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It happens at the hotel check-in desk: the booking for one bed, the receptionist’s glance, and the split-second decision of whether to say “partner” or “friend”. Last month, research from Booking.com finally put a number on it. Just 34 per cent of British LGBTQ+ travellers say they’re out when they travel, despite 76 per cent of us being out to our close friends. Somewhere between the departure board and the check-in desk, more than half of us quietly fold a part of ourselves up and tuck it into the overhead locker for the duration of our stay.
I understand it completely, because I’ve done it myself. Every queer traveller knows the dial, and my day job as a travel presenter and journalist means I’ve turned mine up more than most. The first few times I found myself in the Middle East for work, the discomfort caught me off guard. Here in the UK, for all our challenges, I can exist as a gay man. Yet there I was, slipping the pride flag wristband off my hand before landing while checking my screensaver wasn’t a photo of me and my boyfriend at the time. You feel it in small moments, like the taxi driver’s eyes lingering in the wing mirror a beat too long. The worst of it, however, comes at the hotel desk. I remember the bead of sweat running down my back as it dawned on me that the booking said one double bed, there were two of us, and we’re both men. The clerk repeated “we have single rooms available, sir” and I could barely take it in, because somewhere in the back of my mind, the police were already on their way, and in a country where the way you love carries a prison sentence, that thought is not just paranoia.
The research confirms what so many of us have always known in our bones. More than a third of us would hide who we are entirely if it meant seeing a bucket-list destination, and 37 per cent now take more precautions than a few years ago. One statistic that has remained lodged in my mind, is the 46 per cent of us who scan our surroundings before showing affection, a practised sweep of the room before a hand is held. Romance, for so many of us it seems, comes with a risk assessment attached. Grimmest of all, the travellers who stay in the closet report by far the fewest negative experiences and the least anxiety. Hiding, in other words, works. Which might be the saddest sentence I’ve typed all year.
The world is quietly teaching our community that the price of seeing it is ourselves, and trans travellers, whose anxiety is rising on an exponential scale, are paying the highest fare of all. A holiday is supposed to be the exhale, yet instead you’re running a second job in the background, remembering which version of yourself you checked in as. How are you meant to relax when you are constantly on guard. Just waiting for one slip up, one wrong word to foil your disguise, and in certain countries, put you at genuine risk of danger.
Would it put me off traveling to these countries? Truthfully, it starts an argument I keep having with myself more and more often these days, and I’d like to hear your thoughts upon reading this to see if you questioned your original perspective too.
The first instinct is point-blank refusal: why hand my money to a country that treats my community as though it shouldn’t exist? Then the guilt arrives, because our immediate yet justifiable reaction fails to consider the most critical part of this whole conversation. What about the queer people who live there and have no choice? Does my absence make their lives easier, or lonelier? Perhaps the braver action is to actually go, to be visibly and calmly ourselves in front of ordinary people, so those people can see we’re not the cabal they’ve been warned about. We’re simply humans, who happen to love differently to them, and love harmlessly all the while.
Read more: Turkey and Egypt turned away an LGBTQ+ cruise ship – it’s their loss
On every one of these trips, I ask myself the same question: do the people here actually care who I love, or is this the work of governments who need a common enemy to hold onto power? In my experience the two are often not the same thing. Stay at almost any resort in various countries where being LGBTQ+ is a legal offence and the staff couldn’t care less. They’re simply happy that you’re happy. Mention a boyfriend in passing to a tour guide or driver and the reaction isn’t immediate horror; many times, it’s actually curiosity. Which then leaves you wondering how much of this is really a people problem, and how much of it is a hierarchy problem wearing the people as a costume.
Right now, Turkey is an example. Friends of mine have holidayed there for years; the sunshine is glorious, the lira goes far, and the welcome has always been incredibly warm. Yet since September, authorities there have raided gay bars, LGBTQ+ organisations and activists’ homes, arresting more than 160 people under a campaign the government calls “My Family is Safe”.
The first thought is to abstain and take the money elsewhere. Then I read an article by my colleague, Gary Nunn. Gary has visited Turkey annually for 20 years as an openly gay man and went back days after the raids to find Istanbul’s gay bars rammed, the community defiant and dancing, and with that my thinking began to shift. Perhaps the answer isn’t avoiding Turkey at all but going precisely to put my money behind those venues and the people keeping the lights on through the hardest of times. That, honestly, is what’s on my mind now. There is a line I’d draw, though: travelling somewhere to stand with its queer community for a few days is one thing, while two weeks impersonating a straight man on my own holiday is entirely another. Quite honestly, at that point the trip has lost the very thing it was for.
There is some good news too. The same research found 75 per cent of us had at least one positive experience linked to our identity while travelling, and almost half believe acceptance is improving. The signals that land are beautifully small: pronouns got right, a flag in a window. Schemes like Booking.com’s Travel Proud badge exist precisely so we can find those places without the guesswork and just be ourselves. Lovingly, openly, unapologetically.
Being out on holiday isn’t a luxury or an add-on. It’s the entire point of going away in the first place: to relax, to be free, to be fully yourself. The tan fades within a fortnight of landing, but coming home having spent two weeks as yourself, all of yourself, is the only souvenir that lasts.
Read more: 15 emerging LGBTQ+ travel hotspots
