How Gay Travel Changed After the Pandemic (And Why We're Still Making Up for Lost Time)

I want to tell you about a night in the summer of 2022 that I have thought about more times than I can count and that I am only now, sitting here writing this, able to fully articulate why it mattered as much as it did.

It was July. I was in Mykonos for the first time since before everything stopped. The cruise had been canceled. The Fire Island season had been abbreviated into something unrecognizable. The group trips had been replaced by group chats where we sent each other travel content we couldn't act on, which is a specific kind of torture that I would not wish on anyone and that I believe produced, in the gay community specifically, a level of wanderlust so concentrated and so long-deferred that when the world finally opened again it came out of us like pressure from a valve that had been closed too long.

I was standing on a terrace above the water. The sun was doing what the Mykonos sun does at that hour, which is refuse to be just one color and insist on being every color simultaneously, which should be garish and is instead the most beautiful thing you have ever seen every single time. The music had already started somewhere below me. The crowd on the terrace was dressed in the way of people who had been planning this outfit for two years and were finally wearing it, which gave the whole scene an intensity of intention that I had not experienced before in quite this form.

And then something happened that I was not prepared for.

I started crying.

Not the discreet welling I described in the Belvedere in front of The Kiss. Actual crying. The kind that has a sound. The kind that a person standing nearby noticed and touched my arm about, asking in whatever language was her first language whether I was alright, and I said yes, I'm fine, which was true and also completely insufficient as a description of what was happening.

What was happening was: I was somewhere.

After two years of not being somewhere — not in the specific, intentional, chosen-with-purpose way that travel means somewhere — I was back. The terrace was real. The sunset was real. The music was real. The two hundred people around me were real, and they had all made the same choice I had made, which was to come back to this specific kind of living as soon as it was available again, and the collective energy of that choice — two hundred people who had waited and now were here — was so dense and so charged that it went straight through whatever composure I had arrived with.

The woman who touched my arm looked at me for a moment longer and then smiled in a way that suggested she understood, either because she was also feeling some version of it or because she recognized in me something she had seen in herself or in others at some point in the preceding weeks on this island.

"First trip back?" she said.

"First trip back," I said.

She raised her glass. I raised mine. The sun continued to refuse to be just one color.

That moment is where this piece begins.

What the Pandemic Did to Gay Travel: The Losses

I want to start with the losses before I get to the recovery, because the recovery only makes sense in the context of what there was to recover from, and I think we have moved too quickly past the losses in our eagerness to document the bounce-back.

Gay travel lost things in the pandemic that were not simply paused. They were ended. And the distinction between paused and ended matters enormously, even when we pretend it doesn't.

The Events That Didn't Come Back

Gay Pride events were among the first large gatherings to be canceled in 2020 and among the slowest to fully return. The circuit parties — the large-scale organized gay dance events that have been the backbone of gay travel culture for decades — either folded entirely or emerged from the pandemic in significantly reduced form, having lost the sponsorships and the organizational infrastructure and in some cases the audience that had sustained them.

Some of those events are gone. Not on hiatus. Gone. The venues closed permanently. The organizers moved on to other things. The particular communities that had organized themselves around those specific events dispersed into other gatherings or scattered or simply existed without the annual anchor that had given their social calendar its structure.

I know men who attended a specific circuit event every year for fifteen years for whom the end of that event was a genuine grief — not a dramatic grief, not the kind that announces itself, but the quiet kind that surfaces unexpectedly when you realize you have made no plans for the weekend in May that used to be that event, because there is no event to make plans for.

That grief is real and it deserves to be named as real rather than dismissed as an overreaction to a party ending.

The Bars That Closed

I wrote in an earlier piece about the gay bars that are gone, and the pandemic accelerated a closure pattern that was already happening but that the two years of forced inactivity collapsed from a gradual process into an abrupt one.

Gay bars operate on thin margins in expensive cities. They survive on the consistency of their regulars and the frequency of their foot traffic, and two years of neither produced an attrition that the gay bar landscape has not recovered from and may not fully recover from.

