Editor’s note: This is the second post in our annual Digital Summer School for 2025, in which we highlight projects in the digital humanities. You can read other posts in the series here.
Created during a 2024-2025 fellowship at Temple University’s Loretta C. Duckworth Scholar Studio (LCDSS), the Queer Philly Mapping Project explores the spatial dynamics of Philadelphia’s queer history, tracing its expansion, contraction, and shifting geographies from 1950 to 2000. Developed by Max Gaida, a PhD student at the University of Cologne, the project builds on an earlier Philadelphia LGBT map. Gaida conducted additional archival research and independently systematized the data to create an online resource intended for both the public and academic researchers.
What led you to this project, or perhaps more specifically what sparked your interest and what drove you to create it?
The Queer Philly Mapping Project started as a part of my dissertation on how Philadelphia’s Gayborhood grew in the heart of the city, an atypical location for such a neighborhood when compared to counterparts like San Francisco’s Castro or Chicago’s Boystown. In speaking with people across the city, I became aware of a disconnect between those who had lived through Philadelphia’s queer past and those who knew less about that history. This led me to expand my mapping from simply supporting the arguments of my dissertation to a wider, public-facing map designed to make the many places that once formed the core of queer life in the city visible to today’s Philadelphians. In particular, I aimed to reveal that the Gayborhood, now celebrated as the epicenter of queer Philadelphia, emerged through a corralling and contraction of the public visibility of queer life to a smaller section of the city than in earlier decades. For example, while gay bars used to be spread throughout the city in the 1970s and 1980s, today they are mostly found in a 4 x 4-block area.
How did you go about constructing the site? Why mapping? What sources did you use to create the maps?
A local historian, Bob Skiba, had already created an LGBT map of Philadelphia ten years ago, so thankfully I could use this data to build on, transforming his map using tools that have become more accessible in recent years. As a first step, I organized this data into a spreadsheet, categorizing the locations based on their use and the years they existed as well as (where this information was available) classifying them along the axis of race, sexuality, and gender. I felt a traditional, points-on-a-map approach worked best because this is most tangible to everyday users; they can both quickly see the density of data points in certain areas or zoom into the street-level and connect a historical location with what is there today.
After extensive trial and error with available mapping tools, I decided to construct my own website, as there was no app that allowed me to visualize the data alongside both the categorization and their chronology as I had envisioned. In developing the code for this website, I was assisted by generative AI, an experience that has fundamentally shifted my perspective. While AI is no magic solution for instantly producing fully functional tools, I’ve come to value its ability to lower both the technical barriers and time constraints on digital projects such as this one. Crucially, I maintained control over the project’s direction, especially the analytical thinking behind its design, while being able to delegate much of the brute technical work to a tool with far greater programming fluency than I could have learned during the fellowship.
What were the biggest obstacles in creating the site?
I entered the project with the healthy naivete necessary to believe such an ambitious scope was achievable, only to quickly realize the difficulty of not just gathering and organizing the data but also presenting it within the constraints of a two-semester fellowship. While the sheer number of points—over a thousand meticulously collected entries from archival sources, categorized by hand—posed a significant time challenge, the greater hurdle was figuring out how to make this meaningfully accessible. This challenge remained unresolved until I realized just how powerful generative AI had become. Ultimately, what helped me overcome these and other obstacles was the supportive community at Temple’s Scholars Studio. Though I developed the project independently, it was shaped by the many conversations, feedback, and ideas contributed by peers and experts in digital humanities and mapping at the LCDSS.
What did this mapping project reveal to you regarding LGBTQ history in Philadelphia? Did it confirm or challenging prior assumptions, or a combination of both?
The map unsurprisingly reflects what a lot of queer Philadelphians already felt was true about the spatial arrangement of queer life in the city. For example, that the Gayborhood has historically struggled with the exclusion of people of color. This is reflected in the fact that gay bars with a majority Black customer base operated outside of the neighborhood, in West and North Philadelphia, but also east of City Hall. The last area in particular was a thriving cluster of queer Black nightlife which was cleared to make way for a convention center in the late 1980s. But the map has also revealed patterns which I had not seen before, such as South Street being a proto-Gayborhood in the early 1970s. It was home to the city’s first Gay Community Center and queer bookshop, Giovanni’s Room, before these moved into what was becoming the Gayborhood proper in the early 1980s. Crucially, the data is also helping me challenge prior narratives; for example, that Gayborhoods tend to be exclusionary of women. Philadelphians certainly believed this to be true and there are a lot of instances of sexism which reinforced this. However, in a small side project I analyzed how long women’s bars remained open in different parts of the city and found that lesbian bars in the Gayborhood on average had longer lifespans than those opened elsewhere in this city. This complicates how exclusion was happening on the ground and has become an avenue for further research.
