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Mapping Gay-Friendly Cities Through History

eesmith 7y ago
.... 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_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton#Sotadic... 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.

.... 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_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Francis_Burton#Sotadic... 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.