
If you haven’t experienced Queering the Map (QTM) it’s an online map of the world which allows people to anonymously plot their own queer story. Stories are a few lines long, and range from sexy to sweet, to the raw, the painful and dark, to the absurd and hilarious.
QTM creator Lucas LaRochelle speaks to Sissy Screens writer and editor Stephanie Williams about the project, which was born from a desire to mark their own queer experiences in a meaningful way. That was back in 2017, and since then plots on the map have multiplied: firstly, at the hand of their own community in Montreal; then throughout Canada; to every continent of the world, international waters included.
That was the original impetus. I then developed QTM, placed five of my own stories and launched it. Over the past few years the site has grown beyond my wildest expectations and there are now over 86,000 stories, in 23 languages, from across the world.
"I think intimacy is one of the things that’s so special about Queering The Map, which in many ways is lacking from dominant social media platforms."
The first answer to that question is the anonymity of the platform. QTM allows you to publish and write outside the confines of the user profile, which often asks that we ‘perform’ by creating and curating a version of ourselves that is marketable. Users leave behind an intimate trace of their life that is not tied in perpetuity to their other digital selves.
Secondly, the act of contributing to QTM is an act of sharing one’s story for the collective. It becomes an act of giving, one that is decidedly different to the kind of self-promotion that we’re often asked to do in other digital spaces.
The moderation process also plays a role—if people try to post a story that includes someone’s first and last name, it’s not approved, or a phone number, email, exact address. That’s all blocked. This moderation process is why it takes an infamously long time for something to appear live on QTM. There’s something like 42,000 stories currently in the moderation queue! Moderation is labour!
There’s also a large amount of emotional labour to do this kind of work, and it’s something I take quite seriously. I don’t moderate passively on my phone on the metro, because it can be very intense. I mean there’s some submissions that are like ‘cute, cute, great, great’ and then there’s ones that fuck you up to your very core.
I sit in my room and I click and I read each story carefully. So it’s an act of intimacy between myself and the project. It’s not some algorithm running through all of the stories saying ‘go, go, go’ online, which is unfortunate because I think many people would like their posts to appear much faster.
It’s a big labour of love.
"Queering space is not about possessing it, but rather to critique a static understanding of how space is produced. By who and for whom?"
The ethics of the project were articulated early on, QTM will never be the project that earns me any money in a direct sense, but that's never been the point.
Back on data though, the new project I’ve been working on lately is developing an artificial intelligence trained on the textual and visual database of QTM, whose name is QT.bot. They are an AI that is generating speculative queer and trans pasts/presents/futures and their corresponding locations. The intent isn’t to draw any conclusions about QTM, but rather to work with the data to make it even more opaque and confusing. It's a practice of fabulating in the archive, generating new pasts/presents/futures from the queer and trans histories that have been recorded on QTM. QT.bot is trying to work with data and AI in a non-productive/poetic way. It’s queer in terms of the content of the training set, but also in terms of the approach to data—queer uses of AI outside the realm of progress, efficiency, etcetera, and towards fantasy and fabulation.
You can follow QT.bot on Instagram to follow their development.
And then, how does QTM activate real spaces? I think that’s a question that will drive a lot of continued output that comes out of QTM as a project, through workshops, events and performances. Recently, I organised an exhibition and two week public program, called Queering The Map: ON_SITE that functioned as a temporary queer community space.
I ran a workshop with one of my dear friends and collaborators nènè myriam konaté called ‘Prototyping for Emergent Spaces’ in which we collectively prototype possible futures that emerge through the synergies between our individual narratives. This workshop begins with a personal storytelling circle, and often people will share with the kind of intimacy that they do on QTM—because QTM has been the reference point for this workshop. So that’s been a lot of the work that I’ve been doing to try to extend the kinds of intimacies that are happening in this digital space into a physical location, if only briefly.
"So much of theorising around queer space is thinking about the notion of belonging. But as a settler on stolen land, questions of belonging need to be complicated."
While it is only one small step, QTM includes an acknowledgement of territory and links out to native-land.ca to encourage users to interrogate on a deeper level what their identities mean in relation to the lands and waters on which they live. My hope is that QTM makes evident the multiplicity of relations to land, and that people consider the overlapping histories and presents within a given location when they post. It’s a collective map; not an individual map. Queering space is not about possessing it, but rather to critique a static understanding of how space is produced. By who and for whom?
Making links between queering and decolonisation is an ongoing goal of QTM—the installation of hetero-patriarchal systems and the erasure of genders that exist in expanse of binary male and female categorisations is colonialisms dirty work. As a story that is posted at a school in Honolulu reads: “…I learned that decolonization must mean queer liberation and that queer liberation must mean decolonization.”



