queer story 4
The map is one you'll recognise. It's of our planet after all, you can even spy the little Google Map man in the bottom right corner, but this map is different. It's tinged a soft pick for one and covered in black pins, sometimes in clusters that hide whole countries, other times lonely markers in the middle of the Russian mountains say. This is Queering the Map — a community-driven project that started in Montreal where the map first drops you. It is described as a "community-generated mapping project that geo-locates queer moments, memories and histories in relation to physical space." This is a map, spacial yes, delineating boundaries, streets and intersections, but also a temporal and memorial map that reveals the contours of a place, not through its geography, but its psyche, and a queer psyche at that. (It should also be noted in the 'about' section that the creators acknowledge Indigenous people and that Montreal is the territory of the Kanien’kehá:ka, encouraging the user to think about decolonising the spaces they visit and to support local Indigenous groups in Canada.)
It will be no surprise to queer people to hear that queer life has become more scattered, less unified, no longer tied to specific locations as gay clubs close and queer nights shut down in cities across the globe. Walk around London's Soho on a Saturday night and you're more likely to spot tourists and trendy hipster-types whose chain restaurants are slowly taking over. The one terrible lesbian bar that remains is an Anderson shelter-like hot mess (and not in a sexy way), hidden behind a grim black door. The aim of Queering the Map is to capture spaces both official and renegade, public and private and to mark the acts of queerness that occurred there. Whether they are singular revelations, profound meetings or casual, brief assignations. Queering the Map holds a record when so much of queer life is easily lost or erased and aims to become a repository of queer memories and stories.
These are the cities I have lived in: London, Leeds, Leicester — and I've added my stories to them. The spot in my parent's back garden where I first came out to my mum. The gay friends I made a uni (the first proper out people I had ever met). The street I was walking down when I told my best friend (well I say told, actually she was telling me about a dream she had about me kissing a girl, I said, 'Well funny you should say that because...' and we laughed and laughed about her prophetic vision). I added the spot of my now girlfriend's and mine's first date, where we had to huddle under her umbrella on a rooftop bar in the rain - and how later a double rainbow appeared and we both joked about being blessed by the gay gods.
That's just four tiny stories, each with their own black pin markers, standing proud but alone. Zoom out further though and the black pins start to merge and overlap. They become a whole sea of black pins, tiny narratives that cover great swathes of land. I can't tell you how happy it makes me to see them, to feel a sense of connection to each pin, that there are so many stories, so many memories and layers and layers of different queer people out there in the world getting on with their lives. Growing up in Leicester I can't recall meeting a single 'out' person, but this map tells a different story: they were always there, we were always here, getting on with things, falling in love, falling out of love, being happy, being sad. Just living our unmappable, messy, wonderful, complex lives.
You can explore the stories on Queering the Map and add your own here
queer story is an ongoing narrative on coming out and being part of the queer community
If you have a tiny narrative to share please get in touch at thetinynarrative@gmail.com