This map seeks to highlight instances of injustice, hostility, and violence toward LGBTQ+ individuals. While the South prides itself on its warm and welcoming atmosphere, I seek to illuminate how the LGBTQ community have come to feel shame about their orientations.
This map could not possibly include all of the many aggressions and microaggressions lobbied toward the LGBTQ community over the years in this hotbed of intolerance; the map does seek to convey, however, the more publicly acknowledged instances. All of the research comes from the Hoole Library’s Special Collections of the Spectrum organization’s documents. These documents have not been processed or published, making this project unique in bringing these voices of history together for perhaps the first time.
Places on the map routinely illuminate a silencing of voices, beginning in 1983 when the Young Americans for Freedom sought to curtail a newly-formed Gay Student Union’s freedom of free speech and assembly, and continuing on into the early 2000s, in which we find a community member being assaulted for his perceived sexual orientation. This map seeks to make rhetorical choices in showing the nature of homophobia over several decades, and to offer commentary on this silencing of LGBTQ individuals.
The voices heard will primarily be those who seek to silence; in doing so, my hope is that we can understand the vitriol exhibited toward this minority in order to combat future instances of homophobia. This map is dedicated to the hundreds of young people who have chosen to take their own lives because others have made them feel lesser than because of their sexual orientation.