Off the Shelf #24: The Road Is Calling: Gay Travel and Tourism Writing

by Rob Ridinger

One of the most enjoyable features of the idea of the LGBT community is that it can be personally validated through the medium of travel, whether to another city in North America or to another continent as part of a trip with the usual tourist goals of visiting significant places and events. Having the experience of realizing the truth of the basic credo of LGBT people as being part of every human culture, that “we are everywhere,“ adds immensely to the memories of any journey or holiday. The accounts of where and how to find LGBT-friendly spaces abroad make up one of the older bodies of documentation available in LGBT studies and offer valuable data for social and historical research.

One of the problems facing librarians seeking such materials is that  the word “ travel “ has been used in the title of books that are not in fact travel works.. A review of the entries under the descriptor “ Gays- Travel “ in the WORLDCAT database reveals no books treating  LGBT travel as a subject for the 21-year period between the Stonewall events of 1969 and the publication of In the Land of Alexander in 1990. The titles which do appear in this period are almost uniformly periodicals. For the 1960s before and after Stonewall, and the 1970s until the beginning of the AIDS pandemic in 1981, the landscape of gay travel books was populated by paperbacks offering directions to local establishments of various kinds in specific cities or regions of the world- sometimes printed outside the country or city they covered.  A unique collection of twenty-seven early titles of this fugitive material is held in the special collections department of the University of Chicago library under the title Gay travel guides from the 1960s and 1970s. The earliest of these in North America began in 1958 in San Francisco, published by the Mattachine Society and written by Brice Bard.  Le Guide Gris/The Grey Guide billed itself as “the first ever travel guide written specifically for gay male travelers “and was planned as an annual publication. But it was the decade immediately preceding Stonewall that saw this genre expand significantly, with the appearance of the first issues of serials such as Bob Damron’s Address Book (1968) and The Lavender Baedeker (1966). This last took as its inspiration for a title an homage to Karl Baedeker, who initiated the modern genre of travel guides in 1839.  In 1970, the first volume of the Spartacus International Gay Guide was published in  Amsterdam, followed in 1973 by the Gayellow Pages , Places Of Interest  (created in Phoenix by Ferrari Publications in 1980, and joined by Places of Interest to Women in 1982), Odysseus in 1985, Inn Places in 1987 (also from Ferrari)  the monthly travel magazine Our World  (begun in Daytona Beach in 1989), Out&About in 1992, the first edition of Fodor’s Gay Guide to The USA in 1996, and the biennial Frommer’s Gay and Lesbian Europe in 1999.  The genre continued to diversify in the twenty-first century with additional guides to specific nations, regions and the LGBT life of individual cities produced in both English and the local language.  Communities profiled include Sydney, Melbourne, London,  New York City, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles,  Amsterdam, the Pacific Northwest, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Key West, Hawaii, Barcelona, Ireland, Paris, Canada, Washington, D.C.,  Mexico, Atlanta, the Northeast, Berlin, Italy, Las Vegas, Vienna, Australia, China, Costa Rica, Buenos Aires, Indonesia, Spain, Brazil, Prague, Savannah, New Orleans, New Zealand, Budapest, South Africa, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Hamburg,  Rio de Janeiro, Palm Springs, Singapore, Toronto, Orlando, Vietnam. Some of these places were covered in the series The Out Traveler, published in 2008 and 2009 by Alyson Books. And in 2012, the founders of Out&About revived their publication as a digital magazine titled ManAboutWorld.

The focus of these guides was paralleled in the gay press as well, most influentially in THE ADVOCATE through its national distribution and range of content. In its very first issue in September 1967, a column entitled The Gay Traveler made its debut, and ran until March 1968-. The title was later revived in March 1973 and lasted until the beginning of 1976. Other columns of local news and information were regularly filed from cities as diverse as San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., providing updated information to the listings and advice recorded in guides such as Damron’s. This genre would maintain a dominance in the gay travel monograph genre until the last two decades of the twentieth century, when a recognizably LGBT stream of travel accounts began to appear.

The first of these was written by novelist Edmund White and published in 1980. States of Desire: Travels in Gay America offers a picture of the local gay communities of fourteen cities and regions in the year before the appearance of the AIDS pandemic.  White opens a window into life as it was in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, Denver, Boston, Washington, D.C., Texas and the Midwest, providing useful background to the body of studies of individual cities published subsequently. In 2014, the same communities were examined again by White, who shared his findings and impressions in States of Desire Revisited.  For most of the 1980s, there was an absence of writing on gay travel that was lay outside the familiar genre of city and country guidebooks, a situation which began to change in 1990.

