3 minute read
Queering the map
By Finnian Danger
Queering the map
An interactive storytelling experience.
Imagine a world map pinned with queer stories, highlighting the exact locations of where other queer people felt most loved, most vulnerable and most at home at a particular moment in time. An accessible journey across continents where you can discover queerness in every corner; even in places where you felt you were the only one.
Lucas LaRochelle spent months musing over queer spaces, queer history, and the importance of connection as they put together their magnum opus.
It took months of consideration and hard work before 'Queering the Map' came online in May 2017, with the aim of sharing queer experiences globally in an anonymous yet safe environment. Lucas describes their website as: "A community-generated mapping platform that digitally archives queer experience in relation to physical space. The interactive map provides an interface with which to collaboratively archive the cartography of queer life—from park benches to the middle of the ocean—in order to preserve queer histories and unfolding realities. From collective action to stories of coming out, encounters with violence to moments of rapturous love, 'Queering the Map' functions as a living archive of queer life across the world."
If you're anything like me, you probably immediately wanted to check your hometown. lutruwita/ Tasmania has a small number of map markers, and almost all of them are fascinating. Here are just a few:
"I had my first real tummy fluttering kiss here and that's when I realised, I'm lesbian" – the corner of Bathurst St and Molle St, Hobart.
"We made love in the bathtub throughout winter and lazed for days indoors." – Lenah Valley.
"Grew up downlow queer here. Was kind of like practicing witchcraft within a nunnery in secret. Didn't come out until I left – there were very real risks of violence." – Launceston.
"I had my first queer sex experience here. Sex with a trans woman. The sex was terrible. She was terrible, in the end. But it humbled me so much and I have never had straight sex again." – South Launceston. "Somewhere around here I realised I was transgender for the first time in my life." – Sheffield.
"I proposed to my fiancee 4 months after the ordeal of the SSM debate. My best friend helped me arrange the most perfect day of my life so far. Love does win." – Ulverstone.
"To post on 'Queering the Map' constitutes a kind of giving: sharing one’s own experience of finding, if only briefly, a space of queer possibility. These experiences might then allow others who come into contact with them to also ‘find’ themselves reflected back, though only in fragments, in another’s story," Lucas comments on their website. Every snippet of someone else's queer life on the map is a form of giving. It is a gift to see so many similar people sharing thoughts, and it's emboldening knowing they're so close to you.
"These stories can be lifelines: a trace left behind by those who stand behind us, redirecting us towards the possibility of another world within the world. In trying to find something, one might get lost and stumble upon something else. Something they didn’t know they were looking for. It’s not so much about what is revealed, but rather what continues to elude us when we return to the places that once made spaces for queerness to flourish. The stories on 'Queering the Map' often speak to what was once there, rather than what continues to be visible. The stories speak to a past that has ‘stuck’ to a place, the particular set of circumstances and affective structures that brought into existence a particularly queer moment. The act of documenting these ephemeral traces ensures that the potentiality of these individual moments never fades, offering an affective opening into each other’s worlds."
