{"id":39868,"date":"2026-04-23T16:46:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T20:46:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/?p=39868"},"modified":"2026-04-23T16:46:19","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T20:46:19","slug":"lgbtq-targeted-hate-crimes-with-relation-to-queer-spaces-in-the-u-s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/visualization\/lgbtq-targeted-hate-crimes-with-relation-to-queer-spaces-in-the-u-s\/","title":{"rendered":"LGBTQ+ Targeted Hate Crimes with Relation to Queer Spaces in the U.S."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For this project, I sought out to better understand the correlation between queer spaces and the safety around them. I hoped to discover whether queer spaces brought on more danger for queer people, or act as a refuge. For this project, I gathered hate crime reports from the FBI database for the most recent year available, 2024. I\u2019ve normalized this data by population, the ratio being hate crime per every 100,000 people. Additionally, I gathered locations of queer identified bars used by the Uncloseted Media report<\/a>, similarly exploring the impact of queer spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This project shows the queer bar distribution throughout the U.S., breaking this data further down by county. The project also creates a comparison between the amount of queer bars in states related to their majority political affiliation. While this comparison does communicate a possible understanding of where queer people feel safe to build community spaces, as more liberal states are found to have more queer spaces, this study doesn\u2019t explore the evidence of violence against queer people within the states and how this relates to where queer-welcoming spaces are located.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using this data, I created three maps to understand the correlation between targeted violence and queer spaces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My first map emphasizes the prevalence of hate crimes throughout the country. The more red the state, the more hate crimes have been reported, revealing California and New Jersey to have the most hate crimes, while states like Nebraska, the Dakotas, Tennessee and West Virginia to be ones with the lowest hate crime rate. Additionally, points are plotted where queer bars are located, the dot\u2019s size expressing the density of LGBTQ+ bars in this area, most notable being in Seattle, Washington and New York City. This map reveals that the states with the most queer spaces tend to have the highest rates of hate crimes targeting queer people, while states with no queer spaces seem to have lower rates of this violence.
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My second map seeks to localize this data a bit more, using density plotting to show the areas with the most hate crimes recorded by zip code, the darkest parts of the map again being the west coast of California and New York City, also including Boston. Overlaid on top of this data are the plot points of specific queer bars, showing more narrowly that where there is a density of hate crimes in a zip code, there often are queer spaces. The white plot points of queer spaces act to shine through the redness of violence, a safe haven for queer people where they may feel threatened. This map is able to give a more granular view of the data, focusing more on the hate crime density within areas in a state. With this specificity, the additional hate crimes that occur in spaces like the Southeast and Northwest are more visible, while in the previous map these states seemed to be absent of violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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My final map emphasizes the prevalence of queer spaces in a state, with the hate crime density data overlaid with this information. The amount of queer bars in each state is reflected by the darkness of purple the state is colored with, revealing the west coast, California, Oregon and Washington, along with New York, as the states with the most queer bars. The density of hate crimes can then be seen as varying sizes of red dots on the map, showing Southern California and New Jersey to be most affected my queer targeted hate crimes. This map reveals both the true lack of queer spaces throughout the country, as mostly only the coastal states having established queer bars, as well as the prevalence of targeted violence against queer people throughout the country, regardless of the presence of queer bars.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Challenges with both these sets of data cause these visualizations to be skewed. Within the hate crime data, it is hard to pinpoint how a crime is labelled as targeted and whether some states are more or less likely to recognize violence as a hate crime. This could lead some states to appear to be safer, but only because violent crimes against queer people are not documented correctly. Similarly, a bar may act as a safe haven for queer people, but is not openly established as a queer space, leaving these more hidden queer spaces out of the data, making the collection of data fall short of the number of true LGBTQ+ community spaces.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n


With this inquiry of safety within the U.S. for queer people, I would like to widen my scope of queer safe spaces from nightlife into schools, gathering data on which schools provide a Gay Straight Alliance club for students, and similarly relate this data to the prevalence of violence against queer people. This would link this type of data to youth in conjunction with the data used here, more connected to adults. Additionally, I would like to research a survey of queer perceived safety, as opposed to the queer targeted hate crime data, as I believe this would be a more reflective dataset in understanding the environment that queer people live in and whether this improves or declines with options of queer spaces present.\u00a0
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For this project, I sought out to better understand the correlation between queer spaces and the safety around them. I hoped to discover whether queer spaces brought on more danger for queer people, or act as a refuge. For this project, I gathered hate crime reports from the FBI database for the most recent year…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5069,"featured_media":39869,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1931],"class_list":["post-39868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-visualization"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2026\/04\/Screenshot-2026-04-23-at-4.35.12-PM.png?fit=1738%2C934&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paBdcV-an2","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39868"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39872,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39868\/revisions\/39872"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39868"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentwork.prattsi.org\/infovis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=39868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}