By Larry Urish contributing writer
You needn’t be a dendrologist to understand that you can’t tell much about a forest by examining just one tree. It takes a broader perspective to “see the forest for the trees,” in this case literally.
Likewise, no historian can discern much about a group of people, past or present, by looking at just one artifact. However, by “pulling back” and analyzing thousands of artifacts, then culling together the collective information provided to see a much bigger picture, the historian can draw some often-fascinating conclusions.
That’s where digital history comes in.
“Analyzing digital history provides a broader view, a more expansive overall picture, than singular bits of data found on the internet,” said Eric Gonzaba, Cal State Fullerton assistant professor of American studies.
Gonzaba earned his master’s and doctorate degrees at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. After starting graduate school at George Mason, “I had no idea they train all of their (history) students in digital history.” Drawn toward gay history, Gonzaba studied gay travel guides as a means of viewing the past and soon discovered the Damron Guides.
“Damron” refers to Bob Damron, who owned several gay bars, primarily in San Francisco. As a side project during the mid-1960s, he started publishing the “Bob Damron Address Books,” which initially featured information about other gay bars but later expanded to include a host of other gay meeting spots throughout the U.S.: bookstores, restaurants, bathhouses, cinemas, cocktail lounges, cruising grounds and the like.
The Damron Guides grew massively (but quietly) popular among the mostly closeted gay community. To many gay people throughout the country, the guides provided a sense of community and safety. To Gonzaba, however, it furnished a historical treasure trove of data points ripe for electronic picking.
This brings us to the Mapping the Gay Guides project (mappingthegayguides.org), a textbook example of applied digital history and the name of an exhibit appearing through June 23 at the Muzeo Museum and Cultural Center in Anaheim. The project, co-director Gonzaba said, fulfills “the promise of digital history. By using its broader perspective, we can learn things we can’t otherwise see.”
The online archive itself can be used in two ways: Virtual visitors can examine an interactive U.S. map that furnishes the location of every Damron Guide entry between 1965 and 1989. And drop-down menus allow the information to be filtered by state, location type, amenity feature and year. An assortment of coded amenities includes B (frequented by Blacks), D (dancing), PT (pool tables), L (ladies), and so forth. In addition, the online archive’s Vignettes section furnishes articles that provide deeper dives into aspects of gay life by looking more closely at specific location types and amenities.
The archive reveals, for example, that 154 gay spots appeared across 12 states in 1965, but by 1980 this same territory was home to more than 1,000 locations. By inputting more than 25,000 entries (and counting) into the database, Gonzaba, co-director Professor Amanda Regan, of Clemson University, and a group of interns and graduate research assistants aren’t just analyzing digital history; they’re creating it, one data point at a time.
The National Endowment for the Humanities took notice, awarding Mapping the Gay Guides in 2021 with a three-year grant, allowing the project to expand its database of Damron’s guides published through 2005.
The “Mapping the Gay Guides” exhibit at Muzeo is composed of three sections, Gonzaba said. Part I is about life for gays before the Damron guides were first published. “And it explores the rise of gay print culture (magazines, pulp novels, newspapers and other travel guides). We’ll have a wall full of different gay publications.”
Part II, a look at Damron and his guides, furnishes a wall map of Southern California. “Visitors can read through the importance of different types of gay sites in Orange County, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, San Diego and Long Beach,” Gonzaba said. Each region will focus on a different location type: gay bars in L.A., and hotels in Palm Springs, for example. Associated memorabilia will appear in nearby display cases.
Focusing on the Mapping the Gay Guides project itself, Part III includes reflections by three CSUF grad students who studied in greater detail various subjects revealed through the analysis of data from the archive. Separate QR codes furnished by each student lead to their respective articles online, among many other articles found in the digital archive’s Vignettes section. For example, one QR code leads to “Beyond the ‘Rice Bar’: A History of Mugi’s,” an article that delves into a former gathering place frequented by members of the L.A. gay Asian community.
“In 10 or 15 years, people will publish new insights from our data,” Gonzaba said. “We learn digital history to not just learn history, but to learn new questions to ask about history.”
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