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Lost Spaces, Lost Technologies, and Lost People: Online History Projects Seek to Recover LGBTQ+ Spatial Histories

This article looks at online history projects focused on “lost” spaces, with an emphasis on lost LGBTQ+ spaces. In documenting lost spaces, these projects also highlight lost or marginalized historical actors. I position these projects at the center of debates surrounding how to recover “lost” peoples who have been left out or erased from mainstream histories. This article will discuss the various techniques used by digital humanities projects, focusing particularly on Jan Kurth’s “Lost Womyn’s Space”, Greggor Mattson’s “Mapping Lost Lesbian Bars”, and my own project, “The Feminist Restaurant Project”. This article discusses the various techniques used and the value these open access history websites serve for scholars and non-scholars alike. The article finishes by exploring how lost space projects preserve what was not previously preserved, while these websites are simultaneously vulnerable to similar preservation issues that plague digital humanities projects and community archives more broadly, especially those separate from large institutions. These challenges raise the questions: is lost space doomed to be lost? Can the history of LGBTQ+ space be recuperated? What role do digital humanities have in this work? And what does it mean to be found? What does it mean to be lost? In 1983, A Woman’s Coffeehouse of Minneapolis, Minnesota taped an open community meeting during which members of the predominately white, working class, lesbian coffeehouse could reflect on their experiences. One middle-aged participant remarked that by not speaking with younger generations of lesbians about differences between their comingout experiences, she felt that “she [had] lost her history,” [WCC 1983]. This woman’s concern about not having forums in which to share and document her own history and that of her community was not unique. Archivists and historians have discussed how to preserve and to recover LGBTQ+ histories; less attention has been given to the ways that digital humanities projects have tried to preserve and recover “lost” LGBTQ+ spatial histories. This article seeks to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing online projects focused on the history “lost” LGBTQ+ spaces, particularly women’s spaces. In documenting “lost” LGBTQ+ spaces, these projects highlight previously overlooked marginalized historical actors and geographies. Although the scale of projects varies from local studies to national or even international, these projects seek to empower marginalized communities by acting as testimony to their existence, to provide resources for others to build upon the research, and to document particular historical phenomena. This paper will discuss the various techniques used by the creators of these projects, particularly Jan Kurth’s “Lost Womyn’s Space” [Kurth 2011], Greggor Mattson’s “Mapping Lost Lesbian Bars”, [Mattson 2016], and my own project “The Feminist Restaurant Project” [Ketchum 2015]. It is outside of the scope of this article to look at every history website devoted to documenting or finding “lost” LGBTQ+ histories. Instead by narrowing it down to the scope of projects devoted to documenting “lost” spaces, primarily lost lesbian and queer women’s and feminist spaces on the national and international scale, this paper still provides fruitful comparison. Despite the projects’ emphasis on lesbian spatial culture, I use the LGBTQ+ umbrella. The three projects documented spaces that served a wider range of people than just lesbians. Furthermore, the problematics raised by this article relate to other “lost” LGBTQ+ projects, even if they are not wholly the same. For this article, I analyzed the projects themselves, as well as interviewed their makers and included my own reflections