The bars that closed during the pandemic closed for reasons that preceded it — the rent had been too high, the neighborhood had changed, the business model was already stretched — but the pandemic was the force that turned precarious into impossible. And many of those bars, had they survived the two years, would still be open today and would be full tonight and would be doing the thing that good gay bars do for the people who need them.

They didn't survive. The buildings that held them are other things now. And the neighborhoods that lost them are different in ways that are invisible to people who didn't know them before and permanent to people who did.

The Connections That Didn't Happen

This is the loss that I think about most, because it is the most invisible and the most consequential.

Travel is, in significant part, how gay men find each other. Not romantically — though that too, obviously — but in the broader sense of community-building. The person you met on a gay cruise in 2018 who became a genuine friend. The group of men you encountered at a resort in Puerto Vallarta who introduced you to a different version of gay community than the one you had at home. The bartender in Berlin who pointed you toward something you didn't know you were looking for. The stranger on a terrace in Mykonos who raised her glass when you needed her to.

Two years of none of that.

Two years of gay men whose social expansion had been happening through travel — whose chosen families were being built and extended through the specific intimacy of shared travel experience — having that expansion stopped.

I know men who were newly out when the pandemic began. For whom the expected experience of gay travel as community initiation — the first gay resort, the first Pride abroad, the first time being surrounded by your people in a context that was built for exactly that — was delayed for two years past when they were ready for it. Two years of being out but not yet having been able to do the things that make being out feel like belonging to something.

Those two years are not nothing. They are years of community membership that was owed and not paid, and the people who were owed them have been trying to collect ever since, and they are right to be collecting.

The Smaller Losses That Add Up

Beyond the large structural losses, there were the accumulated smaller ones that I want to briefly name because they mattered too.

The trip that was booked and canceled and partially refunded and never quite replicated. The birthday that was supposed to be celebrated somewhere beautiful and that happened at home instead, once, and then again, and then the year where the birthday had stopped feeling like something that could be celebrated in the way you had been planning.

The relationship that did not survive the loss of the travel that was sustaining it — the couple who traveled well together and discovered that without the travel they were less equipped for the dailiness of each other. The solo traveler who had been using travel as the primary mechanism for resetting his relationship with himself and who spent two years without that mechanism and came out the other side changed in ways he is still figuring out.

The milestones that went unmarked. The anniversaries and the promotions and the coming-outs and the survivals that deserved to be taken somewhere and celebrated properly and that couldn't be, and that we told ourselves we'd celebrate later and then later kept receding.

We are still celebrating the ones that receded. This is part of what the surge means. We are making up for the milestones we couldn't mark, in the places we couldn't get to, with the people we couldn't be with.

It is taking longer than two years to make up for two years. This should surprise no one.

What the Pandemic Did to Gay Travel: The Changes That Were Not Losses

Now I want to tell you about the things that changed that were not simply losses. Because the pandemic did not only take things. It also, in some cases, shifted things — redirected attention and resources and intention in ways that produced some outcomes that were not recoverable because they were not regressions. They were evolutions.

The Rediscovery of Domestic Gay Travel

American gay men, in particular, rediscovered domestic gay travel during the pandemic in a way that had lasting effects on where the community spends its money and its weekends.

Fire Island, Provincetown, Palm Springs, Key West — the domestic gay destinations that had been somewhat taken for granted in an era of cheap international flights and the increasing accessibility of Mykonos and Puerto Vallarta — suddenly became the only options, and the community responded by filling them beyond previous capacity and, more significantly, by rediscovering why they existed.

These places are not consolation prizes for people who couldn't get to Europe. They are original gay destinations — places where the community built infrastructure for itself decades ago, in some cases when there was nowhere else to go, and where that infrastructure still carries the accumulated weight of everything it has hosted.

I know men who went to Provincetown for the first time during the pandemic because it was the closest thing to abroad that was available, and who came back converted — who found in the specific gay geography of a Cape Cod town in October something they had not been looking for and could not stop talking about afterward.

