Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis
Andrea Friedman, Miranda Rectenwald, Steven Brawley, Chris Gordon
“Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis” is an interdisciplinary humanities project that centers on the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer experience within the divided city. It asks how sexuality divides cities and how urban spaces are implicated in the division of LGBTQ communities by race, gender, and class. Exploring these questions through a focus on the St. Louis metropolitan region on both sides of the Mississippi River, we seek to identify patterns of sexual segregation, analyze how these reflect, reinforce and reproduce other divisions, and reveal historical strategies of resistance in the urban landscape.
The project brings together students, grassroots activists, faculty, archivists, librarians, and St. Louis-area residents to unveil the rich history of a marginalized community, a history that has barely begun to be told. We join public historians and community history projects that are emerging across the United States, including the National Park Service, which recently launched its LGBTQ Heritage Initiative to identify, preserve and commemorate the histories of LGBTQ Americans. The digital map that we are creating will bring that history to life. We anticipate that our map will pioneer new ways to represent both LGBTQ community history and broader histories of urban space and segregation.
From May through December of 2016, a team of student researchers combed through city directories, telephone books, and local and national publications to identity the locations of LGBTQ life in St. Louis between 1945 and 1992. This has been very labor-intensive work, but we have identified more than 700 specific spaces—bars and coffee houses, parks and community centers, bathhouses, churches, theaters, and many others—that we are geocoding so they can be plotted on our map. Now we are going to the archives, to oral histories, to census data, and myriad other resources to tell the stories behind the location.
We will use this data to ask important questions about the emergence and construction of LGBTQ communities in the St. Louis region, including: how and where did a variety of sexual and gender variant individuals find each other for sociability, sex, and love in the years before the “modern” gay rights movement emerged in St. Louis? How did LGBTQ people assert their claims to freedom and resist violence—from both city residents and the state—in the 1960s and beyond? What was the role of faith-based organizations in constituting these communities in a strongly religious city? How did the regions’ many medical institutions respond to HIV/AIDS, and what was the role of people with HIV in demanding care and providing it for themselves?
Our most fundamental concern, however, is to understand how racial, gender, and class divides simultaneously mapped onto and were sometimes disrupted by the contours of LGBTQ life. So, we explore both the racially segregated bar scene but also those places and organizations where black and white gay men came together; the ways that the spaces of lesbian sociability were divided by race and class, as well as the opportunities African American lesbians seized to create their own erotic communities; how presumptions about race and class shaped understandings of and organizing about HIV/AIDS; the moments that gay men and lesbians were able to work together on political projects, and the moments when that unity was challenged; when the institutions of gay life created spaces for folks who lived beyond gender binaries, and when those spaces seemed inadequate. We aim for this project to link the St. Louis region to national stories about LGBTQ life while also revealing the complex and multiple histories of the place, St. Louis, at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality
Our digital map (using the Esri Story Maps platform) will launch on the Washington University Libraries website in May 2017. We are planning a public celebration to honor those who lived this history, those whose previous work has made possible our research, and our community partners—the St. Louis LGBT History Project, and the Missouri History Museum—who are working along with us to tell the story of St. Louis’s LGBTQ past. Stay tuned for details! You can also follow our progress on our blog: https://library.wustl.edu/category/collaborative-projects/map-lgbtq-stl/
Many thanks to our wonderful undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate researchers, past and present: Afton Apodaca, Molly Brodsky, Jennifer Chen, Ian Darnell, Kristi Hagen, Wendy Lu, Kate Strube, Karissa Tavassoli, and Brenda Thacker. Thanks as well to our collaborators, who make this project possible, especially Jennifer Moore of Olin Library and Steven Brawley of the St. Louis LGBT History Project, as well as staff at the Missouri History Museum.
For an update on Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis, an interdisciplinary project involving University Libraries, the St. Louis LGBT History Project, the State Historical Society of Missouri, and the Missouri History Museum see here.
Please visit the website for this project here.
Andrea Friedman is Associate Professor of WGSS and History at Washington University in St. Louis.
Miranda Rectenwald is the Curator of Local History for University Libraries at Washington University in St. Louis.
Jennifer Moore is the GIS & Data Projects Manager and Anthropology Library for University Libraries at Washington University in St. Louis.
Steven Brawley is the founder for St. Louis LGBT History Project.
Sharon Smith is Curator of Civic and Personal Identity at Missouri History Museum.
Chris Gordon is Director of Libraries & Collection at Missouri History Museum.
Aaron Addison is Director of Scholarly Services for University Libraries at Washington University in St. Louis.
Ian Darnell is a Ph.D candidate at University of Illinois, Chicago.
Bob Hansman is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Washington University in St. Louis.