By Hannah Grover

When I began working with the Data Justice Hub team, I decided to focus on a topic that aligned with my PhD topic— considering a variety of LGBTQ2IA+ communities online and how their work is visible to the community offline. My interests changed numerous times, due to the vast amount of work we do as a team, but my heart has always stayed centred on queer spaces. When I proposed looking at Queering the Map and interviewing the website’s creator, it became the perfect avenue for me to combine issues that are deeply embedded in our work— data, privacy, care, community activism, and marginality. Queering the Map is an archival website dedicated to preserving self-described queer experiencing around the world. It allows anonymous users to pinpoint any spot on the map and describe an instance where they felt their queerness was validated, they experienced something close to their queerness – be that experience positive or negative – or they simply wanted community with folks just like them on this deeply communal and supportive website. It speaks to our work at the Data Justice Hub, because we consider what the benefits of online archival activism and storytelling are when creating spaces for care and community. Described as a “counter-mapping platform for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space” (LaRochelle 2023), Queering the Map provides media that is both alternative to mainstream depictions of queerness and validating as an online platform dedicated to community, validation, and safety.

This blog speaks to Queering the Map and its practices in community care. This is an in-progress research project conducted as a part of the SSHRC-funded project Mobilizing Data for Justice. The project investigates the ways that Lucas LaRochelle, the creator of the online mapping project, Queering the Map interacts with LGBTQ2IA+ communities worldwide to collect and preserve their experiences and stories. This research was conducted through a series of interviews with LaRochelle, alongside discourse analysis of the content on the website to  provide care and community work done on LaRochelle’s website. I would also like to use this forum to connect this research with my own personal analysis as a queer researcher who felt both intrigued and validated by the website’s model and content.

Ultimately, the purpose of this project is to consider the importance of what “queer storytelling” and “queer communities” look like in online, archiving space. Using the interviews, analysis of the website and stories posted on the website, I would like to facilitate a discussion regarding the importance of alternative media, storytelling, and queerness. This is an important piece of research to be showcased due to the impact Queering the Map has on marginalized communities and their safety, the preservation of queer stories, and the rejection of individualism and the concept of “truth” in online spaces.

Queering the Map was established in 2017 to allow users to anonymously submit experiences they perceived as queer, as well, to mark spaces on the globe as queer, making visible neighbourhoods and businesses where queer experiences would have remained otherwise invisible. During our interview on September 22 of last year, LaRochelle told me

…the impulse for starting Queering the Map really came out of a desire to build digital community and learn with my expanded community. Ultimately, I got… bored thinking about my own experiences of queerness and transness. And so because I am trained as a web developer… internet based tools are…. what I gravitate towards in terms of… building interfaces as ways of asking questions. And so I use those tools to build a platform with… open ended question of how people how queer and trans people experience the world (LaRochelle 2022).

This sentiment was an important one for a researcher like myself, and many others, to hear regarding the strides being made in online archiving as activism and a tool of care. Archiving is often associated with strictly professional or academic modes of thinking, and is not taken into consideration when looking at online activism. However, archiving is a powerful method of communication that can present unique and impactful modes of storytelling, like Queering the Map has done. To give folks an idea of how the platform works, LaRochelle (2022) explains:

“in layman’s or extended terms, it’s a map on the internet, onto which people can pin a location and add a text based description of whatever they define as an experience of queerness and or transness in relation to that space. And then, once those posts are… moderated for hate speech, spam, and unsafe content and breaches of anonymity – so full names, phone numbers, addresses, email addresses, any identifying information that could breach someone’s anonymity – they are then posted live… to the map”.

The role of moderation is important here, because while the website is geared towards being a space of positivity and unity for the queer and trans communities of the world, there have been a number of cyber attacks by right-wing, homophobic groups attempting to take down the website. LaRochelle described a number of instances of both misinformation and targeted attacks against Queering the Map. They mention an instance of a three day spam attack in 2018 by Trump supporters by virtue of the websites’ community support both offline and online. The Trump supporters created a cross-site scripting attack that injected malicious JavaScript code into the database that created pop ups that said, either “Make America Great Again”, or “Donald Trump as President”. In response to this, LaRochelle (2022) shut the site down and posted a call for help on the URL. The queer community was swift in their assistance to LaRochelle, as they describe that “10 queer and trans developers from largely across Turtle Island, assembled and we co-created a moderation system to ensure that that kind of attack could not happen on the platform again”. In June of 2018, they relaunched the platform. Since then, it has grown to now over 227,000 submissions on the platform in 24 languages worldwide, on every continent.

