How to 'Queer the Map'
There’s a tree in Jeanne-Mance Park in Montreal’s Plateau neighborhood that has special significance to Lucas LaRochelle. It’s where the 22-year old designer and student at Concordia University met their first serious partner. (Note: LaRochelle uses gender-neutral pronouns.) Later, the couple had a memorable argument there. In the years since, the same place kept coming to mind.
“I was biking home from school one day and I biked by this tree, which I go by every day on my way back from school,” LaRochelle said. “As I continued my bike ride, I was plotting out in my head all of the other places, or objects, or architecture, that held that queer feeling for me.”
This got LaRochelle thinking: What other parts of Montreal could be mapped according to the queer experiences of others? Out of this question came Queering the Map, an interactive project that allows anonymous users to drop pins on a map and write notes about moments they have had regarding their own queer experience.
LaRochelle started developing the map about a year ago as a part of a class project, then continued to develop it independently. Slowly, it started to make its way through LGBTQ networks in Canada. After Montreal DJ Frankie Teardröp shared the map on Facebook last week, the number of pins swiftly multiplied from around 400 to over 1,600 before spreading from Canada to the continental U.S., and the rest of the world. By February 8, the map boasted more than 5,000 entries.