The domestic gay destination had, in the years before the pandemic, been somewhat coded as the option for people who hadn't yet graduated to international travel. The pandemic removed that coding. The domestic destination became, for two years, the only destination, and the people who went fell in love with what they found there, and the relationship with domestic gay travel that resulted is now part of the landscape in a way it wasn't before.

This is not a small thing. The investment in domestic gay destinations — the spending and the visibility and the community building — that the pandemic redirected has compounded. The resorts expanded. The events grew. The communities deepened. Palm Springs' gay scene in 2024 is meaningfully different from Palm Springs' gay scene in 2019, not only because it's older but because it received two years of concentrated investment from a community that had nowhere else to put its travel energy.

The Rise of the Smaller Group Trip

Pre-pandemic gay travel had a particular configuration that I want to describe: large gay cruises, large resort events, large circuit parties, large Pride gatherings. The architecture of gay travel was predominantly large-scale and communal, organized around events that aggregated hundreds or thousands of people into shared experiences.

The pandemic made large-scale aggregation impossible and then, as restrictions eased unevenly and unpredictably, made it nerve-wracking for longer than it was technically prohibited. The uncertainty about what was allowed, what was safe, what could be counted on — all of it pointed away from the large event and toward the smaller, more controllable, more intimate configuration.

Gay men started traveling in smaller groups. The villa rental for eight close friends rather than the cruise for two thousand strangers. The private house for a long weekend rather than the resort for a week. The dinner party in a beautiful location rather than the pool deck event.

This configuration, which was a compromise in 2021, became a preference by 2022 for a significant portion of the traveling gay population. The intimacy of the small group trip — the concentrated time with chosen people, the specific conversations that only happen in close quarters, the trip that is yours rather than shared with hundreds of people you've never met — turned out to be something that many gay travelers had been wanting without knowing they were wanting it.

The large events are back now. The cruises fill. The circuit parties have returned in most markets. Pride gatherings are larger than they were before.

But the small group trip has kept its audience. The men who discovered it during the pandemic and found that it served them have not abandoned it for the larger format. They do both now. They go on the cruise and they also rent the villa in the Algarve with seven people they love. The pandemic didn't replace one format with another. It added a format to the repertoire.

The Serious Investment in Gay-Friendly Destinations

The pandemic, paradoxically, accelerated a conversation in the travel industry about what it actually means to be a gay-friendly destination — a conversation that was happening before 2020 but that the disruption and subsequent recovery made more urgent.

When gay travelers were choosing more carefully where to spend their recovered travel budgets, they chose with more discernment than before. The destinations that had done the work of building genuine gay-friendly infrastructure — the bars, the events, the legal protections, the cultural welcome — received disproportionate investment from a community that was spending more intentionally.

The destinations that had been coasting on the rainbow flag in the window discovered that a community with two years of deferred travel budget and renewed intentionality about where it spent that budget was not particularly interested in coasting.

Puerto Vallarta's Romantic Zone expanded. Sitges in Spain deepened its gay infrastructure. Portugal — Lisbon particularly, but also Porto and the Algarve — emerged as a new destination of genuine interest because it had been building something real and the post-pandemic gay traveler was paying attention in a way that rewarded real over performative.

The cruise lines that had been serving the gay market responsively rather than proactively found, post-pandemic, that the gap between the dedicated gay cruise operators and the mainstream cruise lines trying to attract gay travelers had widened. Gay travelers chose the former at higher rates than before. The authenticity premium increased.

This is, I think, a permanent shift. The community that was forced by the pandemic to travel more intentionally has kept some of that intentionality even as the urgency has faded. Where you spend your money and your time and your presence is still a choice, and the post-pandemic gay traveler is making that choice with more awareness of what it means.

The Acceleration of Digital Gay Community

I want to name something that the travel industry sometimes treats as a threat and that I think is actually an opportunity: the pandemic accelerated the formation of digital gay travel communities that have, in some cases, become the infrastructure for in-person travel in ways that didn't exist before.

