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But all of us who have some kind of intellectual relationship to Weimar know, deep down, that we still love these unmodish visions of Weimar – indeed, they’re often the reason why we work on Weimar and not on some other time or place. My own presumption to write off my early Weimar visions as Americanized confections of a true past that I could now approach as a serious scholar crumbled under the weight of a single photograph. I saw it about a year after being elected to the Board of Directors of Berlin’s Schwules Museum [Gay Museum] in 2018, a queer archive and museum founded nearly forty years ago with an exhibition entitled Eldorado that presented a series of walk-through, Museum-of-Natural-History-style anthropological dio- ramas of, as its creators said at the time, gay and lesbian life in Weimar Berlin.2 After the exhibit’s success and a very eighties and very messy divorce between the lesbians and the gays (when will we finally take Guy Hocquenghem’s suggestion and just have sex with each other already …) each group began raising funds to build its own museum. The photograph I saw depicted Wolfgang Theis, one of the Schwules Museum’s founding mothers, working the stage at one of these fun- draisers doing a Sally Bowles drag act. There was, as it turned out, no pure tradition of historical memory untouched by nostalgic confections of the past. Step into the dirty bloomers, adjust your sequined top: it’s turtles all the way down.