π³οΈβπPride Abroad π³οΈβπ
Hi friend. I took a full-time job. Sorry to disappoint, but it turns out quitting your job with few savings to join the worst freelance market the city's seen in a decade is maybe not the best financial plan? But my god was it fun being unemployed for a few months. I dragged my feet and moped and cried when I started my new job (it's also somehow a promotion from my last job, because advertising is a joke), complaining to my friend Nora about returning to small talk and fake laughing at the horrible jokes from the "funny guy" at the office, and other maladies of a full-time job, until Nora bluntly shut it down with, "You're being annoying." Sorry, Nora! It just sucks having to work for a living, right??????? I always assumed that if I ever became miraculously rich and never had to work another day in my life, I'd get bored out of my mind, but: turns out it's super fun and I would be very good at living a life of luxury. If anyone wants to venmo me a few billion dollars that'd be great, thanks.
Before starting this job, Justin and Cousin Kevin and I went to Mexico, to visit our friends Santiago and Natalia. We gallivanted around Mexico City and spent two magical nights outside the city in a genuine architectural marvel hidden in the hills above a Pueblo MΓ‘gico called TepoztlΓ‘n. It was ridiculously great.
It was also my first time traveling abroad with a boyfriend, which was a very new experience! Our first day, Justin tried to grab my hand as we strolled down the sidewalk, and I instinctually pulled it away. Holding hands in public is a fraught experience for a lot of gay men, no matter the surroundings, and even in the queerest neighborhoods I have to admit there's always a momentary twinge of, "Is someone going to break a bottle over the back of my head?" when Justin and I hold hands. So, when he grabbed my hand in an unfamiliar foreign city, it only felt natural to pull away, and to say, "Let's scope it out first."
He gave me some shit for this, of course, but I'm still not sure what the right move is in this circumstance. (And if you've been to Mexico City you'll know, as we learned pretty quickly, that it's a super gay city, so my fears were very unfounded. I'm not sure anyone straight actually lives in the city?) It feels dramatic, with a touch of judgment and condescension β "The locals aren't as liberal as us, dear" β but, you know, better safe than sorry, right? And a big, cosmopolitan city like CDMX, where gay marriage is legal, is one thing. But it got me thinking about future trips Justin and I will take together, now that we've reached the international-traveling-together stage of our relationship: in certain countries, we'll have to pretend to be friends, or brothers. How will that feel?
In Morocco, when my friend Chris and I were traveling together, we both picked up on ~vibes~ from a few staff members at places we stayed. Nothing was overt, but after a few too many riad hosts asked, "And you'll be needing separate beds?" or security guards found reasons to linger outside our rooms at the end of the night to watch us go into our separate rooms, it was clear that gay shit would not be tolerated. Or, at the least, we'd be treated very differently if we were a couple. It didn't feel good.
Traveling in Bangkok alone a few years ago, and fed up with the hetero early-20s backpacking crowd, I went to a gay bar by myself, grabbed a drink, and β seeing a table with 7 chairs and 6 people β plopped down in the one empty chair, as if I already knew these people. Within 10 minutes, I was heading to another gay bar with the group, a mixture of foreign expats and Thai locals. At the next bar, I bounced to another group, and made them my friends for the next hour, and so on and so on until it was suddenly 4 am and I was in love with Thailand. I was thrilled to discover in Mexico that it works just as well when you're with a boyfriend. People are excited to talk to you, because it's stupidly thrilling to meet an LGBTQ+ person from a totally different culture. It's like when a Great Dane and a Shih Tzu sniff each other: you're not at all like me but also exactly like me???
Our last night in Mexico, Justin and I broke off from the rest of the group to go to some gay bars. Ground zero for gay bars in Mexico City is a madhouse, the bars packed too tightly to even lift a drink to your mouth. Men spilling out into the streets, trying to shove their way into the next bar like the Tokyo subway at rush hour. It didn't take long for people to start talking to us, our shared queerness breaking down cultural barriers like they were nothing. It's my favorite part about going to a new city: how quickly you can meet people at gay bars, how gay men can make and find this built-in community in cities around the world. It must be so lonely being straight!!
(This is where I should point out that it's a lot easier to access this built-in community if you present as a man, and especially a white one, which seems to carry the same gross cachet in every gay bar around the world. It's obviously much, much harder to take advantage of the welcoming gay community if you present as a woman, or trans, or nonbinary, or just aren't white. The world is infinitely beautiful and also infinitely depressing as fuck.)
I suppose all we can do on the How Do Gays Travel To Hateful Places issue is figure it out as we go, the same way you figure out everything else: how do you say please and thank you in the local language, which street food stalls look best, and can we be boyfriends here or are we brothers? It's a new layer to traveling that I never put much thought to, and open to a lot of emotional complications: Will lying about our relationship just be a bit of silly frivolity, or will we find it emotionally draining? Will Justin even want to lie? (He can be adamant about never hiding who we are, in a way I find both admirable and terrifying in circumstances like this. I'm including this level of honesty as a test to see if he actually reads these letters, hi Justin!)
And then β as always β there are the broader issues to consider: We can pass as straight if we have to, but what do couples who can't pass do? And what about the LGBTQ+ people who actually live in these areas, how are they surviving? What can we do to help them? It's one thing to fret about being perceived as boyfriends while traveling to Uganda or Eastern Europe, but what does that matter compared to the significantly worse threats facing gay people who actually have to live there? Ours will be a momentary inconvenience β we'll lie about being brothers or whatever, and then a week later we could be happy and mindless at a gay bar in NYC while queers in Chechnya keep being murdered by the state.
Traveling to less-developed countries β especially as a white cis-male American β is always an exercise in confronting your own relative privilege on a minute-by-minute basis. You breeze through immigration lines with your American passport. You can hail a cab easily, you can walk into any restaurant and know you can afford everything on the menu. And all around you are people asking for money: just a couple cents, anything you can spare, you who have so much, enough to support an entire family with just one of the paychecks you get every two weeks. You can't avoid it, you just have to sit with that feeling and knowledge and discomfort. It's horrible and, ideally, it makes you a better person when you get home. More aware of what you have, and more willing to help others get some of it, too.
My first experience traveling abroad with a boyfriend had a similar effect on me, in a different shade than I've experienced previously. I would like to do more for gay communities in the places I travel. I have some ideas on what I can do, but welcome any thoughts on what more can be done. I would like to not only feel safe traveling with my boyfriend to anywhere on the planet, but what I want more is for the LGBTQ+ community in those places to feel safe in their daily lives. It feels like asking for a lot, but it's also like asking for nothing.
DANNY RECOMMENDS!
If you're reading this, you probably agree that what the Trump administration is doing to families seeking asylum in the U.S. is deeply, deeply evil. So, donate. Protest. Vote out these Nazis, and refuse to vote for any politician of any party unless they commit to abolishing the terrorist organization ICE. If you're white and live in NYC, get your free city ID and use it around town, so businesses and officials stop seeing the cards as something that only "illegal" immigrants have, and start seeing them as just another valid form of ID, which they are. If possible, prevent ICE from "just following orders." And, something I'm eager to do (especially if I ever run into Paul Ryan back home): it is your patriotic duty to ensure these gross losers from hell never, ever, ever have another comfortable or peaceful moment in public again. Fuck these Nazis, and take care of yourself and each other out there. We'll get through this, and someday we'll all get the chance to piss on Jeff Session's grave. Remember that happy fact.