The gay men who found each other on Instagram and in Facebook groups and on travel-focused apps during the pandemic — who connected around the shared experience of deferred travel and the shared aspiration of going back and the shared documentation of where they had been and where they wanted to go — those connections did not dissolve when travel became possible again.

They became group trips.

I have clients who planned their first group trip with people they met entirely online during the pandemic, who bonded over shared travel content and shared frustration and shared planning for trips they didn't know when they'd be able to take, and who then took those trips together and found that the connection was real and the trip was extraordinary.

The digital gay travel community is now a feeder for the in-person gay travel community in a way that has expanded who is traveling, where they're going, and how they're finding each other. This is good for the community and good for the industry and good for anyone whose business depends on gay travelers traveling.

The Revenge Travel Phenomenon: What It Actually Was

I want to spend some time on this because the phrase "revenge travel" got attached to the post-pandemic surge in a way that I think slightly misrepresents what was happening, and the misrepresentation matters.

Revenge travel implies a defiant act — getting back at the pandemic by going somewhere expensive and doing something indulgent. The narrative tends toward the performative: the person booking the first-class seat they couldn't previously justify, the resort upgrade that went past budget, the back-to-back trips that represented a pendulum swing from enforced stillness.

Some of that happened. I will not pretend otherwise. I participated in some of it and I have complicated feelings about the parts of it that were less about genuine need and more about conspicuous consumption dressed as healing.

But the phenomenon I observed, in myself and in the clients who came to me in 2022 and 2023 with a particular urgency in their travel inquiries, was not primarily revenge. It was something closer to reckoning.

The pandemic had done something to a lot of gay men that I think deserves to be said plainly: it had reminded us that we are not guaranteed the time we assume we have.

This is not a novel insight. Every human tradition, philosophical and religious and cultural, has tried to communicate this. Every loss reminds us. Every health crisis reminds us. But the pandemic communicated it with a scale and a directness and a duration that made it harder to file away in the category of things you know but don't live by.

Gay men, specifically, had already had this experience once. The AIDS crisis of the eighties and nineties had made the gay community intimately familiar with the possibility of catastrophic loss, with the fragility of the futures you were planning, with the specific grief of watching the people who were supposed to grow old with you not grow old. The community that came out of that era carried, in varying degrees of consciousness, the understanding that the time you have is not the time you can assume.

The pandemic reactivated that understanding in the gay community at a depth that I think explains some of the intensity of the subsequent travel surge. This was not revenge against the pandemic. This was a reckoning with the fact that the trip you kept putting off might, in some future iteration of the world's cruelty, not be available to put off further.

The men who came to me in 2022 with that particular urgency — the ones who said things like "I need to do this now" or "I've been waiting to do this for too long" — were not being impulsive. They were being honest about something the pandemic had clarified for them, which is that the waiting has a cost that compounds and that the cost of waiting too long is sometimes the experience you were waiting to have.

I booked them the trips. I understood the urgency. I shared it.

Who Came Back Different

The pandemic changed gay travel, but it also changed gay travelers, and the change in the traveler is the more interesting and more lasting development.

The Men Who Came Out During the Pandemic

There is a cohort of gay men who came out — to themselves, to their families, to their lives — during the pandemic, and who therefore began their gay adulthood in conditions that were stripped of most of the social infrastructure that usually accompanies that beginning.

No gay bars to go to. No pride events to attend. No group trips to book. No cruises, no circuit parties, no resort weeks. The spaces where being gay gets practiced and celebrated and made into something social rather than just internal were all closed.

These men came out in their apartments, in their families' houses, into a community that was entirely digital and only partially in-person, and when the world opened they arrived in gay travel spaces as adults who were, in some experiential senses, significantly younger than their ages.

I have worked with a number of these men and I want to say something about them that I find genuinely moving: they travel with a quality of attention that is rare. They are not taking anything for granted because they know, viscerally, what it feels like to have it taken. They show up to the gay resort and they look around and they do the thing I did in that West Village bar at twenty-two — they see the room and they think oh, this is where they all went — and the quality of their presence in that moment is one of the most beautiful things gay travel produces.

