
Mapping Gay-Friendly Cities Through History - CapitalistCartr
http://m.nautil.us/issue/81/maps/mapping-gay_friendly-cities-through-history
======
eesmith
.... there's nothing about actually mapping gay-friendly cities through
history here.

I was expecting something about, for example, Berlin during the Weimar
Republic (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weimar_culture)
), or Chelsea in the early-to-mid 1900s.

Instead, it maps the Gay Travel Index for 2017, according to a model from
Ptolemy’s _Tetrabiblos_. And does so poorly, as far as I can tell.

The only other historical mapping reference is a geographical model of Richard
Burton. The essay says:

> Indeed, when the great Victorian explorer Richard Burton developed his own
> theory of geographically-influenced sexuality, the Middle East was
> explicitly included, and England excluded, from his map of what he termed
> the “Sotadic Zone”—a region where homosexuality was supposedly natural,
> accepted, and common.

However,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton#Sotadic...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton#Sotadic_Zone)
describes that zone as:

> a geographic zone in which pederasty (romantic-sexual intimacy between a boy
> and a man) is prevalent and celebrated among the indigenous inhabitants

and that it includes all of the indigenous cultures in the Americas
(pre-1492).

Homosexuality and pederasty are not the same thing.

To make matters even more confusing, the methods use to determine "Ruling
triplicity" for the x-axis of Figure 2 seems flawed. It uses the "line running
from London to Riyadh" and the map of Figure 1 centers everything in Antioch.

But Ptolemy lived in Alexandria, and the source text from Ptolemy as given at
[http://www.ye-stars.com/ptolgeog.htm](http://www.ye-stars.com/ptolgeog.htm)
describes the extremes as "farthest from Alexandria".

Further, Israel does not appear to be in Figure 2, when
[https://spartacus.gayguide.travel/gaytravelindex_2017.pdf](https://spartacus.gayguide.travel/gaytravelindex_2017.pdf)
shows it should be ranked about the same as the Czech Republic. And I couldn't
find Egypt either, which should be a -7.

The article concludes with:

> with enough data, and with enough enterprise and ingenuity, the
> “mathematician” can generally make whatever connections he or she wants

My own conclusion is that there's no need to be enterprising or ingenuous if
you ignore the primary data.

