Honors College Theses

Publication Date

2024

Major

History (B.A.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Faculty Mentor

Dr. Robert Batchelor

Abstract

At the time Baltimore’s queer community emerged, much of the country did not accept anyone who identified as gay. Appearing during the 1940s, gay bars then paradoxically expanded following the Pepper Hill raid in 1955. The thesis builds upon the work of Lucas Hilderbrand (Duke UP, 2023) and Susan Ferentinos (“Maryland LGBTQ Historic Context Study,” 2020) to argue that the physical infrastructure of gay bars and the neighborhoods that developed around them drove the creation of a public culture in Baltimore out of LGBTQ subcultures. It uses a geospatial database based on oral histories and newspaper archives to analyze neighborhoods surrounding the bars, the AIDS crisis, and the ongoing fight to preserve these spaces. Because of the nature of the archives, the research required an interdisciplinary approach to spatial humanities, urban anthropology, and sociological data, which reveals very different kinds of urban patterns than traditional histories of the city have.

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