Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis
Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis is a collaborative project of the community-based St. Louis LGBT History Project, Washington University faculty and librarians, and area museums and archives. This digital map features more than 800 locations significant to metropolitan St. Louis’s queer history from 1945 to 1992. We situate these locations within the “divided city” to foreground how the region was divided by sexuality and gender and how LGBTQ life itself was riven by multiple entwined forms of segregation.
The map features a political timeline; interpretive essays on race and gender divisions, experiences of policing and violence, and public sex; and images and documents to tell the stories behind the maps. Additional essays will address the creation of faith-based communities, and health challenges.
Mapping LGBTQ St. Louis was funded by the Washington University Center for the Humanities Divided City Initiative, a Mellon-funded Urban Humanities Initiative.
Oral History
I am currently engaged in collecting oral histories of individuals who had some connection to LGBTQ experiences/communities in the St. Louis region in the years before 2000. Most of these oral histories will be collected by undergraduate students enrolled in my Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies course, “Documenting the Queer Past in St. Louis, while some interviews may be conducted by me or other individuals at times when the class is not in session. In Fall 2017, the first group of students completed twelve oral history interviews wtih thirteen current or former St. Louisans. The goal is to complete forty interviews in the next five years. We are particularly interested in collecting oral histories for LGBTQ St. Louisans whose experiences may have been overlooked by existing historical institutions, among them people of color, lesbian-identified women, and transgender individuals.
Audiofiles and transcripts of these interviews will be deposited in the Department of Special Collections at Olin Library, Washington University, where they will be available to researchers. Some of these will also be available digitally. For further information, please contact me at afriedman@wustl.edu