Editor’s note: This is the first post in our annual Digital Summer School, where we highlight projects in the digital humanities. You can read other posts in the series here.
1. What led you to this project? Or in other words, what sparked your interest and what drove you to create it?
As an MA student in history at Virginia Tech, I was particularly interested in queer history, notably queer pleasure, sex, and resilience before and after the AIDS crisis. With New York City serving as one of several epicenters of LGBTQ culture, my focus naturally gravitated to it. After taking a digital history course, I developed a passion for mapping which allowed me to combine my interests in queer urban pleasure spaces and digital techniques. I designed, researched, coded, and published the website myself using R Studio, Quarto, and GitHub. The main goal of the site is to offer a visual exploration of queer history and nightlife in New York City, revealing the evolving landscape and the complex layers of medical, governmental, and social discrimination faced by the queer community in the late 20th century.
My interest in the project stemmed from the intersection of two different fields I explored during my MA program. First, I developed an interest in locations of queer pleasure through reading secondary literature on queer history. I found that while these stories highlighted how central such spaces were to queer communities across the country, something was lost when readers could not visualize their spatial layout. The second inspiration came from a digital history course where we were tasked with creating websites through coding. Before that class, I had no coding experience, but the course offered me a way to resolve the disconnect I felt in the literature by enabling me to map and offer an interactive view of these historic pleasure locations.
2. What about mapping led you to construct Mapping Spatial Networks of Queer Pleasure within New York City? Why focus on leisure?
The reason I wanted to use mapping to create the website is because many of the sites I was reading about including the Mine Shaft, the Saint, and the Club Baths were now long gone but they were cultural landmarks for a generation of men. Scholars who were writing about these places were often good at depicting the stories of such venues, but these accounts lacked any visualization of the larger picture and sheer volume of these spaces and how they overlapped and closed throughout the 1970s and 1980s. My focus on leisure stemmed from my larger project which explored how AIDS and safer sex heavily impacted the culture of leisure spaces. I wanted to highlight the joy and fun experienced by participants as well as the resilience of the queer community during the transition from gay liberation to the AIDS crisis. Additionally, focusing on these spaces of pleasure allowed me to examine those themes visually through mapping.
3. What were the biggest obstacles in creating the site?
The biggest obstacles in creating the site for me were learning the coding necessary to build the map, tracing the various venues down in the archival documents, and finding concrete start and end dates for each establishment or location. I was not an experienced coder when I started the project, so each new step–imputing and sorting data, building a leaflet map, making a shiny app, creating filters, etc.–took time and trial and error to complete. I was lucky to have an amazing mentor, Dr. Sadler, who helped me learn and troubleshoot errors throughout the process. The locating of these spaces in archival materials proved challenging. There are a lot of magazines and documents that include queer community spaces, but I only had time to collect a handful of them! Lastly because most of the locations are being pulled from bar guides in magazines and because queer locations were often short lived due to discrimination it was hard for me to find concrete dates for the timeline. With the help of my fiancé, I sorted through all the magazines I had year by year, tracked each location and marked when they were first and last mentioned. These dates are then listed as approximations on the map.
4. I noticed when exploring the interactive map that many of the bars were very short-lived. Was this due to the volatile nature of the hospitality industry, the issue of being a LGBTQ bar in an era in which queerness was not only discriminated against but policed, or other factors not mentioned here?
That is a great observation, and it really comes down to a mix of those two factors. Restaurants and bars of all varieties often have short shelf lives just because, especially in big cities with lots of competition, it is hard to maintain a large enough crowd to cover expenses. The same was true for LGBTQ establishments, however they also had to contend with other forms of discrimination and regulation which often caused them to close after only a few months. The main forms of discrimination and regulation that the queer community’s nightlife locations faced was through liquor licensing laws and cabaret laws from the early 1900s and into the 1990s. The municipal government in NYC along with the NYPD used these two licenses to police queer-friendly establishments and close them, often for violations of public indecency if men were seen dancing together, dressing effeminately, or if there were other displays of affection that the owners of the establishment allowed. Due to this policing queer bars were often short-lived, but they never died out. For every closure there was a new site opening, making for a constantly changing spatial network.
5. As with other cities, there are a few inflection points regarding LGBTQ history, such as the Stonewall Rebellion and Gay Liberation Movement and the AIDS crisis. When you embarked on the project did you know it would revolve around or hinge upon these historical moments, or did you come to understand that as you constructed the project?
