An archive of marginalized history owes more than accuracy.

Nothing about a community without that community. Where a record concerns a living scene or a living person, our aim is to document with them, not merely about them — crediting contributors, seeking permission for personal material, and giving the people and houses who built these spaces a say in how they are represented.

We treat this as ongoing, not a one-time clearance. If you are part of a scene we document and want a role in how it appears here, that invitation is open.

We do not host flyers, photographs, audio, or other materials unless we have permission — a deed of gift, an explicit license, or a clear and documented fair-use basis. Rights holders are credited, and a contributor's terms travel with the item.

Factual records — a room's name, dates, address, and the people and parties connected to it — are documented as public history, in cautious, sourced language. Creative materials are a separate question of rights, and we treat them that way.

Any record can be corrected, contested, or removed on request. If you are a subject of a record, a rights holder, or a relative or estate, you can ask us to fix a fact, add a source, restrict a detail, or take something down — and we will act on it.

Until a dedicated rights contact is published, corrections and takedown requests run through the submission channel, flagged as a correction. Time-sensitive requests are prioritized.

Request a correction or takedown

This history includes the AIDS epidemic, addiction, policing and incarceration, violence, and death. We document these plainly and in context, without sensationalizing them, and without aestheticizing other people's trauma for effect.

Claims about living people are held to a higher bar, and contested accounts are marked disputed rather than resolved by us. We would rather a record read as careful and incomplete than confident and wrong.

Being part of a scene is not consent to be individually archived. People who were not out in their era — and may not be now — sex workers, undocumented people, and anyone who simply does not want to appear are entitled to be left out, and to be removed if they were included.

For spaces, history and the present are handled differently. Rooms that have closed are mapped at their real locations; currently operating underground or invite-only spaces are fuzzed or omitted by default, because precise pins can put a living scene at risk.

We aim to describe people in their own terms: someone who has rebranded is recorded under their current name, with former names preserved only where they aid the record. We are adopting community metadata standards for LGBTQ+ description so the language of the archive is accountable, not improvised.

Every record carries a visible confidence flag, and what the atlas does not yet hold is named openly. See the Verification Ledger for what is sourced, and The Silences for what is missing.