Queering the Suburbs: A Digital LGBT History Walking Tour for Northern Virginia

Alexandra Miller, George Mason University
Hannah LeComte, George Mason University
Ashleigh Williams, George Mason University
Savannah Scott, George Mason University

On offer right now in Washington, D.C. there are dozens of walking tours dedicated exclusively to queer history. People wishing to learn about the city, its history, or queer history, can take one any day of the year. But, informative as these tours are, they do not reveal the entire landscape of the city’s queer past. DC has long been a commuter city, and its suburbs are extensive. They have their own queer pasts. In 1991, Murray Greenberg of Alexandria’s French Quarter Café, and two other parties successfully sued the Virginia ABC board to overturn a law banning the serving of alcohol to “known homosexuals.” Just across the street from the Café at 805 King Street was a men’s massage parlor popular for cruising. The rest of King Street, the rest of Alexandria, and the rest of Northern Virginia is similarly dotted with sites associated with queer history. In this project, we not only expand queer history into the suburbs and into the more recent past but also localize it at the sites where queer people lived, loved, and protested. Even more importantly, we make these sites accessible to the public, as an online extension of the walking tours which anyone can take in DC. Drawing on Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax, we compile sites into a website which combines mapped walking tours which the user can take at their own pace with individually geolocated recorded site narratives. We believe that this project both queers the digital space and reclaims the physical space for public memory. When people are able to remember our queer pasts, and literally see them on the map, they remain in our collective conscious, making it harder to forget that queer activism and queer life continue everywhere today.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 65. HGIS for the Public