Going into the project I knew that the background information I included would cover the Stonewall Rebellion, Gay Liberation, and AIDS because of the secondary literature I read and the time I chose to cover. I knew that Stonewall was a pivotal point in queer history especially within NYC because it reopened the queer world to the general public, but I wanted to be careful when mentioning the event because the LGBTQ community had been around and in a “community” for decades prior and were already politically organized. The burst of visible queer establishments in the city was a direct reaction to Stonewall and was a major part of the Gay Liberation Movement because they became spaces to express sexuality and explore queer identities within the city. Gay Liberation’s emphasis on sexual freedom contributed to the spread of what was in the moment an unknown disease that would go on to plague the gay and straight communities alike. All the milestone events mentioned were linked and each changed the cultural and social landscape of LGBTQ life in NYC that the map traces, so I did go into the project expecting them to link but the depth to which each event was interconnected did surprise me at times!
6. New York is a city with a long LGBTQ history. Did the project confirm or challenge your previous understanding of this history? Or did it result in a combination of both?
I think a little bit of both! I had read books like George Chauncey’s Gay New York and Fiona Buckland’s Impossible Dance before starting the project, so I had some idea of the history of the community and the value that the public spaces I was looking at had for people, but much of the nuance was surprising. What challenged my understanding of LGBTQ history in the city the most was just how many locations I found. My committee and I had expected to find a small number of locations, maybe a few hundred at most, but I ended up locating over 800 and I am sure I missed hundreds of smaller locations across the five boroughs! I had assumed that because of policing and discrimination that there would be fewer locations and that AIDS would have closed bars, bathhouses, and backrooms, but that story was not always true. I did find some patterns that I expected, like a decrease in bathhouses in 1985 to match the city closure orders due to AIDS, but for the first time in my research I saw some bathhouses reopened in the late 1980s which surprised me and pointed me in new directions for my other research. Overall, the visibility and expansiveness of the community was a surprise and some trends in establishments were a challenge to my existing understandings, but overall the reasons I chose the city remained true: that it had a rich history of queer life and that it was a major player in the broader American queer history story.
7. To your knowledge, how have people used the site?
While I am not entirely sure how people are currently using the site, I had envisioned it being used by both future researchers and the public. I hope that researchers will use the map to explore the city’s queer landscape and be able to add to the work or use it to influence their own arguments. I hope that the public uses it to educate themselves about queer history in NYC in a fun and interactive way that ideally will give them new questions that lead them to further research. I also hope that members of the queer community from the era of gay liberation up to the present day use the site as a location of memory. Allowing them to see the landscape as it was during their youth or during times of joy and sorrow, I hope will help with reflection and connection to their past and the community.
8. What in general do you see as the site’s future?
The site’s future in my eyes is that I will continue to edit it as more information and my skills improve so that it will always be getting more accurate and have a larger pool of information for the public and other researchers to access. I want it to be a place where there is direct engagement from the public with me as the researcher so that anyone can submit stories, locations, or dates for me to include on the map. Like the bars and bathhouses themselves I want my website to be a community location of joy, information, and education for both me and viewers.
9. 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?
Digital humanities is moving in an exciting direction. I see it moving toward projects that are more interactive, community-oriented, and grounded in public engagement. As coding tools and web design become more accessible and people from different academic backgrounds get involved, I see the field continuing to grow in ways that allow for new kinds of storytelling, especially for communities that have not always been centered in traditional academic work. I see my website as part of that shift. It brings together digital tools, historical research, and community memory to offer a more visual and emotionally connected way of exploring queer history. I wanted the site to feel both informative and personal. My goal was to create something that could support academic research but also resonate with people who lived in these times or are just now learning about them. In that way, it fits into a larger movement in digital humanities that values history not just as information, but as experience, reflection, and connection.
Kylie Edington earned her MA in History from Virginia Tech (’25), where her work focused on gender and sexuality frameworks. Edington is particularly interested in queer history, the histories of gender and sexuality, and the concepts of enjoyment and pleasure. Edington’s research seeks to uncover how people in the past experienced everyday joy — to highlight the fun, freedoms, and opportunities that shaped their lives. Her MA projects centered on queer communities in urban New York in the late 20th century: where they went to socialize and seek pleasure, and how they navigated and reimagined sexual pleasure during the AIDS crisis.