In that year, novelist Keith Hale’s narrative In the land of Alexander:  gay travels, with history and politics, in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Greece appeared from Alyson Publications. He was a former staff member for the Spartacus group of gay travel guides, and this readable volume follows his experiences over the summer of 1989 and presents a detailed picture of the conditions under which gay people then lived in several countries of eastern Europe and the Balkans as told to Hale by the men he met. The second chapter on “Gay Rights in Eastern Europe“ offers a valuable summary of the beginnings of LGBT activism in Hungary, Romania, Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia (as it was then known), and the social and legal barriers imposed on homosexuals in Albania and Bulgaria. It was followed in 1991 by a work whose title indicated that the faceless anonymity of the Grey Guide was long gone for LGBT people seeking vacation help. Are You Two– Together? :  A Gay and Lesbian Travel Guide to Europe by Lindsy Van Gelder and Pamela Robin Brandt. In their introduction, the authors offer an illuminating view of gay and lesbian travel literature up to that time:

The real reason we wrote this book is that we wanted to read it…..we’ve been frustrated by the scarcity of gay travel writing. There are plenty of gay guidebooks out there: but too often they’ve seemed to us to be poorly researched….single-mindedly focused on bars and cruising. Even the best ones we’ve seen have consisted almost entirely of listings, with no travel writing. Where was the information about gay culture and gay history? ….the book you’re reading is the very first gay travel guide to be brought out by a major American publishing house. (Van Gelder and Brandt 1991: xiii-xiv.)

The book reports on fourteen travel destinations of interest to LGBT people– from the familiar    (Amsterdam, Berlin ,Paris , London , and Bavaria with the castle of Neuschwanstein) to less well known  locales (the home of the “Ladies of LLangollen“ in Wales and the relaxed atmosphere of Copenhagen) and even the Greek isle of Mykonos. Each section begins with an essay about important aspects of the local scene, followed by a map, advice on things to do (by day and night), where to dine, information sources such as local LGBT newspapers, and what books to read before you go.

The next book in the corpus of gay travel writing, published in 1993, is the first of two by the man who created the idea of specifically gay-oriented travel vacations in 1972 and is regarded as the “father“ of the LGBT travel industry of today.  In Volleyball with the Cuna Indians and Other Gay Travel Adventures, veteran traveler Hanns Ebensten shares incidents gleaned from decades of leading high-end tours to destinations as varied as Istanbul, the Caribbean, the Grand Canyon, the monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece ,the Sinai, the Galapagos Islands,  and sailing the Nile on a felucca. His eye for detail and frank accounts of the conditions and personalities of his tours enhance the text. The book has unfortunately never been reprinted. 1993 also figures in the 1995 book by Michael Lane, Pink Highways:  Tales of Queer Madness on the Open Road. Lane (more familiar to online readers as the co-author of the underground zine Monk) shares a colorful account of his journey across the United State to participate in the 1993 March on Washington in a manner reminiscent of Richard Brautigan.  It was followed in 1997 by USA Cities:  Essential Information for Gay and Lesbian Travelers compiled by the editors of the monthly newsletter Out and About, begun in 1992 and published in New Haven. And in 1999 Hanns Ebensten returned with a second book of tales from his life as a traveler and tour leader, The Seals on the Icepack and More Gay Travel Adventures. Lands and experiences covered include Tangier, Morocco when it was still an “international“ city, Papua New Guinea, the seal migrations in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Tahiti, Venice, Egypt, Mexico, the Amazon River, riding the Orient Express, and the benefits of travelling with older men in their seventies.