If you haven’t experienced Queering the Map (QTM) it’s an online map of the world which allows people to anonymously plot their own queer story. Stories are a few lines long, and range from sexy to sweet, to the raw, the painful and dark, to the absurd and hilarious.
QTM creator Lucas LaRochelle speaks to Sissy Screens writer and editor Stephanie Williams about the project, which was born from a desire to mark their own queer experiences in a meaningful way. That was back in 2017, and since then plots on the map have multiplied: firstly, at the hand of their own community in Montreal; then throughout Canada; to every continent of the world, international waters included.
That was the original impetus. I then developed QTM, placed five of my own stories and launched it. Over the past few years the site has grown beyond my wildest expectations and there are now over 86,000 stories, in 23 languages, from across the world.
"I think intimacy is one of the things that’s so special about Queering The Map, which in many ways is lacking from dominant social media platforms."
The first answer to that question is the anonymity of the platform. QTM allows you to publish and write outside the confines of the user profile, which often asks that we ‘perform’ by creating and curating a version of ourselves that is marketable. Users leave behind an intimate trace of their life that is not tied in perpetuity to their other digital selves.
Secondly, the act of contributing to QTM is an act of sharing one’s story for the collective. It becomes an act of giving, one that is decidedly different to the kind of self-promotion that we’re often asked to do in other digital spaces.
The moderation process also plays a role—if people try to post a story that includes someone’s first and last name, it’s not approved, or a phone number, email, exact address. That’s all blocked. This moderation process is why it takes an infamously long time for something to appear live on QTM. There’s something like 42,000 stories currently in the moderation queue! Moderation is labour!
There’s also a large amount of emotional labour to do this kind of work, and it’s something I take quite seriously. I don’t moderate passively on my phone on the metro, because it can be very intense. I mean there’s some submissions that are like ‘cute, cute, great, great’ and then there’s ones that fuck you up to your very core.
I sit in my room and I click and I read each story carefully. So it’s an act of intimacy between myself and the project. It’s not some algorithm running through all of the stories saying ‘go, go, go’ online, which is unfortunate because I think many people would like their posts to appear much faster.
It’s a big labour of love.
"Queering space is not about possessing it, but rather to critique a static understanding of how space is produced. By who and for whom?"
The ethics of the project were articulated early on, QTM will never be the project that earns me any money in a direct sense, but that's never been the point.
Back on data though, the new project I’ve been working on lately is developing an artificial intelligence trained on the textual and visual database of QTM, whose name is QT.bot. They are an AI that is generating speculative queer and trans pasts/presents/futures and their corresponding locations. The intent isn’t to draw any conclusions about QTM, but rather to work with the data to make it even more opaque and confusing. It's a practice of fabulating in the archive, generating new pasts/presents/futures from the queer and trans histories that have been recorded on QTM. QT.bot is trying to work with data and AI in a non-productive/poetic way. It’s queer in terms of the content of the training set, but also in terms of the approach to data—queer uses of AI outside the realm of progress, efficiency, etcetera, and towards fantasy and fabulation.
You can follow QT.bot on Instagram to follow their development.
And then, how does QTM activate real spaces? I think that’s a question that will drive a lot of continued output that comes out of QTM as a project, through workshops, events and performances. Recently, I organised an exhibition and two week public program, called Queering The Map: ON_SITE that functioned as a temporary queer community space.
I ran a workshop with one of my dear friends and collaborators nènè myriam konaté called ‘Prototyping for Emergent Spaces’ in which we collectively prototype possible futures that emerge through the synergies between our individual narratives. This workshop begins with a personal storytelling circle, and often people will share with the kind of intimacy that they do on QTM—because QTM has been the reference point for this workshop. So that’s been a lot of the work that I’ve been doing to try to extend the kinds of intimacies that are happening in this digital space into a physical location, if only briefly.
"So much of theorising around queer space is thinking about the notion of belonging. But as a settler on stolen land, questions of belonging need to be complicated."
While it is only one small step, QTM includes an acknowledgement of territory and links out to native-land.ca to encourage users to interrogate on a deeper level what their identities mean in relation to the lands and waters on which they live. My hope is that QTM makes evident the multiplicity of relations to land, and that people consider the overlapping histories and presents within a given location when they post. It’s a collective map; not an individual map. Queering space is not about possessing it, but rather to critique a static understanding of how space is produced. By who and for whom?
Making links between queering and decolonisation is an ongoing goal of QTM—the installation of hetero-patriarchal systems and the erasure of genders that exist in expanse of binary male and female categorisations is colonialisms dirty work. As a story that is posted at a school in Honolulu reads: “…I learned that decolonization must mean queer liberation and that queer liberation must mean decolonization.”