Preservation Maryland, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving historic places, has turned to the Web for help documenting the state’s LGBTQ history.
The organization has begun cataloguing places of importance to Maryland’s LGBTQ community through the website historypin.org. Each pin on the website’s interactive map represents an LGBTQ history site. Visitors can click on each individual pin to learn more about the site and see pictures and videos related to it. Anyone can add a pin to the LGBTQ+ Maryland collection.
There are currently over 200 pins in the LGBTQ+ Maryland collection. Most of the current pins are concentrated in Baltimore. However, there are pins representing LGBTQ history throughout the state. The current collection also covers the history of the state as far back as the 17th century.
The digital cataloguing effort comes after a week of listening sessions hosted by Preservation Maryland. The listening meetings were intended to inform a larger context study report on important places of LGBTQ history. Ultimately, Preservation Maryland hopes to use the suggestions from the listening sessions and the historypins collection to nominate LGBTQ sites to the National Register of Historic Places. Currently, there are only 18 sites on the National Register recognized for LGBTQ history. Of the 1,500 historically important places in Maryland, none are listed for importance to the LGBTQ community.