If you are one of these men: you are not behind. You are not late. You are exactly where you are, and what is available to you now is available, and I would like very much to help you find it.

The Men Who Came Back to Themselves

The pandemic forced a lot of gay men — particularly gay men in their thirties and forties, which is to say gay men who had been moving fast for a long time and who had not recently had occasion to stop — to spend an extended period in their own company.

For some of them, this was straightforwardly terrible. The social infrastructure of a well-lived urban gay life depends on movement and company and the constant availability of things to do and people to be with, and the removal of that infrastructure was experienced as deprivation and nothing else.

For others — and I count myself partially in this category, though I will not pretend the pandemic was anything other than a collective trauma — the enforced stillness produced a kind of reckoning with what they actually wanted from their lives that the constant movement had been successfully preventing.

I know men who came out of the pandemic and made different choices. Who decided that the circuit party every six weeks had been filling a need that might be better filled other ways. Who discovered that the travel they most wanted was not the travel they had been defaulting to — that the large gay resort had been doing something for them that a different kind of trip might do better.

These men came back to travel changed, and the travel they came back to was different from the travel they had been doing, and the difference was not a downgrade. It was a recalibration toward what they actually wanted rather than what the default gay travel circuit offered.

This recalibration is visible in the bookings. The men who previously always did the large cruise are now mixing in the private villa. The men who always did the resort week are now doing smaller, more culturally embedded trips — spending a week in a single city, going deeply into it rather than broadly across it. The men who traveled constantly for the pace of it are now traveling with more intention about what each trip is for.

Not all of them. Not uniformly. But the pattern is real and it is not a post-pandemic blip. It is a settled shift in how a significant portion of the gay travel market relates to the act of traveling.

The Ones Who Discovered They Could Work From Anywhere

The remote work experiment that the pandemic forced on large portions of the professional class had a specific effect on gay travelers that I want to name because it changed the mechanics of gay travel in ways that are still unfolding.

Gay men with remote-compatible jobs discovered, during the pandemic, that the concept of a fixed home base was a convention rather than a requirement. That the Upper East Side apartment — or the equivalent apartment in whatever city — was a default rather than a necessity. That the travel they had been doing in two-week increments around a fixed work schedule could, with restructuring, become something more continuous.

The gay digital nomad — the man who works from Lisbon for a month and then Mykonos for a month and then wherever the winter seems best for what he's working on — is not a new phenomenon but he is a significantly more common one post-pandemic than pre-pandemic, and his existence has had effects on gay travel destinations that are worth noting.

The gay-friendly European cities that attracted remote workers — Lisbon, Barcelona, Berlin, Amsterdam — have seen their gay neighborhoods deepen and evolve in response to an influx of longer-term international gay residents rather than short-term tourists. The bars that serve this population serve it differently than the tourist bars. The community that forms around longer-stay residents has a different quality than the community that forms around weekly resort turnovers.

I find this development genuinely interesting and broadly good for the destinations that are receiving it and for the gay travelers who are participating in it, though I also want to name the complication: the gay neighborhoods that attracted the remote workers are also the gay neighborhoods where rents are now doing things that affect the local gay community in ways that are worth paying attention to.

The gentrification conversation and the gay travel conversation are not separate conversations. They intersect in Lisbon and Barcelona and Berlin in ways that anyone traveling to those cities with any genuine interest in those communities should be thinking about.

The Couple Who Made It Through

The pandemic sorted relationships. The couples who made it through — who survived the continuous proximity and the shared anxiety and the canceled plans and the tested patience and the discovery of exactly how much two people can genuinely sustain each other when the external social infrastructure is removed — came out of it with something.

Not all of them know what to call the something. But I see it in the couples who book with me, the ones who came through the pandemic intact and are now traveling together with a quality of settled pleasure that is different from the giddy anticipation of a newer couple and different from the mechanical efficiency of a couple that has been traveling together for twenty years and has turned it into logistics.

These couples travel now as people who know something about each other that you only find out in the hard conditions. They have been through the hard conditions. The resort vacation, for them, carries the specific pleasure of a luxury that was earned rather than assumed.

