Rare and hard to fine, MGG seeks to make these valuable sources available by digitizing, transcribing and mapping the locations within each guide. Our team associates geographical coordinates with each location mentioned within the Damron Guides and the website provides an interface for visualizing the growth and change over time in these locations. Made up of a public-facing and freely available web app as well as a series of digital vignettes that analyze the data using historical context, MGG stands to make a significant contribution to scholars understanding of the ways in which LGBTQ people negotiated and appropriated public space to form community.

Using a subset of the data digitized for this project, we have also written an article entitled “Mapping the New Gay South: Queer Space and Southern Life 1965-1980” for publication in Southern History Quarterly (forthcoming). In this article, we argue that the appearance and utilization of gay space as an integral part of southern life helped create what we refer to as “the New Gay South,” a robust but close-knit network of queer geography far from the gay meccas of San Francisco or New York.

In 2021 the project was awarded an NEH xxx grant. Over the course of the next few years our team will work to create another 25 years of data from the Damron Guides and update the visualizations on the site. You can read more about the next phase of the project on the project blog.