The opening years of the twenty-first century saw the continued development of the genre of LGBT travel books begun with Are You Two Together?  with the appearance of works addressing and expanding the concept of a distinct pool of potential customers the travel and tourism industry could cater to. The earliest was a themed issue of the British newsletter Leisure done in November 2000 surveying “The Gay Holiday Market.“ The following year, the sixth annual gay and lesbian travel survey “A Place For Us 2001“ was published in San Francisco by the LGBT owned firm Community Marketing, founded in 1991. But the first book explicitly examining the varied aspects of LGBT travel as a subject did not appear until 2002, Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity and Sex by Stephen Clift, Michael Luongo, and Carry Callister presents eleven chapters written by authors from the UK, the United States, and Canada in three sections, “History, Culture and Commerce”, “Identity, Choice and Resistance” and “Sexual Behaviour, Risk and HIV Prevention.” Topics explored include marketing travel to the gay and lesbian population, Thailand and Hawaii as destinations, resistance to gay tourism, aspects of the social role of holidays in the forging of a gay identity, and a detailed review of print and web sources of information on gay and lesbian travel and the factors that affect their quality. The Introduction (co-written by all three authors) on “Gay Tourism: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” offers an historical treatment of the idea of a same-sex presence within the experience of travel from the Victorian period through the late twentieth century. 2002 also saw the acceptance at Arizona States University of the M.S. thesis Gay Space and Tourism: A Semiotic Content Analysis of Destination Brochure Images by Debra L. Kuffner, which explored the symbolism used in marketing LGBT tourist locations. And in 2003, the first issue of The Out Traveler was published in Los Angeles, initially a quarterly but beginning in 2005 switching to six times a year.

In 2004, Michael Luongo, one of the editors of Gay Tourism, continued his involvement in the development of LGBT travel literature with Between the Palms:  A Collection of Gay Travel Erotica. The volume presents eighteen accounts by American and Canadian authors of their romantic encounters with men of other cultures in places as diverse and vivid as the Burning Man gathering in Nevada, Morocco, Ghana, Berlin, Granada, India, and Jamaica. It was followed in 2005 by a lengthy and thoughtful autobiographical exploration of one of the stereotypes of sexual partner preference by culture preserved in gay slang. The title of Canadian writer Daniel Gawthrop’s The Rice Queen Diaries:  A Memoir incorporates the term used to indicate an attraction to men of Asian heritage, and recounts his experiences in locations as varied as Vancouver, Bangkok and Saigon. 2005 also saw the publication of a complex study of one of the most public manifestations of the LGBT community, New Zealand geographer Lynda Johnston’s Queering Tourism: Paradoxical Performances at Gay Pride Parades. The book draws upon her own experiences with pride events in Sydney, Auckland and Edinburgh and notes that in addition to issues of cultural politics, protest and affirmations of sexual identity, “this spectacular display has become an important date for the rapidly expanding queer tourism industry, attracting both queer and non-queer tourists,” (Johnston 2005: 1)

2006 was marked by the publication of Gay Tourism: Culture and Context by Australians Gordon Waitt and Kevin Markwell which continued the approach initiated in the 2002 anthology Gay Tourism and presented a greatly expanded analysis drawing on the fields of cultural geography and leisure/tourism studies. The introduction notes that “the interaction of destination cultures, local tourist industries, national politics, and international tourism clearly offers a complex range of outcomes” (Waitt and Markwell 2006: ix) for defining and analyzing LGBT tourism. Gay Tourism opens by examining how LGBT people have (or have not) been recognized in the literatures of tourism studies, then moves to consider the history of gay tourism, the mythology of gay travel destinations as utopias for sexual activities, gay tourists in heterosexual societies with differing legal and ethical limits on permitted sexuality (with Egypt and the island nations of the Caribbean offered as examples), how individual cities promote themselves as gay destinations with emphases on specific LGBT neighborhoods (ranging from San Francisco to places as diverse as Manchester, Amsterdam, Montreal,  Cape Town and Miami Beach) the local political factors involved, and specialized festivals and events as varied as Sydney’s well-known Gay Mardi Gras, the Gay Games athletic competitions,  pride parades, and Gay Day at the Disney theme parks. The concluding section frames gay tourism within the process of globalization. A second 2006 work published in the United Kingdom was Pink Tourism: Holidays of Gay Men and Lesbians by Howard L. Hughes which takes a marketing perspective and is addressed to both students in tourism management and related fields and a more general audience. An introductory chapter on homosexuality is followed by four chapters on the demand aspects of gay and lesbian tourism (such as market size and growth, profiles of the holiday patterns visible for both men and women, and co-factors such as a public gay identity and travel as a part of the gay lifestyle), destination choices and the involvement of risk, and the perspectives of tour operators and travel agents on the supply side of gay and lesbian tourism. Questions of useful criteria for identifying the gay and lesbian market, survey data and incorporating gay- friendly images and language into publicity materials and the role holidaying plays in creating a gay identity are considered in the final two chapters. The third development in the genre of LGBT travel writing to occur in 2006 was the initiation by Harrington Press of the series “Out in the World,” led off by Gerard Wozek’s collection Postcards from Heartthrob Town: A Gay Man’s Travel Tales, a mixture of fiction and personal accounts exploring what drives gay men to answer the call to experience new territories.

