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In June 2018 a crowd assembled in Tate Britain to ask: ‘What does a queer museum look like?’ Surrounded by the airless eroticism of Pre-Raphaelite portraiture, all drowning Ophelias and hieratic Lady Macbeths, the founder of the Museum of Transology, E-J Scott, asked a mixture of queer activists and members of the public how to go about building a museum in which ‘we can save the queer past for the queer future’ and where ‘we all can become curators of queer heritage’ For some, a queer museum was necessary so the world could see that queers exist For others, a separate queer museum would only absolve other institutions from diversifying their collections One speaker questioned why black queerness should be defined by a museum, itself a European institution long bound up with the colonial subjugation of Africa and its diaspora There was little threat of the discussion getting out of hand among the Tate’s polite, predominately white middle-class audience But just in case, Scott had distributed oversized plastic toy tools among queer activists in the audience, to control the order of the discussion One by one they were called in: hammer, screw-driver, spanner Building a queer museum, it was suggested, was a matter of finding ‘the right tools for the job’   A museum is an institution for relating things in time It arranges objects not just in rooms, but in a history that moves in a continuous line from past to present, in order to show the development of a communal identity In theory this can be the universal humanity disingenuously imagined by the British Museum or the Louvre; in practice it is often the more narrowly defined ethnic nation produced by Tate Britain, whose natural continuity and organic reproduction across time is enabled by the museum’s presentation of an archive of ‘our’ past Perhaps one reason why the discussion at the Tate had to be handled so delicately, as if disagreement was something that only happened among children, was because of a suspicion that as a way of using time a museum is inherently contradictory