Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity and Sex
Michael Luongo et al.
The 1969 movie comedy If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium depicted and promoted the growing popularity of whirlwind European travel for middle-class Americans. While hardly a landmark work of cinema (Suzanne Pleshette and Norman "Mr. Roper" Fell were the stars), the film has had a lasting cultural impact: its title has become a catchphrase to describe the "greatest hits" mode of tourism, and that mode itself has become a subject of criticism from vacationers who prefer more in-depth cultural experiences.
Gay Tourism: Culture, Identity and Sex, a thought-provoking collection of scholarly-styled theses on historic, cultural and economic issues related to GLBT leisure travel, could well carry the additional subtitle, If It's Chapter 3, This Must Be Hawaii. The book touches down in a dizzying number of places, perspectives, and theories. Like a two-week eight-city continental jaunt, Gay Tourism thrills you, exhausts you, provokes lots of thought, and leaves you anticipating further, more deeply revelatory explorations. The book offers little in the way of definitive theorizing, but the questions it raises may have lasting cultural impact of their own.
There are nuggets of fascinating information throughout the volume's 12 pieces, including a concise history of gender roles and sexuality among native Hawaiians; an examination of the social complexities of prostitution (both hetero and homosexual) in Thailand; a look at the aggressive cultivation of gay tourism by urban and national governments; and a study of gay men's sexual practices on vacation as compared to at home. But the far-flung range of the contributors' topics combined with the fact that the writers work with no strict common style is sometimes frustrating (Key terms such as "tourism," "travel," "gay," and "queer" are not consistently defined from piece to piece, making it difficult to try to synthesize the book's broad spectrum material).
A number of themes are touched upon in more than one of the papers collected here, and they offer great potential for additional study and future books. These include the roles of travel in the shaping of personal identity, sex-themed "gay tourism" versus gay-friendly general tourism, and a focus on gay men and lesbians as marketing targets defined by their sexuality. This last is the book's most common thread: a significant number of the contributors work in tourism marketing, and even those pieces that deal with the psychological and cultural meanings of travel feel informed by a vested interest in figuring out how to optimize the business of gay tourism.
Toward the end of an information-packed interview with co-editor Michael Luongo, Thomas Roth, the President of Community Marketing, "a travel consultation firm helping companies, tour operators, travel agents and government tourism boards gain access to the gay and lesbian travel market" says "Ultimately, our goal is that it will be a non-issue. That gay and lesbian people will be free and happy and welcome everywhere that they want to go...And we'll just close up because we'll just be able to say that we've done out what we set out to do. But until then, we're working to help."
Roth, who otherwise provides an excellent, business-savvy overview of travel marketing that anyone interested in the basics of the field would benefit from reading, comes off as a bit disingenuous in this statement. Surely the long-range objective of his highly profitable business isn't really to create conditions that lead to its shutting down (Similarly the owners of the gay bookstores who will sell Gay Tourism wouldn't want to have to shut their shops down if general bookstores start carrying comprehensive selections of gay-interest titles).
This points to one of Gay Tourism's most thought-provoking aspects: the degree to which it highlights the LGBT community's simultaneous and conflicting desires for gay-identity-based segregation and broadbased humanist integration, a topic that should help the book reach a broader audience than its obvious constituencies of intellectual travel buffs and tourism professionals. In Martin Cox's pithily ambiguous contribution, The Long-Haul Out of the Closet: The Journey From Smalltown to Boystown, the British scholar contrasts men who "learn how to be gay" by visiting so-called gay meccas and then begin to feel more confident with their sexuality back at home with other small town men who use frequent visits to Ibiza and other subcultural hot-spots as a way of splitting off their gay experiences from their relatively closeted daily lives, intentionally dividing their own personae.
To their great credit, co-editors Clift, Luongo, and Callister modestly acknowledge the wide-ranging, non-comprehensive nature of Gay Tourism in their introductory comments: "...the rationale for this book: to bring together contributions from leading practitioners in the business of gay and lesbian tourism, and from academic researchers—both to provide an overview of current issues and to act as a stimulus for further research." This volume is but the rugged first leg of the long journey that lies ahead for scholars and readers in this fascinating new field of inquiry. It's just the tip of the iceberg...on a gay Alaskan cruise.