2007 was marked by the publication of three works devoted to specific geographic regions and their heritages of experience woven by LGBT visitors. The first of them, Love, Castro Street:  Reflections of San Francisco was edited by the well-known lesbian author Katharine V. Forrest and Jim Van Buskirk, program manager of the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library. The collection  gathers together twenty-six wide-ranging personal life journey accounts by novelists, poets and nonfiction writers who  all experienced  the gay , lesbian communities and counterculture of San Francisco as they were during eras as varied as the Summer of Love in 1967 and the searing years of the AIDS pandemic and the assassination of Harvey Milk.  Their voices take the reader into both San Francisco as a living, dying and changing quilt of realities and the significance to LGBT people of San Francisco as a mythic destination of journeying and pilgrimage. Michael Luongo continued his use of personal accounts seen in Between the Palms with an edited volume sharing the experiences of gay men who chose one of the Islamic nations as their destination, Gay Travels in the Muslim World. Countries represented in this diverse book include Afghanistan, Mauritania, the Sultanate of Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, Iraq, Egypt, and Turkey. The introduction was written by the founder of Huriyah, the first online magazine for queer Muslims (published in San Francisco between 2000 and 2010 and continued by The Huriyah Blog, while Luongo’s preface explores “Homosexuality and Coverage of the Islamic World. “  And LGBT travels on the continent of South America last covered by Hanns Ebensten in his account of visiting Macchu Picchu returned in 2007 in Jesse Archer’s colorful account You Can Run: Gay, Glam, and Gritty Travels in South America.

2007 was also the year when the most comprehensive work on LGBT tourism yet done aimed specifically at educating the travel professional on the most effective ways to become part of this burgeoning industry was published. Jeff Guaracino’s Gay and Lesbian Tourism : The Essential Guide for Marketing draws upon the author’s long involvement with marketing and communications within the LGBT community and is notable for the number of case studies provided of mainstream businesses that have adapted themselves to attract gay and lesbian clientele.  One of the more interesting points made comes in the first chapter “The Rise in Gay and Lesbian Tourism, Nothing Short of Historic” where seven reasons are offered for the growth in travel destinations branding themselves as gay-friendly since 2001. They include the events of 9/11 and the refusal of LGBT people to be cowed by fears of terrorism and hate speech, the greater visibility of gay people and issues in the media, the desire of gay travelers to seek new places and to be welcomed (paralleled by the effect of off-season large-scale LGBT events such as the Winter Party in Miami), active and engaged local LGBT communities,  the availability of market research allowing the economic impact of gay travel to be measured,  and the growth of media outlets (among them websites, newspapers, television networks and the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association) aimed at potential LGBT travelers. Other chapters review best practices in LGBT tourism marketing, judging how gay-friendly a business is, the role of gay sports as a marketing tool, and the economic power of LGBT tourism. Readers will find the section on the nonprofit organization Commercial Closet with its list of advertising practices to avoid useful as a benchmark for where marketing to the LGBT travel community stood at this time.

Certain destinations have acquired a degree of myth that makes them inevitable choices for gay men seeking a vivid travel experience. One of them is the Greek island of Mykonos in the Cyclades archipelago in the Aegean Sea. Many tourists return to it year after year and in the process form a self-selected group of island citizens, among whom are many gay men.  The complex anthropological study by Pola Bousiou The Nomads of Mykonos: Performing Liminalities in A ‘Queer’ Space published in 2008 is based on fieldwork conducted between 1991 and 1997. It focuses on the ways the constructed myth of the island as a desirable gay destination is interwoven with other narratives which cast Mykonos as a place where identities outside the norm are accepted and serve as the bases for complementary distinctive social forms.

