Desire lines, queer cartographies and cartographic queers

Digital technologies have enabled communities to map and (re)claim space in novel ways and at significant scale. Queering the Map (queeringthemap.com), a community-generated counter-mapping platform for archiving LGBTQ2IA + experiences in place, offers a rich example of the potential of cartographic technologies and practices of storymapping. In this article, we share findings from an analysis of stories pinned to Queering the Map and interviews with people who have engaged with the platform. Drawing from queer geographies and theorisations of desire, our findings reveal how desires are mapped and documented by users in relation to the affordances of the platform. Through a focus on concepts of moorings, constellations and traces, we illuminate the spatial dimensions surfaced in participants’ experiences and readings of the map. We consider the impacts of multiplicity as a constitutive feature of queer space: how the platform's invitation to claim any and all space as now, as always, as potentially, as multiply queer moves visitors to map queerly, to document (through) queer modes, to trace desire lines and to queer cartography. We reveal how people contribute to a map of queer life and to a queer mapping of life – and thereby become cartographic queers.