Tuesday 27 May 2025 – Amanda Regan (Clemson University): Mapping the Gay Guides: Using Digital History to Explore LGBTQ Travel Guides, 1965 – 2005

This seminar is 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm BST live on Zoom at https://zoom.us/j/94472452357, and later posted to our YouTube channel.

Session chair: TBC

Abstract: 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. With over 175,000 entries between 1965 and 2005, MGG offers a unique resource for exploring LGBTQ history in the late 20th century.

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.

Bio: Amanda Regan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Clemson University. She specializes in US History 1877-present with a focus on women and gender as well as digital history. At Clemson, she teaches in the department’s new Digital History Ph.D. program and leads research projects related to LGBTQ history and women’s history. She is the co-director of the digital history project Mapping the Gay Guides and her book project, Shaping Up: Physical Fitness Initiatives for Women, 1880-1965, is under contract with UVA press. She received her Ph.D. in 2019 from George Mason University.