The current decade has seen the further development of LGBT tourism literature in both print and electronic formats, initiated by ManAboutWorld in 2012. Two years later, travel writer Benjamin Law’s account of his experiences of the ways LGBT identity has taken distinctive forms and expression in Indonesia, Thailand, China, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar and India appeared as Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East. Among the stories shared are the gay resorts of Bali, a national transsexual competition in Thailand, the invisible world of LGBT China, Japanese television’s embrace of drag queens, and a pride parade in India.  And in 2017, the assessment of LGBT tourism from an industrial and marketing perspective last seen in works such as Pink Tourism and Gay Tourism: Culture and Context , and Gay and Lesbian Tourism: The Essential Guide for Marketing,  returned in Jeff Guaracino and Ed Salvato’s  Handbook of LGBT tourism and Hospitality: A Guide for Business Practice. Guaracino was the author of the 2007 volume Gay and Lesbian Tourism: The Essential Guide for Marketing while Salvato served as the editor in chief from 1980 to 2004 of Out and About. Their detailed book is intended to educate the range of professions in the hospitality industries on both the existence and extent of the LGBT market of potential clients and practical strategies and methods of reaching them. A unique and very valuable feature is a timeline of “Milestones in LGBT History, Tourism, and Marketing” covering the period from 1958 to 2015. Categories examined are publications, history/events/demonstrations, travel and accommodations, and marketing. Separate sections of the Handbook examine the foundations of LGBT hospitality and tourism, business opportunities and essentials, the global aspects of LGBT tourism, and industry resources and trends. The title of this last section masks its diverse content, which includes an annotated bibliography and information on professional associations, advocacy organizations and conventions.

In the same tradition as The Nomads of Mykonos is the beautifully detailed and heavily illustrated 2017 work by Howard Phillips Smith, Unveiling the Muse: the Lost History of Gay Carnival in New Orleans. The book begins by providing background on the local gay scene in New Orleans and the French Quarter before moving to present the histories of thirteen major gay organizations active in the annual Mardi Gras parades and celebrations attracting visitors from across the world since the formation of the Krewe of Yuga in 1958.  Notable artists who created the intricate costumes and settings for the balls and courts of Carnival are also profiled.

The most recent work in the stream of writing on LGBT tourism approaches the subject as part of a complex social narrative. Queering the Redneck Riviera: Sexuality and the Rise of Florida Tourism by Jerry Watkins looks not at South Florida and its large gay community but at a region less known within LGBT studies, the Florida Panhandle and Gulf Coast. It discusses the interwoven histories of the creation and deliberate marketing during the 1950s of the idea of Florida as “The Sunshine State” , the legislative authority of the Johns Commission of the Florida state government as an attempt to serve as a moral enforcer against homosexuals (which it regarded as enemies of the state or the heterosexually-promoted image of Florida all good citizens were called upon to endorse )and the ways that the gay and lesbian citizens of the Gulf Coast generated survival strategies within the matrix of tourism and created their own spaces of community. The detailed coverage of local LGBT events from a sting operation at a public restroom in Panama City in 1961 to out beach parties on the Fourth of July include coverage of the history of what Watkins describes as “pink capitalism” and the growth of businesses catering to the LGBT segment of the streams of tourist who have visited the Gulf Coast since the 1960s.  The analysis of the cultural politics of reputation as a factor complicating the queering of the Gulf Coast given in the epilogue is thoughtful and cogent. Whether sailing down the Nile, participating in the splendors of Mardi Gras, or simply sharing in other travelers’ tales of wonders seen and savored, the LGBT tourist is both a longstanding subject of interest to the hospitality industry and a figure whose experiences mirrored in words have a diverse and lasting value.

References

Archer, Jesse. You Can Run: Gay, Glam, and Gritty Travels in South America. New York: Harrington Park, 2007.

Bard, Brice. Le Guide Gris: The Grey Guide. San Francisco: Mattachine Society, 1958.

Bob Damron’s Address Book. San Francisco: Bob Damron Enterprises, 1968.

Bousiou, Pola. The Nomads of Mykonos: Performing Liminalities in A ‘Queer’ Space. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008.

Clift, Stephen, Michael Luongo, and Carry Callister. Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity and Sex. London: Continuum, 2002.

Ebensten, Hanns. Volleyball with the Cuna Indians and Other Gay Travel Adventures. New York: Viking, 1993.

Ebensten, Hanns. The Seals on the Icepack and More Gay Travel Adventures. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Professional Press, 1999.