I find them among my favorite clients to work with. They know what they want. They know what the other person wants. They have stopped pretending to like things they don't like and they do not expect their partner to pretend either. The trips they take are honest in a way that makes them easier to plan and infinitely better to take.

Where We Are Now: The State of Gay Travel in the Present Tense

It is 2026. We are six years out from the beginning of the thing and four years out from the moment when travel became genuinely, broadly possible again, and I want to give you an honest account of where gay travel stands right now because the narrative of "we're back" is both true and insufficient.

The Recovery Is Real but Uneven

Gay travel has recovered. In aggregate, across the industry, the numbers are not only back to pre-pandemic levels but in many markets and many categories they exceed them. The gay cruise sector is healthy. The major Pride events are drawing larger crowds than before. The gay resort market is strong. The circuit party calendar has been reconstituted.

This recovery is real and it deserves acknowledgment.

It is also uneven in ways that matter.

The large established players recovered fastest and most completely, partly because they had the resources to survive and partly because a post-pandemic audience gravitating toward reliability over novelty chose the known quantity. The smaller operators, the independent event producers, the boutique accommodations that had been building something over years and were in the middle of building it when the pandemic hit — their recovery is more complicated.

Some of them made it back and are thriving. Some of them made it back in reduced form, having lost the momentum and the team and the infrastructure they had accumulated. Some of them did not make it back and are not coming back, and the gap they left is still a gap.

The geographic recovery is also uneven. The most established gay travel destinations recovered fastest — Mykonos, Puerto Vallarta, Provincetown, Palm Springs — while some of the emerging destinations that had been developing interesting gay scenes before the pandemic have developed those scenes at a slower pace or in a different direction than was anticipated.

The Price Question Nobody Wants to Talk About

Gay travel is more expensive than it was before the pandemic. This is not unique to gay travel — travel broadly has inflated significantly since 2020 — but the specific interaction between gay travel pricing and the gay community's financial reality deserves a direct conversation.

The gay resort experience that was expensive but accessible in 2019 is, in many cases, expensive and less accessible in 2025. The cruise that a reasonably compensated professional could swing with some planning has, in some segments, moved out of reach for that same professional at current pricing.

This creates a stratification in gay travel that I think about and that I think the industry should think about more than it does. The experience of being surrounded by your community in a curated gay environment — the resort week, the gay cruise — has an egalitarian aspiration built into it that the pricing increasingly contradicts.

I say this as someone who sells luxury gay travel and who is not going to pretend I am neutral on the subject: the community that built gay travel built it for everyone, not just for the people who could afford the upgraded stateroom. The bars that were the original gay travel infrastructure cost the price of a drink. The beaches cost nothing. The community was not means-tested.

As the luxury end of gay travel grows and the accessible end contracts, something is lost, and the industry would do well to think about what it owes to the breadth of the community rather than only to its premium segment.

I offer this observation while also being the person who will absolutely get you the upgraded stateroom if that's what you want, because the two positions are not incompatible. You can care about access and equity in the community while also booking the suite. They are different decisions being made at different levels and neither negates the other.

The Safety Conversation That Won't Go Away

One of the things the pandemic changed about gay travel — and I want to be direct about this even though it is not a comfortable subject — is that it happened simultaneously with a political and cultural moment that has made the safety question more urgent for gay travelers than it was in 2019.

The rollback of LGBTQ+ protections in various jurisdictions, the increase in documented anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and violence in certain regions, the specific experience of being gay in a political climate that has made the community a target for explicit legislative hostility — all of this is real and ongoing and it affects where gay travelers feel comfortable going and what they feel comfortable doing when they get there.

I am not going to tell you which destinations are safe and which aren't in this piece, because the safety landscape changes and this piece will be read in a future I can't fully predict. I am going to tell you that the question of safety is now more explicitly part of every travel decision for a larger portion of the gay travel market than it was before the pandemic, and that the destinations and operators who take that question seriously rather than dismissing it or offering hollow reassurances are the ones who are earning and keeping the trust of thoughtful travelers.

