Mapping the gay guides
Mapping the Gay Guides
Using a subset of the data digitized for this project, we own written a forthcoming article for Southern Quarterly enti
Gay Geographer
Indeed, Halford, the famed “Metal God,” felt secure enough in the ruse to carry the guide in his back jeans pocket. The words “gay” or “homosexual” didn’t emerge in its pages; readers in the know were compelled to translate a bit of gay lingo to access its materials, which provided plausible deniability should the wrong sort of person go snooping. In the years when a closeted gay star like Halford stood to lose his position in music if his sexuality became widely known, Damron, hailed as the “first name and last word” in gay travel, helped keep a secret animation secret.
Similarly, but decades later, when the New York theater company Aquila went on a national tour of classic plays prefer Much Ado About Nothing, actor Louis Butelli counted on his Damron’s Speak to Book to find queer watering holes and combat loneliness. Butelli attested to the New York Times that it was a “life-saving device.” Both Halford and Butelli represented the guidebook’s traditional target reader: the discreet gay bloke seeking fellow travelers, as it were, in unfamiliar settings.
A Brief History Of Gay Explore Guides — And What They Utter About Life In Southern California
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Today, a simple internet look for lets those in the LGBTQ+ communities find each other and welcoming establishments. But it wasn't always so easy.
Even as gay tradition was beginning to gain wider awareness in the s and '70s, especially in cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, knowing who would be friendly was difficult. That’s where homosexual travel guides came in.
They worked prefer the Green Novel guides designed to make travel safer for Black people or the vacation guides to steer Jewish people to friendly locations. For gay people navigating potentially fraught encounters, these pocket-sized guidebooks listed bars, hotels, restaurants, and even churches across the United States that were either frequented by the lgbtq+ community or accepting towards gay patrons.
The most
Mapping the Gay Guides
Visualizing Queer Territory and American Life
Welcome to Mapping the Gay Guides!
While operating one of his many gay bars in the s, Bob Damron started a side project publishing gay travel guides that featured bars like his. Called the Bob Damron Address Books, these guides proved popular and became a valuable resource for lgbtq+ travelers looking for friends, companions, and safety.
First published in an era when most states banned same-sex intimacy both in general and private spaces, these commute guides helped gays (and to a lesser extent lesbians) identify bars, cocktail lounges, bookstores, restaurants, bathhouses, cinemas, and cruising grounds that catered to people favor themselves. Much like the Emerald Books of the s and s, which African Americans used to find friendly businesses that would cater to black citizens in the era of Jim Crow apartheid, Damron’s guidebooks aided a generation of queer people in identifying sites of people, pleasure, and politics.
Damron’s guidebooks were part of a growing interest in gay travel guide publications that began i