Collins, Andrew. Fodor’s Gay Guide to The USA   New York: Fodor’s Travel Publications; Distributed by Random House, 1996.

Frommer’s Gay and Lesbian Europe. New York:  Macmillan USA, 1999- Biennial.

Gawthrop, Daniel. The Rice Queen Diaries:  A Memoir. Vancouver, British Columbia: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005.

The Gay Holiday Market. London: Mintel International Group, 2000.

“The Gay Traveler”. The ADVOCATE, September 1967-March 1968, March 1973-1976. (column)

Gayellow Pages. New York: Renaissance House, 1973-

Guaracino, Jeff. Gay and Lesbian Tourism: The Essential Guide for Marketing. Amsterdam; Boston; London: Elsevier/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2007.

Guaracino, Jeff and Ed Salvato. Handbook of LGBT Tourism and Hospitality: a guide for business practice. New York, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2017.

Hale, Keith. In the Land of Alexander:  Gay Travels, with History and Politics, in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Greece. Boston, Massachusetts: Alyson Publications, 1990.

Hughes, Howard L. Pink Tourism: Holidays of Gay Men and Lesbians. Wallingford: CABI, 2006.

Huriyah (http://huriyahmag.blogspot.com/)

Inn Places. Phoenix, Arizona: Ferrari Publications, 1987-

Kolber-Stuart, Billy, David Alport, and David Savage. USA Cities:  Essential Information for Gay and Lesbian Travelers. New York: Hyperion, 1997.

Kuffner, Debra L. Gay Space and Tourism: A Semiotic Content Analysis of Destination Brochure Images. M.S. dissertation, Arizona State University, 2002.

Lane, Michael. Pink Highways:  Tales of Queer Madness on the Open Road. New York: Carol Pub. Group, 1995.

Law, Benjamin. Gaysia:  Adventures in the Queer East . Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc., 2012.

Love, Castro Street:  Reflections of San Francisco, edited by Katherine V. Forrest and Jim Van Buskirk. New York: Alyson Books, 2007.

Luongo, Michael. Between the Palms:  A Collection of Gay Travel Erotica. New York: Southern Tier Editions, Harrington Park Press, 2004.

Luongo, Michael. Gay Travels in the Muslim World. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2007.

Luongo, Michael. “Homosexuality and Coverage of the Islamic World” in Gay Travels in the Muslim World. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2007: xiii-xxvi.

ManAboutWorld. (https://www.manaboutworld.com/about-us/)

Odysseus. Flushing, New York: Odysseus Enterprises, 1985- Annual.

Our World. Daytona Beach, Florida: Our World Publishing, February 1989-

The Out Traveler. Los Angeles, Calif.: LPI Media, 2003- Quarterly 2003-2005, Six times yearly 2005-Onine at https://www.outtraveler.com/

Out & About. New Haven, Connecticut: Out & About, Inc. 1992-

“A Place for Us 2001”: Tourism Industry Opportunities in the Gay & Lesbian Market: the 6th Annual Gay & Lesbian Travel Survey.  San Francisco: Community Marketing, 2001.

Places of Interest. Phoenix, Arizona : Ferrari Publications, 1980-

Places of Interest to Women: Women’s Guide USA & Canada.  Phoenix, Arizona: Ferrari Publications, 1982-

Smith, Howard Phillips.  Unveiling the Muse: the Lost History of Gay Carnival in New Orleans. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2017.

Spartacus International Gay Guide. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Spartacus, 1970- Annual.

Strait, Guy. The Lavender Baedeker. San Francisco, California: Guy Strait, 1963-1966.

Van Gelder, Lindsy and Pamela Robin Brandt. Are You Two– Together?:  A Gay and Lesbian Travel Guide to Europe. New York: Random House, 1991.

Waitt, Gordon and Kevin Markwell. Gay Tourism:  Culture and Context. New York: Haworth Hospitality Press, 2006.

Watkins, Jerry T. Queering the Redneck Riviera: Sexuality and the Rise of Florida Tourism. Gainesville, FLorida: University Press of Florida, 2018.

White, Edmund. States of Desire: Travels in Gay America. New York: Dutton, 1980.

Wozek, Gerard. Postcards from Heartthrob Town: A Gay Man’s Travel Tales. Binghamton, NY: Southern Tier Editions, Harrington Park Press, c2006.

 

Copyright R.Ridinger 2019