Alan Beck: The Man Who Mapped a Community

A Five-Decade Legacy in LGBTQ+ Travel & Cartography

For five decades, Alan Beck has been quietly essential to how LGBTQ+ travelers find their way — not just around Fort Lauderdale, but across dozens of cities in North America. He is the founder of Fun Maps, later FunMaps, the print-then-digital guide series that became, for generations of queer travelers, a lifeline as much as a map. His story begins not in publishing, but in a high school newsroom in New Jersey — and the thread runs unbroken from there to the present day.

Beck's editorial instincts were shaped early. As a student at Columbia High School in Maplewood, New Jersey, he served as editor of the school paper, an experience that left a deep enough impression that when he later founded his company, he named it Columbia Marketing Corporation in its honor. He continued honing those skills at Lehigh University, where he wrote and edited for the college's storied Brown and White newspaper while earning a degree in finance and marketing. He also served in ROTC and the Army Reserves, leaving with an honorable discharge as a First Lieutenant.

After graduating, Beck turned those combined skills — editorial precision, financial acuity, and a natural gift for cartography — into a business. Starting in 1973, he launched Columbia Marketing Corporation and began producing cartographic maps for the New York City area, serving Chambers of Commerce, Commerce and Industry associations, and local real estate companies, for whom he developed a particular niche in property and neighborhood mapping.

A sampling of the tourism and regional maps produced by Beck's Columbia Marketing Corporation — examples of the cartographic work that built his company into a million-dollar enterprise before FunMaps ever entered the picture.

What started as a regional publishing operation grew steadily and purposefully. Beck's cartoon-style maps for real estate clients were particularly sought after — visually engaging, sponsor-supported guides that put businesses front and center on beautifully illustrated pages. By the time Beck turned his attention to the LGBTQ+ community in the early 1990s, he had already spent nearly two decades building a million-dollar enterprise producing tourism maps for businesses across the region — a body of work that gave him both the infrastructure and the credibility to take on something more personal.

An example of the cartoon-style, sponsor-supported maps that made Columbia Marketing's reputation — lively, illustrated guides placing clients at the center of their communities. This real estate map for Van Riper Realtors in Queens is typical of Beck's early commercial cartography.

A Friendship That Changed Everything

The maps that would define his public legacy grew out of an unlikely friendship. In 1989, Beck met Jeffrey Goodman, a publisher producing the Long Island Fun Maps — a lively, cartoon-style map that had become a genuine fixture of the region. Goodman's company, David James Press Maps, was distributing roughly 250,000 maps across Long Island, the entire operation financed by major business sponsors who saw the maps as an effective and widely-read advertising vehicle. Beck and Goodman hit it off immediately, and what began as a professional acquaintance deepened into a close friendship.

The Long Island Fun Map on display at the Greiner-Maltz Map Club — a Map Club Newsletter clipping documenting an early public appearance of the Fun Map brand. Jeffrey Goodman's Long Island Fun Map was distributing 250,000 copies across the region when he and Alan Beck first crossed paths in 1989.

As the two men's working relationship evolved, Beck licensed the Fun Maps name to Goodman, and the Long Island Fun Maps was folded into the broader FunMaps brand — combining Goodman's established distribution network and cartoon map format with Beck's proven infrastructure and business relationships. It was a natural partnership between two people who understood both the commercial and the community value of putting the right map in the right hands.

Then, in 1992, Goodman approached Beck with a proposition: he wanted to sell. Beck initially hesitated — his own company was thriving and the acquisition carried real risk — but was persuaded to move forward by FunMaps' two primary sales agents, Matt Mathrani and Alden Thayer, who were passionate about keeping the project alive and serving the community. Beck agreed, bought out Goodman's company, and FunMaps became a subsidiary of Columbia Marketing Corporation. It was a decision that would change the course of his life, and quietly change the lives of countless LGBTQ+ travelers across North America.

Building a Lifeline, One Map at a Time

What followed was three more decades of building something larger than a tourist guide. At its height, Fun Maps reached dozens of cities across the United States and Canada — from New York to San Francisco, Toronto to Fort Lauderdale — and the maps became indispensable companions for travelers who needed to know not just where to go, but where they would be safe and welcomed. That distinction mattered enormously in an era when mainstream directories simply erased queer spaces from the map altogether. Building and sustaining that network was not effortless work: Beck spent years working directly with business owners, organizers, community leaders, and advertisers to keep each edition current and well distributed, facing stigma and financial hurdles along the way without ever losing his conviction that LGBTQ+ people deserved to travel with confidence.

As the internet reshaped publishing, Beck adapted rather than retreated. The guides moved from print into mobile-friendly web maps and eventually an app, and in the past five years alone, Beck has published Fun Travel Guides digitally for more than 33 destinations, putting all of them in users' hands through a single mobile app. His recognition has followed accordingly: in May 2024 he received a Trail Blazer Award for pioneering FunMaps and Fun Travel Guides, and he was also honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Florida Out Coast Convention for his work in LGBTQ+ tourism.

Beck remains a fixture of Fort Lauderdale's LGBTQ+ institutional life, currently serving as Vice-Chair of the Stonewall National Museum, Archives & Library. His personal story — including his Jewish upbringing, an early realization of his sexuality, three prior marriages, and his eventual partnership with Broward College history and ceramics professor Nicholas Starr, whom he met in New York over four decades ago — adds depth to a public legacy built largely on maps, but really built on something closer to trust.

Now in his late eighties, Beck is often described less as a publisher than as a friend — compassionate, loyal, and the kind of person who quietly supports other people's dreams. Though print maps have largely given way to digital platforms, Fun Maps continues to be published and distributed. For a community that has often had to find its own way, Alan Beck spent five decades making sure that way was easier to find.

Share Your Alan Beck Story

Alan Beck's legacy isn't just in the maps — it's in the thousands of people who used them to find a bar, a beach, a community center, or simply proof that they weren't alone in an unfamiliar city. If Fun Maps guided you somewhere that mattered, or if you crossed paths with Alan himself over the years — at a Pride event, through Columbia Marketing, at the Stonewall National Museum, or anywhere else his work touched — we want to hear about it.

Did a Fun Maps guide lead you to your favorite bar in a city you'd just moved to? Did it help you find safety, community, or even love somewhere far from home? Have you met Alan in person and come away with a story worth telling? Whether it's a quick memory or a longer reflection, your story helps complete a picture that no single article can capture — the human side of a project that, for over fifty years, helped a community find itself.

Share your stories, photos, and memories using the form below. We may feature them in a follow-up piece honoring his remarkable contribution to LGBTQ+ travel and community life.