MuseumOur Method
How we know what we know.
A museum about a persecuted community has duties an ordinary history does not. This is our promise about how every exhibit here is built, and how we handle the things we cannot yet prove.
I · The rule above all rules
Nothing is stated as fact unless it is sourced.
No inference. No "this was probably." No plausible reconstruction filling a gap. Memory is treated with deep respect and preserved as memory, but it is never quietly promoted to settled fact. Every load-bearing claim carries a confidence tag and a citation.
II · What it looks like in practice
A fact, the way we present it
Example object label
New Bedford's longest-running gay bar opened at 20 Kenyon Street in roughly 1982.
Corroborated
Source: The New Bedford Light, feature on the bar's history (2022). Founding year reported as "approximately 1982"; exact date pending a primary record. Founder names cross-checked against a second source before publication.
III · Consent & care
We do not out people.
Naming someone can still carry a cost, for them or for the family they left behind. We hold ourselves to a strict standard.
Living people
Identified as LGBTQ+ only where there is clear public self-identification, with a source, and with their consent for inclusion.
The recently departed
Handled with their living family in mind. When in doubt, we do not out. Dignity comes before completeness.
Hard histories
Violence, illness, arrests, and loss are documented with context and care, never as spectacle, always with resources.
Nothing about us without us
This is a project of the SCLGBTQ Network. The community are stewards and partners, not subjects.
IV · The honest part
We show you the gaps.
Marginalized local history is often simply not well documented. Fall River's bar history is nearly a blank online. We have found almost nothing before 1980. Trans history and the history of LGBTQ+ people of color are badly underrepresented in the sources. We refuse to fill those silences with invention. Instead, we mark them, and we ask for your help filling them, the right way.