Queer Boston

A Resource Guide

Queer people often struggle to find community, even when in a queer-friendly city

Boston is often seen as a very queer-friendly city--it even designated itself a sanctuary city for transgender people in 2025. However, even with the large amount of resources, people struggled to find community. In my work doing queer organizing in Boston, I often hear the common refrain that it's hard to find spaces locally that engage people because there aren't places that cater to their interests--something that isn't really true.

While researching the impact of queer homelessness, I realized that what was needed was actually a centralized place for people to find community. It was something that I hadn't found anywhere, and it was something I identified through community outreach that people really needed.

Helping An At-Risk Community

An opportunity to connect people to resources that they need

Queer people are an at-risk community, seeing increased rates of homelessness, mental health risks, unemployment, and violence based on their sexuality or gender identity/presentation. They often seek queer communities because of those things--they feel more comfortable within queer spaces where they're less likely to be discriminated against.

However, even folks at major risk of these things don't know about the resources available to them. This project, while also about connecting people to local queer community, provided an avenue to co-locate other resources that are queer-friendly and can help them out of really tough situations to both increase accessibility of these resources, and decrease stigma associated with needing to access help.

To do this, big resource areas were chosen based on

• need -- how impactful certain resources were to the overall wellbeing of queer individuals
• and on frequency of resources -- resources were clustered into similar topic areas, then the largest clusters were seen as more in-demand

Statistics were also included on big resource area pages as an educational tool and to show people at-risk that they were not alone.

A Search Feature

Searching for the most relevant resources

Resources could be searched for by:

• Name and description, through the search bar at the top -- it returns any resources that have a match to the text entered
• Big resource areas
• Location -- Boston is not equal in terms of resourcing across its different neighborhoods and surrounding cities. This helps people find resources that are easy for them to get to
• Additional Tags -- these get more granular, so people can find more specific things that apply to them

Long Term Sustainability

Choosing user-friendly tools for updating the site

Because resources are obviously changing all the time--new groups form, old groups lapse--it was important that this site was easy to update.

The back-end uses Airtable, which is pulled from on the front-end through the Airtable API. This was chosen because Airtable is a very visual format for people to edit and access permissions can be given very easily to volunteers. It also has built-in database population through forms, so anyone can submit a resource for review and it will immediately show up in the database for vetting. Making a resource visible is as easy as switching a label from 'Unapproved' to 'Approved'.

Impact

Accessed by government, colleges/universities, community organizations, and local queers

Since being launched in June 2025, there are over 240 resources listed, with X resources submitted and added post-launch. While I chose not to include analytics on the site itself, an easy metric to measure is how much server bandwidth is being used (and the associated cost).

This project has also been used to inform other work, such as identifying local neighborhoods that lack resources, which has been used to propose future events to engage these neighborhoods and help set up local affinity groups to form communities closer to home for many queer people in the Greater Boston area.

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