Throughout Israel’s bombing of Gaza over the past year, LGBTQ Palestinians have continued to seek refuge for their stories of love and identity on the digital hub, Queering the Map (QTM).

The online interactive platform repurposes seemingly ordinary places by giving LGBTQ users the agency to anonymously pin their personal messages onto an interactive online map at any location across the globe, as designed by its creator Lucas LaRochelle.

For LGBTQ Palestinians in Gaza, platforms like QTM offer a rare space for expression in a challenging environment. While homosexuality is not explicitly criminalized in Gaza, societal and religious taboos make it extremely difficult for LGBTQ individuals to live openly. The ongoing conflict has further complicated their situation, disrupting support networks and increasing isolation.

However, the challenges faced by LGBTQ Palestinians are often co-opted and misrepresented through what activists call ‘pinkwashing’—Israel’s cynical weaponization of LGBTQ rights to distract from and justify its oppression of Palestinians. This tactic, part of a deliberate PR strategy that emerged in the early 2000s, paints Israel as a ‘gay haven’ while erasing the struggles of LGBTQ Palestinians.

LaRochelle, a designer, researcher and cartographer whose work explores queer and trans digital cultures, community-based archiving and artificial intelligence, is interested in expanding the notion of queer places beyond architecture and infrastructures where LGBTQ lives thrive.

“Places like the middle of the forest where I would meet my first love and talk about our relationship and the barriers to its full expression,” LaRochelle, who is nonbinary, told “Outward” in May. “[It’s] park benches, subway trains—these places that were less places as much as they were ephemeral moments that happened to occur in a space.”

Paromita Pain, associate professor of global media at ​​Reynolds School of Journalism, told Nevada Today in March that digital activism can often be boundaryless, giving way to negative factors externally.

“[It] sometimes draws a great deal of trolling, which can lead to extreme harassment for LGBTQ activists,” she told Nevada Today. “Because of this harassment, activists who usually do this work and take care of the emotional labor involved can often feel very emotionally fraught.”

She also noted that it can provide positive chain-reactions, such as the news of gay marriage being legalized in the U.S. making its way to countries that are seeking the same.

Created in 2017, the platform is deeply inspired by queer and feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, whose essays “The Cultural Politics of Emotion” and “Affective Economies,” describe experiences and emotions as being impressed upon one another and therefore “sticky” in their two-way imprint. QTM hinges around that emotional ‘stickiness,’ shining light on how queer experience can have extraordinary emotional charges despite its minute or otherwise average circumstances.

The wave of virality QTM experienced last year as Israel began the ongoing bombing and massacre of Palestinians highlighted stories of heartbreak and nostalgia, taking the internet by storm with the emotional rollercoaster of notes posted by LGBTQ Palestinians living in Gaza.

Since Oct. 7, the Palestinian death toll has risen past 42,000, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, not counting the bodies buried under rubble. However, a study by The Lancet from July reveals that the Palestinian death toll could have realistically surpassed 186,000 people. While many impacted by the violence have mutual aid and grassroots fundraising to support one another, LGBTQ Palestinians have additionally taken to QTM to give home to what could be their last messages.

“I will never lose hope in us,” one person wrote, pinning the message on the Gaza strip. “No matter how long it takes, we will be together soon.”

All eyes were on QTM last year, as Israel’s violence against Palestinians in Gaza grew momentum, with attacks currently spreading to Lebanon.

Trains in London were hacked last October by pro-Palestinian advocates, who posted Gazan messages from the platform onto the advertisement screens throughout London’s transit; a pro-Palestine Jewish activist at Columbia University wore a t-shirt with a QTM message printed on it during an interview with Democracy Now about the student encampments in May. Even renowned gender theorist Judith Butler spotlighted the digital platform during a virtual conversation in March.

Since its launch, QTM has become home to nearly one million stories of queer and trans life in 28 languages across the world. It was awarded with an Honorable Mention in the 2018 Prix Ars Electronica, and is part of the Library of Congress LGBT Web Studies archive. Currently, there are 22 messages posted on the Gaza strip, increasingly more than last year’s handful.

Since then, LaRochelle has made the message clear: QTM is welcoming of LGBTQ Gazans’ stories and stands in support of Palestine.

Severing ties with Google Maps due to its connection to Israel

When the traffic surged on the website last year, LaRochelle recalls the feelings of horror in reading the stories. It was clear that they needed to strengthen the infrastructure of the project so that it could handle its massive traffic, which had led LaRochelle to reconsider the website’s back end after discovering discouraging information.

In April, Google employees across Seattle, New York City and Silicon Valley staged sit-in protests against Project Nimbus, a collaboration between the tech company powerhouse and the Israeli military. Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion initiative, seeks to provide cloud-computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence and other technology services to the Israeli government and its military.

As a result, 28 employees were immediately fired, marking one of the largest mass firings in the tech industry. Meanwhile, QTM had been using Google Maps for its infrastructure. Two months ago, LaRochelle launched a new version of the site with a much more robust back end to handle the amount of traffic that it’s receiving.

In this new back end, LaRochelle has moved away from Google Maps and now uses an open-sourced mapping via Protomaps to sever any relation to Google, further standing firm in solidarity with Palestinians impacted by Israel’s violence.

The double-edged sword of the virality of violence

LaRochelle recalls seeing Palestinian stories from QTM printed out in pro-Palestine protests across the world—something they tell Reckon is “phenomenal to see. They were even read in the Scottish Parliament.

“The stories function as a counter-narrative to Israeli attempts at pinkwashing that claim that Israel is the only safe place for queer people in the Middle East, which they then use to justify their ongoing genocide of Palestinians,” LaRochelle said of LGBTQ Palestinian messages in Gaza and the West Bank on QTM. “These stories very much speak back to that narrative and make pretty evident that one cannot really think about queer liberation when undergoing genocide.”

Despite the platform’s spike of visibility over the past year, witnessing queer and trans Palestinians’ messages on the platform be used as a tool for protest, LaRochelle’s message is clear: a successful website doesn’t remedy Israel’s violence unfolding in Gaza.

“It’s important the way in which the stories have circulated, but the stories themselves of people losing their lives or the lives of loved ones to a genocidal nation state is horrifying and should not be happening, and the story should never exist because the situation should not be happening,” they said.

As the person responsible for the platform, LaRochelle’s priority is ensuring that the website stays online, and that the feelings are transmuted into something more pragmatic. The past year has been a double-edged sword: QTM does what it has meant to do, but the very means of circulation hinges on a global tragedy against a group of people.

LaRochelle stresses that this dichotomy speaks to the futility of what communication technology can do in times of war, “because we see images of genocide unfolding, and yet it continues,” they said.

Despite its significance for LGBTQ Palestinians, QTM is not without potential risks. To scholar Pain’s point, the anonymous submissions give way to harassment, and because it is human-run, each negative submission requires an individualized assessment and vetting. It is, however, the humanness that makes the project all the more special.

Ultimately, for them, queer liberation depends on decolonization, and the LGBTQ lives in Palestine are far from the exception. They express that these two movements are intimately linked with one another, and as the creator of a platform that deals with queer, trans and nonbinary stories from across the world, it is their responsibility to make that conviction and that politic abundantly evident.

“Queering the Map is not a neutral project by any stretch of the imagination.”