What have you been able to learn about who uses the site?
The website has been a great conversation starter with people in Philadelphia, both those who use it to reminisce about the great places that have closed and those younger or newer to the city who are excited to learn more about its history. The project has also sparked deeper conversations, beginning by zooming into our current location on the map to reveal just how much queer history surrounds us. This often leads to more difficult questions, such as why we are surrounded by history, but see so little visible queer life in the present. Nowhere is this shift more striking than west of Broad Street. Once a nexus of queer nightlife, organizations, and residences, much of this vibrancy has since been displaced by gentrification.
On the academic side, the map was a useful tool for a class I taught on exploring the city’s queer history. We discussed how the cultural geographies of sexuality had shifted, and students used locations as a starting point for their final projects. I am also in conversations with a scholar writing about Philadelphia’s restaurant renaissance, in which queer-owned establishments played an important part. I hope that these academic uses of the data I’ve collected can grow in the future, as there are a lot more stories to be revealed.
Philadelphia is a city with a definite identity. How did the project align with the city’s own self-image and what did it reveal to you about Philadelphians?
Philadelphians have shaped a civic identity rooted in pride, forged in the face of urban decline, persistent challenges, and a lingering sense of being overshadowed, particularly by New York. My project shows that queer Philadelphians played a central, but not always unproblematic, role in the city’s urban revival. Their cultural organizations and businesses in Center City led to a return of the area’s metropolitan dynamism yet also contributed to much of the gentrification that has been pushing poorer residents out of downtown. Moreover, the map directly challenges the city’s inferiority complex by highlighting that Philadelphia played a central role in queer history: from the 1960s, when homophile activists staged the country’s first recurring queer rights protests, to its ongoing importance as a cultural hub including scenes like ballroom. At the same time, Philadelphia’s queer community has not always fit comfortably within the city’s self-fashioned image of working-class grit and machismo, epitomized by icons like Rocky. But this image, too, is evolving. The Flyers’ mascot Gritty has been coopted, even receiving a Queer Eye makeover. What the project ultimately reveals is how deeply queer Philadelphians have tied their politics to the city’s image and its broader historical narrative, claiming the symbolism of the birthplace of democracy and the ideal of the “City of Brotherly—and Sisterly—Love” as part of their struggle.
What do you see as the site’s future?
For now, the site is a points-on-a-map collection of historical data. Although many locations include some explanations, I hope to expand this into a more encyclopedic project. Students or other interested parties could contribute to collections of points, analyzing and elaborating on the history there. In the same vein, I would love to add an interactive aspect to the site, by letting visitors add comments or even their own points of interest that are not found in the archives. For example, were there any residences famous for throwing popular house parties? Or where were great spots for first dates that a queer couple felt comfortable and safe going? This, I hope, would move the map away from a static display of locations toward a more nuanced visualization of how sexuality is arranged in space. Here, I’m also exploring a how to include a “spray-can” approach to mapping, accounting for the fluidity and subjective nature of queer geographies. What if visitors could draw or shade in their own understanding of the Gayborhood (or Gayborhoods), revealing how perceptions of queer space vary across age, gender, race, or lived experience?
Digital humanities is in its young adulthood at this point. Where do you see the field going and how does your project fit into this larger history?
Using AI to help me craft this project opened my eyes to its revolutionary potential for digital humanities. Although I remain wary of how, even if, this should change our analytical approaches, I believe that thoughtfully and deliberately using AI will make previously unfeasible projects possible. The impact of these tools goes beyond simply lowering the barrier to entry for those without technical skills or increasing efficiency in the often resource-constrained environment of academia. It also reflects a broader shift in that many people, especially our students, now live deeply digital lives. For the humanities to remain relevant, we must learn to value the new ways of gathering, organizing, and sharing knowledge that are now being created.
Max Gaida is a PhD candidate in American History at the University of Cologne and will serve as a visiting fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, DC in 2025-2026. His dissertation examines the shifting geographies of sex in Philadelphia amid the urban crises of the late 20th century, which resulted in the emergence of the Gayborhood. Exploring how queer communities reshaped notions of metropolitan citizenship as cities reimagined their futures, he argues that while queer people were increasingly tolerated their public life was also corralled into the Gayborhood by gentrification and through policing. Committed to public scholarship, he created the Queer Philadelphia Mapping Project to make queer urban history more accessible and visible to a wider audience.
