It’s sad but true: the vast majority of gay travelers stick to gay hot spots like Barcelona, Rio and Sydney — or worse, gay-only cruises of the Caribbean or Mediterranean. The occasional drunk or curious “straight” boy aside, I can count the number of fellow gay travelers I’ve met during six years of backpacking on both hands.
This might not seem serious to you if you don’t travel frequently. If anything, you might say, I’d be glad to get away from “my kind” for a while. And you will be — until every single person around you is regularly having sex with someone else and you have absolutely no options.
A solution to this dilemma does exist, however — and I’m happy to report that its usefulness extends beyond curing intermittent bouts of horniness.
Know those gay social networks people back home use to find quick sex? Create an account if you don’t already have one — although you probably do, you slut — then change your profile location to a foreign city you plan to visit soon. Place a note in your profile text indicating the arrangement you’d like to seek (be it lodging, a tour guide arrangement, a casual encounter or a combination thereof) and voilà! You just exponential increased your chances of getting an inside track to any place you plan to visit.
Before Departing Your Home Country
Setting your online gay profiles up for travel prior to departing your country increases your chances of finding someone to host you, show you around and get naked with you. Doing so provides you with more time, both to put yourself out there, as well as to get to know guys who express interest in you. If you develop a connection with someone before you even arrive in his city, chances of the meeting being mutually beneficial skyrocket.
When I made my first overseas trip — to Europe, in 2005 — it was about a month after being fired from my serving job at the now-defunct Bahama Breeze restaurant. Although I had enough money saved to complete trip on the day I lost my job, I had four weeks of down-time (in other words, spending time) between the last time I added funds to my bank account and stepping off the plane in London.
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention — and I had an idea that seemed extremely inventive to me at the time. Why don’t I just set my profile to say I live in cities where I need a place to stay and then explain my situation to guys who contact me? If they want to meet me badly enough, they’ll help me out.
Perhaps the most lucrative of the contacts I made during this little experiment was Torben, a resident of Hamburg, Germany. Not only did I secure a free place to sleep for the entire three days I planned to stay in Hamburg — Torben was waiting for me at the train station. Over the course of my stay in Hamburg, he showed me around the city’s central harbor, its central Stadtpark and the seedy Sankt Pauli red-light district when he wasn’t working and met me for lunch on the days he was.
Within the four walls of his trendy apartment near the Mundsburg metro station, I had my first taste of German hospitality, nasty and otherwise. Among other delights, I credit Torben with introducing me to the delicious kirsch cherry nectar that’s popular throughout the Fatherland — but that I can’t seem to find anywhere else.
Between Destinations
Of course, not all guys you contact months and weeks before you travel are going to remember who you are by the time you arrive — and not all trips are planned as far in advance as they should be.
When I traveled to South America earlier this year, for example, I bought my plane ticket just two weeks before my scheduled departure. The only detail of my trip I knew for sure when I arrived in Lima was that I would depart from Rio de Janeiro exactly two months later.
By the time I got to San Pedro de Atacama, a mostly-gringo town in Chile located in the Atacama desert that sits below the Andes Mountains that form Chile’s border with Bolivia, I knew one thing for sure: after over a week in middle-of-nowhere, no-gays-anywhere, Bolivia, I needed to get laid as soon as possible.
Once safely inside a hostel with Wi-Fi, I took immediately to the gay social networks and began setting my location to the Chilean capital of Santiago, the next big city I planned to visit. As is usually the case, I got about a half-dozen responses within an hour — and as is also usually the case, only two or three of those ended up bearing any fruit beyond the first couple messages being exchanged.
By the next morning, my brightest prospect was oddly one that didn’t speak any English — when he wasn’t typing Spanish into Google Translate, anyway. Matias, a sultry-looking 24-year old engineering student, seemed just as eager to meet a lustful white traveler as I was to bag myself a Latin lover. Unlike I had back in 2005 as a just-fired waiter, however, I didn’t ask Matias for a place to sleep — except for my first night in Santiago, of course, which I didn’t plan to spend sleeping at all.
We set the details of our meeting before I boarded the 24-hour bus to Santiago: I’d take the metro from the bus station to the Universidad de Chile stop, where Matias would be waiting for me. We’d walk to his nearby apartment together if all went according to plan.
