You’ve renewed your passport, applied for and received your visa/ETA, notified your credit card company of your travels and purchased travel insurance. Well done. You’ve also done your research to determine safe places to stay, high-risk places to avoid, booked your hotels and transportation at fantastic prices, and created an itinerary that you and your travel partner agree on. Gold star. Straight people might overlook these travel must-dos, but you’re not going to make the mistakes made by more basic travellers.
But you might end up making some classically gay travel mistakes.
Avoiding these mistakes doesn’t mean spending your whole trip in museums and churches, or staying out by the airport. You can still queer it up all you like. But we’ve travelled while gay long enough to know that gay and bi men have certain travel tendencies that could use some adjustments.
1. Don’t pack like you’re going to Pride unless you are
When headed to a gay-friendly destination, you may be tempted to dress 100 percent gay: the rainbow socks, the Nasty Pig hat, the Boxer branded tanktop. And why not? You only live once. But also consider the weather—do you need a coat to wear over your harness?—and other activities you may be interested in, like fine dining or hiking. If you’re going to a place that’s a bit more conservative, bring some backup items, different from the slutty ensemble you’ve envisioned, just in case. One of the best pieces of advice is to look at your planned activities day by day and pack only the ensemble for each of them. If half of what you’re doing is Pride and circuit parties, then that should be half your wardrobe. If it’s only one party, then that’s just one ensemble.
2. Don’t spend the whole trip in the gaybourhood
Yes, bars, clubs and saunas are fun, but you didn’t fly across an ocean to spend every minute in Schöneberg, Soho, Zona Rosa, Oak Lawn or Silom. In fact, during the day, many gay villages can be a bit dull, their restaurants and shopping subpar compared to other districts. Yes, you’ve been waiting months to let your rainbow flag fly. But if a city is open enough to have a gaybourhood, it’s highly likely that there are splashes of pink across most of its tourist-friendly neighbourhoods. Try to balance queer hotspots with broader cultural exploration. I mean, really—do you want to be sitting alone at the bar at 8 p.m. waiting for the magic to start? Find out about up-and-coming hipster neighbourhoods, check out some green spaces and perhaps even try a must-see attraction like an observation deck, zoo or monument. They’re usually a must-see for a reason.
3. Every city runs according to its own schedule
You show up at midnight at a club in Sitges and realize you missed half the night. The gay-friendly beach town doesn’t run at the same pace as Spanish metropolises like Madrid and Barcelona, where 2 a.m. might be a good time to start the night. In Toronto you could have beat the queue if you showed up at 10:45 p.m. instead of 11:15 p.m., a small 30-minute price to pay for not having to stand shivering in the rain or snow. Cities like Palm Springs and St. Petersburg, Florida, love their late afternoon/early evening happy hours. Though Fridays and Saturdays tend to be the busiest nights everywhere in the world, Mondays the deadest, some cities have good Wednesday or Thursday night traditions, often tied to good drink prices and the absence of cover charges. For those seeking naughtier adventures, there are some cities, like Medellín, Osaka and Lisbon, where saunas can be quite busy after work, but closed by 10 p.m., while in other cities, saunas and sex clubs only get packed after midnight.
4. Put down your phone for a while
You’re fresh meat in a strange city and everyone in the grid of your hookup app is new and sexy to you. All the DMs can be mesmerizing. Indeed, there are great YouTube videos about what to do and how to do it. Sure, Instagram is very helpful for finding photogenic spots and likeminded people. The restaurant you’re considering eating at has 562 reviews. I know that we’re all slaves to social media’s infinite scroll. But lying on the bed in your hotel room flicking at your phone is not going to make this a memorable trip. You’re in this fascinating new place—look around, soak it all in and cruise the locals IRL. It’s much more thrilling, and even if you’re unsuccessful at hooking up, there’s an increased possibility there will be a story to tell about it later. I’ve seen too many gay men staring at their feeds as hotties sashayed past.
5. Plan some downtime
This is especially important if you’ve jetted in for a Pride festival, circuit party, music festival or some other sort of blissfully intense gathering. Overscheduling can lead to mid-trip burnout where you’re not enjoying the things you were most looking forward to. The best part of your trip might be the day when you abandon your gay goals—hooking up, dancing till you drop—to chill at the pool or take a freestyle stroll around the city. If late nights and substances are part of your plans, make sure you’ve built in a recovery day—you know you feel down post-partying, so be a big boy and adopt a wellness strategy.
6. Know yourself and your tastes
With social media and internet research, we can gather tonnes of tips about a destination before we even head to the airport. Those influencers are so good looking and they look even better with that lake, mountain, DJ booth or skyscraper in the background. But do you actually want to eat the weird burger from the super-trendy food cart? Unless you’re a content creator who makes money off doing certain things in certain places, what turns you on should be more important than what looks good on Instagram. Chase your dreams, not likes. While it can be fun to experiment with your persona and wardrobe while you’re away from your quotidian life, your food preferences, interests and physical capabilities (like climbing a mountain) aren’t going to magically change because you’re in a new place.
7. Set some rules for your group trip before fights break out
Nobody wants a Real Housewives moment on their friendship vacation. Friend groups should come to some sort of consensus about the vibe of the trip and what the daily budget should be. Often it’s the friend with the most bougie tastes who takes the reins as the planner-in-chief; they might need to be reminded that not everybody wants “the best” for each and every outing. (Practically speaking, it’s actually better to balance fancy Michelin-star meals with lighter cheap-and-cheerful ones—it’s good for your waistline, pocketbook and for expanding your palette.) Check out what group leaders have booked before signing off. It’s better to have that conversation before the trip than when you see the bill after martinis and several bottles of wine.
