THE ALL-INCLUSIVE PLAN

LGBTQ travellers are venturing around the world, whether the world is ready or not. JAMES HANNAHAM and his husband find warm acceptance—and a little comical confusion—in some unlikely destinations.

- JAMES HANNAHAM

MY HUSBAND AND I, undaunted by whatever dangers might face a gay interracial couple abroad, have travelled fearlessly enough to frighten my in-laws. The Philippines. Cape Verde. Vanuatu. Colombia. We won’t go to Brunei, though. We disapprove of countries where it’s legal to stone gay people to death. In fact, we disapprove of stoning people to death in general. And not just because it’s messy. Brendan and I don’t want to support the economies of places with homophobic laws, like Myanmar, Kenya, or Saudi Arabia—the latter’s royal family hardly needs our three-dollar bills.

We did go to the Maldives, where they have whipped people for homosexual activity, but there seem to be separate rules for locals and visitors—I think the tourists get safe words. We made an exception because rising sea levels may obliterate the Maldives, which is made up of some 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean, by the end of the century. In a way, our experiences in that Muslim country, where visitors are mainly sequestered at luxurious resorts, taught us not to make assumptions. I’ve found that the rules about public conduct can get murky in places with liberal laws, and ostensibly conservative locales can surprise you.