Project: Queering the Map
— Andrew Sargus Klein
It didn’t seem that long ago that Queering the Map flew across my radar, only to disappear under an avalanche of trolling by the alt-right (my memory of this is possibly incorrect, as there has been no shortage of similar incidents over the past year).
Thankfully, it’s back. Here’s what it is:
Queering the Map is a community-generated mapping project that geo-locates queer moments, memories and histories in relation to physical space. As queer life becomes increasingly less centered around specific neighborhoods and the buildings within them, notions of ‘queer spaces’ become more abstract and less tied to concrete geographical locations. The intent of the Queering the Map project is to collectively document the spaces that hold queer memory, from park benches to parking garages, to mark moments of queerness wherever they occur.
I don’t have much to offer on top of this, except, simply, it’s worth your time whether you’re queer or not. The homepage centers on Montreal, but this project’s reach is global. Zoom out and you’ll see hundreds, if not thousands of geotags across the world, each one a memory, a moment, something fleeting perhaps but also something important in the someone’s trajectory.
Queerness is still too often invisible, and maps are often the products of erasure, and so such a deliberate subversion is incredibly meaningful.