Jekyll website for the Love Cults, Masquerading gals, and Subway Sammies Project @ Boston College
By Sam Hurwitz
The aim of this digital humanities project is to analyze the diverse LGBTQ+ subcultures that existed in mid-twentieth century Boston. The personal accounts of LGBTQ+ life during this time are few and far between. There is limited scholarship on the LGBTQ+ community of Boston before the late 1960s. Tessa Bahoosh created an online digital project titled Mapping Boston's Former Gay Bars. Their project mapped all of Boston's gay bars from the 1920s through 2020, but did little else to analyze the city's queer subcultures. Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland, published and compiled by The History Project of Boston, and The Hub of the Gay Universe: An LGBTQ History of Boston, Provincetown, and Beyond by Russ Lopez, insufficiently examined Boston's queer history. Their analyses were superficial and anecdotal and they failed to utilize certain digital scholarship tools, like ArcGIS, that are invaluable in analyzing the spatiality of Boston's queer subcultures.
By analyzing The Mid-Town Journal and court materials from The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Archives, my project will help not only map the multifaceted LGBTQ+ subcultures of Boston in the mid-twentieth century, but also assess and examine the personal experiences and private lives of queer Bostonians.
- Follow this guide to install Ruby and Jekyll
- Install Node
git clonethis repo and thencdinside the directory- Comment out the
urlandbaseurllines of_config.ymlwhen working locally - Install Ruby dependencies by running
bundle install - Install Node dependencies by running
npm install - Run the server with
bundle exec jekyll serve
Jekyll & Tailwind Setup based on TailPages by Harry Wang (Chinese: 王建楠)