World gay guide

Visualizing Lgbtq+ Space and American Life

Welcome to Mapping the Homosexual Guides!

While operating one of his many gay bars in the 1960s, Bob Damron started a side project publishing gay tour guides that featured bars like his. Called the Bob Damron Address Books, these guides proved famous and became a valuable resource for gay travelers looking for friends, companions, and safety.

First published in an era when most states banned same-sex attachment both in public and private spaces, these move guides helped gays (and to a lesser extent lesbians) find bars, cocktail lounges, bookstores, restaurants, bathhouses, cinemas, and cruising grounds that catered to people like themselves. Much fond the Green Books of the 1950s and 1960s, which African Americans used to find friendly businesses that would cater to black citizens in the era of Jim Crow apartheid, Damron’s guidebooks aided a generation of homosexual people in identifying sites of community, pleasure, and politics.

Damron’s guidebooks were part of a growing interest in gay travel manual publications that began in the early 1960s. Bob Damron wasn’t the only entrepreneur looking to propose gay consumers