as LGBTQ+ people we’ve had our stories told by other people who haven’t always had the understanding or our best interests at heart and there’s very few spaces where we’ve actually […] told our own stories for everyone.
We wanted a museum that would encourage an intergenerational conversation […] we wanted to create a space which was welcoming for everyone else in order to win hearts and minds by exposing people to our true stories.
So much of our history exists in the living record, it exists in people and that’s a very delicate place to keep history and you need to make sure that you’ve got that into a […] museological setting so that it can be preserved and understood.
We’re using the London pride theme this year ‘Embracing Everyone’ – how does that factor into creating this museum?
One of the first things we did was specific identity consultations […] we asked different communities the question ‘what what a successful museum look like for you? What would make you want to come?’. And also ‘what would be some barriers to you coming?’. We made sure it was never trying to create a ‘them or us’ language or approach […] we are actually all part of the same society, and we all deserve to be exposed to each other’s histories and to understand each other a little bit better, so we always try to be welcoming in that way.
Lisa Power [a LGBT rights campaigner and Stonewall co-founder] said that, unusually in a space where so often its just white men, she was bowled over by just how broad our audiences were. What was so beautiful was that when we opened, I remember we always had people with prams coming and in and visitors like Andrew Lumsden [journalist and leading gay rights campaigner who helped organised the first Pride march in 1972], who was about 90 at the time.
What are the benefits or challenges of starting a business with a focus on a specific group?
It was actually focusing, it gives you a sense of who to talk to and who is likely to be motivated to support; when you’re talking about the mid to major donors (giving around £2,000 – £30,000) it enables you to have conversations with people who are moved by what you’re doing because it impacts and resonates with them personally.
When it came to corporate partnerships, which were a huge part of the funding, it was about looking at CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] or DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion] budgets, which also means that you’re making an offer where it demonstrated to the company’s internal staff and talent pipeline that this was a welcoming place to work. It took us four years to get to the point where we had a space, which was very quick, and it also meant that once we opened, we had further things to sell, especially to corporates, which was a space to hold receptions for their LGBT staff and so on.
We were discussing ‘rainbow washing’ in our Pride Club the other day, do you think that companies also taking positive action is the solution to that?
I actually think that the concept of rainbow-washing it a bit overdone. It tends to be where companies are being performative with a very shallow marketing perspective […] they’re hiding their bad actions behind the skirts of some social responsibility. When a company is rainbow-washing, they disappear the moment the political and economic landscape changes. Skittles have been one of those [positive] companies, they came to us and did meaningful projects in which they engaged their staff, they put more money than we asked for on the table, and even today the relationship continues when we have this much tougher, less politically advantageous environment.
I remember one Pride, I was walking up Oxford Street and feeling a bit like there was a too much of a sugar rush of so much pride stuff and rainbow flags festooning everywhere. Knowing the companies, you can see […] where it’s simply a marketing strategy. But I was reflecting on it and thinking, actually, 10-20 years previously, we as a set of communities were bashing on those doors trying to get attention, trying to get any money out of them; I just looked at it again and thought I would rather have a problem when there’s too much of it and some of it is insincere, but there is a benefit in acknowledging it.
You can stand on the sides and demand that everything be perfect and nothing can be done because we live in a world that is compromised and difficult to navigate, or you can recognise that you live in an imperfect world, and that actually you want to make change. You have to have a dance where you work out where your hard lines are, and how you’re going to approach that.
What are the best and worst parts of being an entrepreneur?
I think the best part it seeing change, it’s really exciting to be able to build communities and offer impact, and you build a really amazing collection of people around you. It’s a sense of achievement; I think probably the biggest sense of achievement I’ve ever experienced is the museum opening, seeing people coming in and how they’re engaging.
The hardest part; raising money is always tough, but it’s the cornerstone, you generally don’t get anything of scale done without that. It’s also very easy when you’re excited by something to not effectively manage where you’re directing your energy and attention and how you’re pacing yourself. People can drown in exhaustion because they just feel they have to continue with everything. I hear my mother! She said to me ‘remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint’, but it was a lot of sprinting.
I think a good dose of naïvety is really helpful. If you were to start a museum having already had the experience, you’d probably think it was too much to take on. If you start in a naïve position like I did, you think ‘well museums exist, therefore somebody must have started a museum at some point, so why not us?’. You kind of ask, how hard can it be?
How was it, having put all this work in, to step back from the charity?
I have worked for somebody who suffered from ‘founder’s syndrome’, where they think they’ve got to control it all, and start damaging the organisation, so I wanted to create something loving and know when it’s the right time to step back. I wanted to get 100,000 people through the door, for me that was a big win which I wanted to leave on, and also, I spent nearly eight years in ferociously fast startup mode, and it takes it out of you, so I needed a break. I have an honorary role, but I stand back and give the support they want, not what I think they need, because it was important the new director had a chance to make it his own without the founder breathing down his neck.
But emotionally, it was really hard! I wasn’t prepared for how grief filled I would feel at stepping back, and it took me some time to recover from that. I needed a break from the organisation, I gave it a good year before I started going back to events and showing up again, but now I just look at it and feel tremendous happiness and pride at what we all achieved together.
I hope you’ve enjoyed Pride Month as much as the pride team has and visit Queer Britain in Kings Cross if you get the chance – I know I’ll be heading over for a summer day out!