LaRochelle notes that the user’s anonymity is of the utmost importance to them, which is why their web moderation has expanded to an entire team. This team of moderators ensures that if it is anyone who is not a public persona, then those are not allowed on the map. Neither are phone numbers, exact addresses, unless those exact addresses are speaking explicitly to a historical past linked to said physical location. For example, “this is the location of the drug store in Montreal”. And then, emails, and social media handles are also blocked. Everything else is encouraged. LaRochelle (2022) and the team of moderators encourage the creativity of their users to express their narratives, “which includes many stories, like fanfictions about gay or trans polar bears and penguins. Fanfiction rewritings of films like Titanic, of which there are many, stories of being railed by Aquaman”. Queer humour or memes are a big part of the posts as well. The context is impossible for the moderators or other users to know, unless they are privy to the poster’s perspective, either through the poster explicitly explaining, or other users having an experience with the poster:

One example of this is like a couple of days ago, I was moderating and there was one that just says like “the hill!”, exclamation mark, and that’s the entire post. And that counts. So it’s like the context… like I don’t… because Queering the Map is creating these… hyper situated counter publics….I don’t know what that means, because I don’t have a contextual relationship to that hill, or the person that potentially posted that. But you might or… someone in that person’s community, so it matters in that context. So privileging opacity, as a method of storytelling is really important on Queering the Map. And so even… if [moderators] don’t understand what the story is about, it will still go through (2022).

LaRochelle continues to moderate and maintain this website with their team of moderators and community support. These findings indicate to me that Queering the Map has demonstrated the importance of power of archiving and online activism as a powerful tool of caring and storytelling in our digital era. However, what remained for me was the connection to my own  queerness as an individual and researcher.

I was first made aware of Queering the Map when I moved to Montreal, long before I worked with the Data Justice Hub. My partner mentioned making their own post on the website, but we were yet unfamiliar with queer areas in our midst. As I explored the project further, I considered how I navigate queerness in my own life. I draw upon thinkers Kirby et al. (2021) as they mention that “highlight[ing] these publicly private stories’ connective and affective underpinnings, and the political potentialities (and problems) therein for queer belonging and community-building” is an important consideration for navigating online spaces for queer folks. However, what became ever more apparent to me was the storytelling and the modes of “fanfiction” that remains ever permanent for queer folks. LaRochelle (2022) expressed to me that “part of the reason also for allowing and actually encouraging fanfictions/fantasy/lies is also trying to think about what a queer approach to the archive might look like. I think it’s important for communities of people who have historically been already framed as being untrue or unreal, so like queerness as a phase transness as a performance as an untruth”. Forcing ideas of legitimacy and truth in the context of telling and recording history is problematic for myself and many other queer people. The importance of storytelling and fantasy in queer and trans communities is clear, so it would only make sense that those stories would also count in a queer archive. I found myself impressed with the archive’s commitment to untruth or queering historical archiving, because one person’s truth is subjective, but it is still a worthwhile experience to achieve. That, to me, is the true beauty of Queering the Map and why I felt connected to it, as a digital and queer scholar.

As our team winds down our research, I have had time to reflect on the work I have done over the past two years. The experience I have had researching, recording, documenting, and analyzing Queering the Map has been a fruitful professional and personal endeavour as it gives me clarity regarding what a queer archive means and how online resources and archiving serve as both a mode of storytelling and collective remembering. Lucas LaRochelle’s work has had an outsized impact on queer communities worldwide — the website’s visibility has made that ever evident. I am but one of many of the queer folks that this work has impacted. Through queerer, inclusive, and accessible digital activism like Queering the Map, tools for archiving and storytelling online can only become more expansive and challenge institutional exclusion, prejudices, and subjugation. It is my hope, and the hope of many other digital activists and scholars, that communities like this one will gain greater traction and visibility and different modes of storytelling receive both their flowers and their due historical documentation.

References

Kirby, Emma, et al. “Queering the Map: Stories of Love, Loss and (Be) longing Within a Digital Cartographic Archive.” Media, Culture & Society 43.6, 2021: 1043-1060.

LaRochelle, Lucas. Interview conducted by Hannah Grover, September 27th, 2022.

LaRochelle, Lucas. “Queering the Map.” Queering The Map, https:/www.queeringthemap.com/.

Raffa, Taylor. Affective Claims to Digital Space: An Analysis of Queering the Map. Diss. The American University of Paris (France), 2020.