Abstract

"Making the World of Gay Travel: From Sex Tourism to Gay Cruises in the Global South at the End of the Twentieth Century"

Christopher Ewing, Purdue University (cbewing@purdue.edu)

This paper examines the changes in global gay travel markets at the end of the twentieth century. The period between 1970 and the beginning of the twenty-first century marks a moment of dramatic historical change. As gay liberation movements and related publications across western Europe and North America in the 1970s expanded global travel opportunities for gay consumers, they simultaneously centered the possibility for sexual opportunities, often marshalling the language of racialized desire to market to affluent, implicitly white tourists. However, facing escalating charges in the late 1980s and early 1990s of participation in sexual abuse, many travel and hospitality operators swiftly expunged clear-cut references to sexual desire. Instead, they offered a new category of gay and lesbian travel that could at once garner international investment and emphasize the importance of gay travel to gay rights. Several decades of scholarship have importantly revealed the overlapping dynamics of racialized desire and global inequality that ran through this transition; however, the significance of travel operators and hospitality providers – both formal and informal – based in the Global South has remained understudied. This paper argues that men and women of color working in popular gay travel destinations in southeast Asia were crucial agents in the transition from “sex tourism” to gay travel. Far from passive recipients of Western desires and capital investment, they harnessed gay information and travel networks to make rights claims, while providing information that shaped gay knowledge production of tourist spaces. The neoliberal logics of international gay travel that bound tourism to rights by the end of the twentieth century were therefore the result of a multidirectional, if uneven, process.