While on his frequent business trips around the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Bob Damron wanted to find bars and other locales to meet other men like him. A gay man, Damron sought friends, companions, and safety at friendly businesses in the various cities he visited. He began jotting down the names of the spots he frequented, sometimes loaning out his notebooks to fellow gay friends to take with them on their own journeys. His prolific lists became the basis of gay travel guide he began publishing in 1964.
Named the Bob Damron Address Books, these travel guides became almost survival guides to gay and queer travelers across the United States. First published in an era when most states banned same-sex intimacy both in public and private spaces, these travel guides helped gays (and to a lesser extent lesbians) find bars, cocktail lounges, bookstores, restaurants, bathhouses, cinemas, and cruising grounds that catered to people like themselves. Much like the Green Books of the 1950s and 1960s, which African Americans used to find friendly businesses that would cater to black citizens in the era of Jim Crow apartheid, Damron’s guidebooks aided a generation of queer people in identifying sites of community, pleasure, and politics.
Damron’s guide books were part of a growing interest in gay travel guide publications that began in the early 1960s. Bob Damron wasn’t the only entrepreneur looking to offer gay consumers listings of queer friendly places. Guy Strait published the first edition of The Lavender Baedeker in 1963, an extension to his already popular newspaper in San Francisco entitled Citizen’s Guide. Other publishers followed suit, including Guild Guide to the Gay Scene and World Report Travel Guide, published not in the gay mecca of San Francisco but rather in New York. Despite stiff competition from these early publishers and later “copycats” (as Damron often saw them), Damron’s guidebooks were perhaps the most extensive and long running of any of the early gay travel guides. In fact, unlike all his initial competition, Damron’s guides are, as of 2020, still in publication. While the internet age threatens the continuation of these important guidebooks, the fact that the Bob Damron Address Books have existed for nearly six decades suggests an enduring and active queer travel community that never was strictly confined to a closet.