When Eric Gonzaba, Ph.D., assistant professor of American studies at Cal State Fullerton, was working on his dissertation on the history of gay nightlife spaces as a graduate student at George Mason University, he wasn’t finding much information. That is, until he discovered the treasure trove of Bob Damron’s “The Address Book.” The books, dating from 1964 to 2020, are a series of annual travel guides for gay travelers that list bars, stores, cinemas and other spaces that catered to queer folks.
The books are wonderfully idiosyncratic. In the early days, every site was visited personally by Damron, updated yearly and carefully labeled with various symbols indicating things such as MCC (metropolitan community church), W (western or cowboy types) and HOT (dangerous — usually fuzz).
In 2020, Gonzaba and co-collaborator Amanda Regan, Ph.D, a digital humanities postdoctoral fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History, launched the Mapping the Gay Guides to plot the spots listed in the books to create a digital history of these gay spaces over time.
The two are trained in digital history methods, which use technology to look at history differently, so it was a natural next step to give the guides the digital treatment. “She (Regan) said it would be interesting if we would learn something about this, not just by reading the addresses in this guide but actually seeing them mapped out. Maybe we can learn something about it if we can filter this data,” Gonzaba said.
Mapping the Gay Guides is still in phase one — getting the infrastructure up. The team, including a few helpful grad students, has mapped 15 years of the books and over 40,000 listings.
“Now is the fun time when we get to look at the data closely and play with it,” said Gonzaba, enthusiastically, as is his way.
The goals for the project, depending on how funding goes, are to upload data from the rest of the books, then expand upon the entries. “We want to add more context and make it more of a community archival space so people can engage on a more multi-dimensional level,” Gonzaba said. He hopes to add capabilities for people to upload photos and share memories.
One of big takeaways so far has been the sheer number of spaces they’ve mapped, not just in well-known, gay-friendly (or at least friendlier) urban spots such as San Francisco, but places throughout the Deep South, the Great Plains and the Midwest, including a Waffle House in Gonzaba’s home state of Indiana. “It really speaks to how much gay culture there is outside of these kinds of coastal gay meccas,” he said.
The team also is researching the role of religion in the community. “We were surprised by the number of religious institutions listed in the guide,” Gonzaba said. “Because of historical discrimination by churches and whatnot, we often think of LGBT Americans as kind of pushing away from ideas of faith. And yet these guides show there was actually a big yearning for these robust institutions in LGBT communities.”
Gonzaba is quick to note that the Guides aren’t a perfect source. “Bob Damron was a white, middle-class gay man in San Francisco, so his idea of what a gay spaces is is limited by those factors. What you’re not seeing are the interesting divisions in the gay world. He lists a lot of African American sites, for instance, but certainly, if a black man in the 1960s wrote this, it’d be a very different-looking guide.”
The project also reveals how the experience of being gay in America has changed. On one hand, things were more oppressive. Different sexualities weren’t widely accepted, gay marriage was illegal and even the Guides were undercover.
“The early guides didn’t even use the word ‘gay’ on the front cover. There’s nothing on the book that suggests that they’re gay because Damron wanted men to be able to use them in public,” Gonzaba said. “But I think that stereotype is overblown. On the other end, encountering the variety of spaces in any city, you see it’s not just a couple of bars or a couple of restaurants, its places all over — bookstores and bowling leagues and all kinds of stuff.”
“I believe people are going to be surprised to learn about queer spaces that were once active near them or possibly still thriving,” said Christian Castillo, a graduate research student working on the project, who discovered the Brass Rail, a gay bar in his hometown, has been there since 1965. “It was a bar that I had been into a couple times and I was completely unaware that I was in a space where generations of gay men had danced, drank, and celebrated life on the dance floor.”
Gonzaba sees those earlier days as an exciting time in gay history. “They were reimagining what it meant to be gay, finding spaces and building community. It’s fascinating to see how excited they were to build this world that they had long desired.”
Source: Orange County Register
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