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Amanda Regan: Mapping the Gay Guides: Using Digital History to Explore LGBTQ Travel Guides, 1965 – 2005

Mapping the Gay Guides (MGG) relies on the Damron Guides, an early but longstanding travel guide aimed at gay men since the early 1960s. An LGBTQ equivalent to the African American “green books,” the Damron Guides contained lists of bars, bathhouses, cinemas, businesses, hotels, and cruising sites in every U.S. state, where gay men could find friends, companions, and sex. The online mapping project explores different dimensions of American gay life through time, from bars and nightlife, bookstores, cinemas, and churches. Users to the site are able to navigate and investigate the dynamic and sometimes disappearing nature of LGBT spaces over time.

By associating geographical coordinates with each location mentioned within the Damron Guides, MGG provides an interface for visualizing the growth of queer spaces in the United States. MGG’s interactive web app includes a series of filters that can be used to interact with the digitized data including narrowing the data down by city or state, choosing to display only certain categories of establishments, or visualizing change using a date slider. However, MGG also functions as a research tool for studying the culture of queer spaces in American life. Drawing on the digitized data and visualizations from the app, the website includes “vignettes” that offer historical analysis of the changing ways that gay spaces were defined. This paper will introduce MGG and discuss its data, methodology, and discuss some of its findings.

Lecture within the Open Research Colloquium Digital History
Time: Wednesday, 15 January 2025, 4:15-5:45 pm CET
Place: via Zoom – Request access via email (digitalhistory@hu-berlin.de) or Mailinglist


OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Digital History Berlin (Redaktion) (13. Januar 2025). Amanda Regan: Mapping the Gay Guides: Using Digital History to Explore LGBTQ Travel Guides, 1965 – 2005. Digital History Berlin. Abgerufen am 12. Februar 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/132gb


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