Project News

By associating geographical coordinates with each location mentioned within the Damron Guides, MGG provides an interface for visualizing the growth of queer spaces between 1965 and 1980 (eventually 2000).

In this episode of the Altas Obscura Podcast, we learn about how, for decades, a one-of-a-kind travel guide opened up the world for gay travelers. Today, historians are using them to create an interactive map of LGBTQIA+ spaces in midcentury America.

MGG is excited to release a new map and new data from 1981-1985. This data adds another 25k+ locations to MGG!

For LGBTQIA+ people, location data and maps are often less about taking them where they want to go, and more about telling them where they can go. Apart from pointing out safe spaces and those they must avoid; maps also serve as proofs of existence of the queer community — especially in a world that repeatedly tries to erase and overwrite their history.

In this episode of the podcast, Next City Executive Director Lucas Grindley talks with the historians about the underappreciated realities that were meticulously recorded within the pages of The Damon Guide, which included addresses for nightclubs, health clinics, churches, bookstores, restaurants and more.

On this program we’re joined by Dr. Amanda Regan and Dr. Eric Gonzaba, co-creators of the NEH-funded digital history project Mapping the Gay Guides.

Mapping the Gay Guides is a historical database and mapping of LGBTQ spaces based on the midcentury gay-friendly travel guides created by Bob Damron, a businessman who kept track of his experiences as a gay man traveling around the United States from the 1960s on.

This story is masterfully told on a larger scale by Amanda Regan and Eric Gonzaba in their new interactive digital history website, Mapping the Gay Guides: Visualizing Queer Space and American Life. The Mapping the Gay Guides project focuses on one particularly notable guidebook series, Bob Damron’s Address Book, a text first published in 1964.

Washington became a vital player in the history of gay rights, ground zero for landmark Supreme Court decisions, massive demonstrations, and the site of the most famous display of the 1.3 million-square-foot AIDS Memorial Quilt, among other monumental events.

The project earlier this year garnered a nearly $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The researchers will use the award to hire graduate students through 2024 and add at least 116,000 new Damron listings.

The books were created by a businessman to help LGBTQ travelers find safe spaces nationwide to be themselves. By the '70s, Frederick’s Media Arts company was asked to create advertisements and graphics inside the books.

In another time and place, traveling businessman, Bob Damron, created an unusual address book. As a gay man from San Francisco, he kept track of his travels to other parts of the US between 1965 and 1980. And thanks to a pair of historians, these gay ‘travel guides’ are going online.

New technologies also have the power to make hidden histories more accessible and give people who have traditionally been excluded from the academy opportunities to participate in the preservation of their histories in new and lasting ways.

The Mapping the Gay Guides team is pleased to announce that we have received a three-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the expansion of the project.

The Garfinkel Prize in Digital Humanities is an award that honors caucus founder Susan Garfinkel for her longstanding service to the caucus and her commitment to an inclusive, interdisciplinary, welcoming Digital Humanities. The annual award will recognize excellent work at the intersection of American Studies and Digital Humanities.

The award recognizes open scholarship that incorporates open access, open data, open education, and other related movements that have the potential to make scholarly work more efficient, more accessible, and more usable by those within and beyond the academy. By engaging with open practices for academic work, open scholarship shares that work more broadly and more publicly.

Amidst this anxiety, a new digital humanities project from historians Eric Gonzaba and Amanda Regan has been a major bright spot. Mapping the Gay Guides is an online exhibition that shows the growth of queer spaces for “community, pleasure, and politics” from 1965 to 1980 in all 50 states as well as Washington, DC....

Historian Eric Gonzaba’s college students aren’t familiar with the concept of a physical guide book. Their world is a digital one, where cell phones contain infinite travel guides.

Years ago —no, decades ago— if you couldn't find a local gay newspaper to browse along your travels, the Damron Guides provided the most up-to-date addresses, phone numbers and information on bars, cafes, bookstores, bath houses and cruisy spots throughout the U.S.

When Eric Gonzaba travels across the United States, he often wonders about the history of the places he passes through — specifically, their queer history.

Five minutes. I waited only five minutes after reading the spring 2020 announcement to apply for the opportunity to work as a graduate research assistant with Eric Gonzaba, assistant professor of American Studies, on his grant-funded project Mapping the Gay Guides.

When Eric Gonzaba travels across the United States, he often wonders about the history of the places he passes through — specifically, their queer history.

At first glance, Bob Damron’s Address Book reads like any other travel guide. Bars, restaurants, hotels and businesses are grouped by city and state, their names and addresses listed in alphabetical order...

Today we’re excited to officially launch the first phase of Mapping the Gay Guides, a digital history mapping project that aims to understand ignored queer geographies using the Damron Address Books.