This project is a preliminary exploratory analysis of the Mapping the Gay Guides data. Lucas Avelar is currently the Project Data Manager for Mapping the Gay Guides.

The Gay New York City in the second half of the twentieth century was a stubborn response to the risks of Normative New York - the heteronormative cultural topography and sexual regime established during and after the Second World War. In the public sphere, particular locales became associated with gay culture and resistance to status quo by being categorized as dangerous and risky for gay men. This reflection uses methodologies of data exploratory analysis to examine the available data from the Mapping the Gay Guides project and visualize potential correlation between the suppressed gay landscape in New York City and appropriation of “risky” public spaces of the normative city by gay men.

"Risky New York" uses the available data from the Mapping the Gay Guides project from 1965 to 1989 as well as unreleased data from 1990 to 1996. It also draws from historical schoalrship on gender and urban space to understand how gay men appropriated public spaces in the city of New York between the 1960s and the 1990s, resulting in distinct spatial practices that resisted to gendered dynamics of power and the normative American urban and cultural landscape.

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