Baltimore’s queer history is a tale interwoven with stories of the city’s shifts pre and postindustrialization. At the height of factory and port work in the 1930s and 1940s, Baltimore’s population soared with the arrival of Black Southern farmers and Eastern European immigrants. At the same time, queer parties and performances, at the time labelled “pansy balls,” as documented by the AFRO American Newspaper, point to parallel growth of queer communities in the city too.
More new arrivals also brought queer musicians and performers along with the farmers and workers from the South. My great-grandparents came to the city in this wave of Southern migrants fleeing worsening political violence in the 1940s. Then, in the 1950s, post-World War II, Charm City’s population reached its zenith: Nearly a million residents on record and a solid social scene of jazz clubs, theatres, and dance clubs keeping residents and visitors entertained. Since then, Baltimore’s population has waxed and waned, never again reaching the postwar pinnacle of the 20th century.
We’re a majority Black mid-Atlantic metropole with working ports smack dab in the middle of the East Coast. There’s a lot to factor in, Baltimore’s Black and working-class majority for starters, when recalling histories of Baltimore’s past and present queer cultures. I pride myself on applying historical context to present-day conditions, yet I was shocked in 2024 to learn about my neighborhood’s story of the neighbors lost to HIV/AIDS. Mainly, I was shocked at my own ignorance.
The losses felt intimate. And I felt naive for being shocked. What did I imagine before? That Baltimore was spared from a plague that stole a generation? But my own naivety is endemic of the consequences of stigma and queerphobia. It’s hard to learn about an era when an entire agenda has been set to disavow the past.
It’s hard to learn about an era when an entire agenda has been set to disavow the past.
The story of those who lived and died in Whitelock is the story of queer neighbors who died around the world. People died, and in their wake friends and lovers were gaslit by world governments and public health officials, and their neighborhoods shifted. The impact of government neglect continues as public health funding continues to face cuts. They were buried and erased. And with that erasure, local stories of lost neighbors become valuable mementos of pasts too hastily discarded.
I live in the same neighborhood I grew up in. The neighborhood where two Gen X jokers met in the late ’90s, and down the street from where my grandparents met at a pharmacy in the ’60s. And I have friends raised in their own family histories in Whitelock. All these stories played out in the same 10-block radius even before the neighborhood raised me throughout the 2000s. But the neighborhood looks different now than it did then, and even my 2000s coming of age omitted stories of lost neighbors who died from a too-easily-forgotten plague.
In 2024, I briefly attended meetings held by the St. Francis Neighborhood Center about the Community Data Hub, an organizational archiving project focused on the Whitelock neighborhood, which they were stewarding in collaboration with the Black Beyond Data project. The Black Beyond Data project is a cross-institutional research project led by Johns Hopkins professor Jessica Marie Johnson. The meetings are one way I tried to learn more about Whitelock’s history before all the landmarks I knew came down in exchange for new tunnels and new-build townhouses. And that’s where I learned about the ghosts and grief of the queer neighbors lost during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the late 20th century.
Within the first 15 minutes of the Community Data Hub meeting, I was glad I logged on. The facilitators pulled up scans of old poems and diary entries from Father Tom Composto, the Jesuit Priest who founded SFNC, and the materials painted a new portrait of the neighborhood I figured I knew. I’d have never guessed the collection included poetry from a Jesuit priest about the drug trade and the upper-middle-class patrons from outside the neighborhood who supplied the demand. Composto’s poetry didn’t condemn the corner boys; He loathed the luxury car-driving businessmen parked at the four-way intersection across from the Center’s doorstep.
This archive wasn’t just budgets and program proposals. In the final moments of the call, a passing comment changed the next two years of my life.
“We’re trying to learn more about the neighbors who died during the AIDS crisis,” an SFNC staffer said on the call. “It’s come up in a few conversations how the neighborhood changed after the ’80s because so many people died.” I’d never heard that before. And in a city anchored by a handful of public health juggernauts, I’d hope to hear more about how a neighborhood in the middle of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland medical campuses fared during one of the most horrifying public health crises in our national memory. How many neighbors did Whitelock lose? Who remembers them? And how does a city this small move forward when so much remains unstudied?
In searching for more information about the neighbors we lost during the AIDS epidemic, I contacted scholar Ben Egerman. A librarian and researcher by trade, Egerman’s recent lectures at The Club Car, a queer bar right on North Avenue, have built on renewed interest in the study of Maryland queer history and a desire for public education. By the end of our call, Egerman taught me about The Baltimore Alternative, a free newspaper edited by Bill Urban, who himself passed from AIDS complications, dedicated to covering the AIDS epidemic. In the last few years, Towson University has processed past issues and made them available online. Bit by bit, Baltimore’s queer history is being cross-stitched by contemporary scholars.
Bit by bit, Baltimore’s queer history is being cross-stitched by contemporary scholars.
My hunch, however, is that a wealth of information exists in the records and archives of Maryland’s public health institutions. Between Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland, other colleges and universities, and the National Institute of Health, Maryland is an epicenter of public health data and research. The democratization of that data on the AIDS epidemic, and the recent increase in HIV/AIDS diagnoses in the region in the last few years, is crucial to composing a fuller quilt of Maryland queer history.
Before joining the SFNC Community Data Hub meeting, I’d never taken the time to study how Baltimore fared during the zenith of the AIDS epidemic. I’d forgotten our own lost ones.
And living day-to-day life as a twentysomething in 2026 helps me forget. Few public memorials exist commemorating hundreds of thousands dead. The one on record I can find in Baltimore, a painting entitled “Hope Lives Here,” is because of the late great Tom Miller, who died from AIDS complications in 2000.
I’m still learning about Whitelock’s lost neighbors. Since 2024, the SFNC Community Data Hub project has paused, stalling some of my hopes to learn more about Whitelock’s past, but I’m hopeful for the future of this research.
In the meantime, I’m still reading more about the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its continued impact on Baltimore’s past and present. Luckily, there are others committed to sharing Baltimore’s queer history, too.
To name a few: Egerman, whose 2020 interview with Paulette Young on Black gay and lesbian life in the ’70s is a must listen. Egerman’s next session at The Club Car on June 11 features SHAN Wallace, a photographer and artist exploring the queer history of the Baltimore club scene. Preservation Maryland has compiled a register of queer monuments. Folks can also read past essays from Jamie Grace Alexander on Baltimore’s queer past. And this fall, abdu mongo ali and Maleke Glee plan to publish the inaugural issue of twurl, a literary journal of Black gay poetics.
There’s much I don’t know. I’m unclear on how many neighbors died, how many people were left mourning, and when the height of Whitelock’s devastation was. There’s no public memorial or neighborhood shrine for the dead. Part of that is because HIV and AIDS are still mired in stigma. The other part is because those who survived lost too many and too much to talk about, let alone put their grief on display.
In all that I do not know, I’m clear that decades ago, Whitelock, and Baltimore at large, lost too many neighbors to a preventable plague that still kills thousands annually. I’m still working to find them in the archives and memories of those of us who did not die.