The Civilized Homosexual: Travel Talk and the Project of Gay Identity

Abstract

Gay tourism has been identified as an area in which new intersections of identity, transnationalism, politics and economics are occurring. By marketing travel/holiday choices based on a sexual identity, we are witnessing in some sense a ‘postmodern’ turn in tourism as it responds to a multiplicity of interests and subject positions. But, at the same time, some argue that as an industry and an event, gay tourism is very similar to its mainstream counterpart as it sustains social, political and economic inequalities with very deep roots in the socio-historical firmament we refer to as colonialism. In this article, I explore the situated production of difference/distance primarily through the comments of a member of the gay tourism industry located in Barbados and the perspectives of some local ‘gay-identified’ Barbadian men in order to highlight how the former's constructions are inflected with modernist hierarchies of race, class, nation, and colony and how the latter's views simultaneously reproduce and transform these hierarchical relations.