And did it ever! The chemistry between the two of us was absolutely explosive. In spite of the fact that Matias had to attend school early the next morning — after having played hooky so that he could meet me at the metro station — he stayed up with me most of the night. He even prepared breakfast and coffee for me in the morning — and that was after grabbing Chinese takeout for me before our brief sleep the night before.
In addition to all the Latin lovin’ I got, he drove me all around the city with him on his motorbike, including to the top of the Cerro San Cristobal mountain that’s high enough see just about every part of Santiago. During the two weeks I spent in the Chilean capital, Matias was my de-facto boyfriend — I had to literally wean myself off him prior to my departure to avoid having an emotional breakdown.
Last-Minute Desperation
No matter where in the world you are, gay social networks — with a few exceptions — have the same ultimate purpose: to get you laid as close to immediately as possible. With this in mind, it’s perfectly feasible to use them to this end when you’re the road, just as you would at home.
The result aren’t always terrible, either! The night after arriving in São Paulo, Brazil I met with Will, a 23-year old firebrand I came across on perhaps the trashiest of the gay websites I used. After exchanging a few pictures and flirtations and establishing baseline compatibility, we arranged to meet in front of the charming “Shopping Center 3″ on the city’s grand Avenida Paulista.
Luckily, the two of us were extremely into one another. After taking a long walk north on Rua Augusta to procure some herbal refreshment to enhance our encounter, we checked in to a nondescript, by-the-hour motel and proceeded to get it on. If you read the post about casual sex in Brazil I made a few weeks back, you might recognize Will as the lover mentioned in the intro — you know, the one I convinced myself was a prostitute because of how amazing a lover he was.
Will and I met twice more before I left São Paulo and although our interactions rarely went beyond casual sex or recreational drug use, I developed a bond with him that has flourished into a sweet, boyishly romantic Facebook thing, one I hope to re-ingite the next time we’re in the same place at the same time.
Benefits, Pitfalls and Dangers
When things work out as planned, meeting guys online provides you with a free place to stay, local hospitality, exposure to part of cities and local establishments Lonely Planet probably will never, ever know about — and, of course, a singular physical experience you’ll remember for years to come . Without a doubt, meeting a local boy or man, even if it’s just for a quick encounter, is the most surefire way to get to know (and love) each place you visit.
As you can imagine, however, meetings aren’t always what you imagine them to be — sometimes, to a frightening extent.
I stayed with my friend Jill’s family in Antwerp, Belgium for a week during the middle of my aforementioned first visit to Europe in 2005. After a few days on my best behavior, however, my 20-year-old mind began to wander toward more carnal subject matter. I arranged to meet a fellow traveler, this one from Russia, for a cocktail downtown — and, if our initial meeting went well, additional libations.
My bad luck that night didn’t end with the fact that the city’s Astrid station was closed and I had to navigate its dark, deserted interior to escape to street level. The fact that I was already creeped the fuck out, however, probably didn’t help whathisname’s case. Indeed, the moment I stepped into the bar, I knew which of the weary-looking faces was the one I was supposed to meet. I was terrified!
I won’t go into gory detail — I don’t want to have nightmares tonight, thanks — but I’ll just say that my subsequent sprint through the dreary, abandoned center of Antwerp and the taxi fare I paid getting back to Jill’s was enough to shock me limp until I arrived in Hamburg to meet Torben (who, as you know, ended up being delightful) about a week later.
In spite of other less-than-savory meetings, I’ve been lucky enough never to feel threatened or unsafe — but that isn’t to say that terrible people posing as decent people won’t want to meet you. As a rule of thumb, always meet in a public place, preferably during the day time or in a crowded enough part of the city that you won’t find yourself alone in the dark. Only return to someone’s place with him when you’re reasonably sure he isn’t a serial killer.
This should go without saying, but if you do choose to do the nasty with a stranger you meet in a foreign city, always use protection. It’s tempting to get caught in the heat of the moment — particularly if you’re in Latin America, in more ways than one — but random unprotected sex with a stranger you meet in a foreign country is properly the riskiest kind of behavior there is.
Riskier, even, than using your gay social media presence to make your international travel experiences more fulfilling. As if any sane person does that!
Robert Schrader is a travel writer and photographer who’s been roaming the world independently since 2005, writing for publications such as “CNNGo” and “Shanghaiist” along the way. His blog, Leave Your Daily Hell, provides a mix of travel advice, destination guides and personal essays covering the more esoteric aspects of life as a traveler.
