Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, and Globalization

While I was in Trinidad and Tobago in February 1998, a curious incident set off a series of conversations about the often tense relationships between the interests and effects of globalization and postcolonial gay and lesbian identities. After the Cayman Islands, a British territory, had refused docking privileges in December to a so-called gay cruise originating in the United States, several other Caribbean governments expressed the intention to refuse the same cruise ship and those that might follow. The local Caribbean media engaged in no editorial discussions or debates about the cruises but merely printed press releases from Reuters and other global wire services. Caribbean Cana-Reuters Press reported that, in the Bahamas, a ship with nine hundred gays and lesbians on a cruise arranged by the California-based Atlantis Events had become a "test for the tourist-dependent Caribbean islands after the Cayman Islands refused the ship landing rights." Officials from the Cayman Islands said that gay vacationers could not be counted on to "uphold standards of appropriate behavior." ¹ Islanders had apparently been offended ten years earlier when a gay tour had landed and men had been seen kissing and holding hands in the streets. A U.S.-based gay rights organization now called on the British government to intervene. British prime minister Tony Blair did so and determined, in the case of the Cayman Islands (dubbed by Out and About, the leading gay and lesbian travel newsletter, the "Isle of Shame"), that codes outlawing gays and lesbians, many of which have descended from colonial legislation, breach the International Covenant of Human Rights and must be rescinded. ² U.S. officials followed suit, insisting that human rights had been violated. ³

I watched with confusion, hopeful that both former and current British possessions would tell Blair and the United States to mind their own business, but aware of my ambivalent solidarity with Caribbean activists. ⁴ Some activists, relying on the profit motive to justify the presence of the cruises, commented that "anti-gay protests could be costly to the tourist economies of the Caribbean, a favorite playground for affluent gays." ⁵ However, many organizations decided not to issue an official response for fear of the local exposure and a backlash against individuals as well as against nascent gay and lesbian and AIDS-related nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that were barely surviving. ⁶

The complexities of this incident posed for me the following questions: How is community created through and against such encounters? What are the differing constructions of global and local sexualities? How are these cruises part of the production of a global gay identity contested by postcolonial situations? Ironically, the United States and British states advocate protection for cruise ships in the Caribbean while granting no such rights when the cruisegoers return home. What are the roles of activists, human rights organizations, NGOs, national governments, multinational corporations, and ethnographers in mediating this conflict? These queries form the basis of my work on queer tourism. ⁷

Paradigms of Tourism

The field of tourism studies includes only a handful of works examining gay and lesbian tourism, and most of them focus on industry and advertising trends; practices of gay and lesbian consumption remain undertheorized in queer theory. ⁸ A number of articles, most of them authored by British academics, are heavily indebted to the use of space and place to understand the forces behind the market. Questions of public space and the disruption of heterosexuality through visible and mobile homosexuality are thus crucial to tracking a spatialized understanding of gay and lesbian tourism. Annette Pritchard, Nigel Morgan, and Diane Sedgely gravitate toward the concept of space and claim that gay and lesbian tourists demonstrate the potential for the disruption of public space as well as query the production of public space itself. ⁹ Visibility politics supply much of the force of certain forms of...