I take this question seriously in every trip I plan. It is part of the briefing. It is part of the research. It is part of why knowing where you're going and what to expect matters more now than it did when the political climate was slightly less explicit about its hostility.

Travel with knowledge. Travel with awareness. Travel with joy, absolutely, and without apology — but also with your eyes open to what the destination is and what it is not.

The Things We Are Still Making Up For

We are making up for the milestones. The travel industry sees this in the bookings — the disproportionate number of significant milestone trips that have been concentrated in the post-pandemic years. The fiftieth birthday trip that should have been 2020 and became 2023. The anniversary trip that got deferred twice before it happened. The first-time-to-Europe trip for the man who had been saving up for it and then saved for two more years while the borders were complicated.

We are making up for the connections. The gay community is a community built significantly on in-person gathering, and two years of reduced gathering created a deficit in the social capital of the community — the new friendships that weren't formed, the community bonds that weren't deepened, the initiation into gay culture and gay travel culture that didn't happen — that cannot be fully recovered but that the post-pandemic surge has been working on in the sustained and intentional way of a community that understands what was lost.

We are making up for the joy. And this one is harder to quantify but easier to feel. There is a quality of presence that I notice in gay travelers now — a quality that I noticed most intensely in that Mykonos summer of 2022 and that has softened somewhat as the years have accumulated but that has not entirely disappeared — that is the quality of people who know what it felt like to not be here and who are therefore more here than they would have been otherwise.

The man who is dancing on that terrace is dancing with the awareness of the two years he wasn't dancing. The woman who raised her glass to a stranger crying on a terrace above the Aegean was raising it to both the sunset and the fact of the sunset — to the beauty and to the fact of being back in its presence.

That awareness is a gift of the pandemic, if you want to find a gift in it. Not a gift I would have chosen or that was worth what it cost. But a gift nonetheless.

What I Want You to Take From All of This

I have been writing this piece in the long-form way of someone who has been carrying these thoughts for a while and is glad to finally have the context and the space to put them down. If you have read this far, you are either a person who cares about this subject deeply or you are a person who has nothing else to do this afternoon, and in either case I am grateful for your company.

Here is what I want you to carry away.

The pandemic did not merely interrupt gay travel. It changed it, permanently and in multiple directions, and the gay travel landscape we are currently in is not a return to what existed before. It is something new that contains the memory of what existed before — the losses and the infrastructure that was rebuilt and the intentions that were renewed and the clarity that was purchased at significant cost.

The travel you have not done yet is still available to you. The trip you deferred is deferrable no longer, not because the world might close again — though the world might close again, and we have been instructed in what that means — but because the deferring has a cost that you have already paid once and that compounds with each further deferral.

The community you have been meaning to find, in the destination you have been meaning to go to, among the people who are already there waiting for you — that community exists. It survived. It changed and it contracted and it lost things that are genuinely lost and it rebuilt around what remained and what was built anew, and it is there, on a terrace in Mykonos or a bar in Berlin or a beach in Puerto Vallarta, doing what it has always done in every era it has been allowed to do it.

The sun is still refusing to be just one color.

The music is still playing.

Someone is still going to raise a glass to you when you need it most.

Go back. Go for the first time. Go again and differently. Go with the people you love or go alone to find the people you haven't met yet. Go with the urgency of someone who has learned, at some cost, that the time is not guaranteed.

We have been making up for lost time since 2022 and we are still making up for it and we will be making up for it for years, probably, because two years of not living a life fully takes more than two years to recover.

That is not a tragedy. That is the assignment.

The assignment is to go.

Be nice to Fluffy. Love Fluffy. Let Fluffy help you stop making up for lost time and start making the time.

Fluffy is a Manhattan-based luxury gay travel specialist who cried on a terrace in Mykonos in the summer of 2022 and has been trying to put it into words ever since. This was the attempt. Luxury gay travel, planned by someone who actually goes — and who never again takes for granted the fact of being somewhere beautiful with the people who need to be there.