MuseumRadical Transparency
What we hold, and what we are missing.
Most institutions show you only what they have. We show you the holes too. This is our living coverage map: where the record is strong, where it is thin, and where it is missing entirely. The gaps are not failures to hide. They are the map of the work ahead.
I · The sourced record
A 993-record foundation, and its honest skew
Our research has gathered 993 sourced, confidence-tagged records, and it grows continually. The collection reaches across the regions (the Americas beyond the big nations, the Maghreb and Levant, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast and East Asia, Korea) and across the dimensions of the history: lesbian, bisexual, and asexual lives, faith, sport, the military, ballroom culture, disability, and global-South trans movements. The backbone is strong, and still uneven by era, region, and voice. We name that openly.
II · By era
Time
Roughly 1860 to the present: the modern legal, medical, and movement era. The Ancient World is well anchored (Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia).
The "long 19th century" outside German sexology and British law. Antiquity-to-1400 outside a few centers.
Medieval and early-modern history outside Western Europe and Edo Japan: Ottoman, Persian and Islamicate juridical, classical Chinese and Korean, and South Asian textual histories are named but largely unrecorded.
III · By region
Place
United States, Western Europe (UK, Germany, Netherlands), South Africa, India, and the larger Latin American nations (Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia).
Eastern Europe, Russia, Scandinavia, Italy and Iberia (esp. pre-modern); East and Southeast Asian trans and women's history.
Central Asia; the Gulf interior; much of Oceania's historical depth; circumpolar and many First Nations histories. Waves two and three moved Central America, the Caribbean, the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Korea out of this column and into "thin."
IV · By topic & voice
Subject, and who speaks
Decriminalization and marriage law, the AIDS crisis (US-centric), the modern trans-medicine and intersex movements, the science of sexuality.
Lesbian and women's same-sex history everywhere (rarely policed, so rarely recorded, itself a finding); global-South trans history; arts beyond the Western literary and film canon.
Bisexual-specific history is nearly absent. Global-South HIV/AIDS as its own thread. Ballroom and house culture. Ordinary, rural, working-class, and incarcerated voices.
Indigenous and third-gender histories (Two-Spirit, hijra, fa'afafine, muxe, bissu, babaylan, kathoey, mukhannathun) currently rest on outsider sources. We will not publish exhibits on them without community partnership and cultural authority.
The most important honest finding
Our inherited record is disproportionately built from prosecutorial, elite, literate, and colonial-ethnographic sources. The people most often missing are exactly those most often silenced. We treat that silence as data, and as a duty.
V · The work ahead
Where the research goes next
The gaps above set our priorities. Our research follows two tracks. A cultural-authority track that does not proceed without community partnership, for Indigenous and third-gender histories. And an open-archive track that fills the regional voids (Central America, the Caribbean, the Maghreb and Gulf, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast and East Asia) and the thin cross-cutting topics (lesbian, bisexual, global-South trans and HIV/AIDS, and a deliberate map of backlash and regression). Every load-bearing record currently resting on an aggregator will be re-grounded in primary scholarship before it clears review.