Inspo—
“No, you're not gonna get what you need / Baby, I have what you want” —Robyn, Honey
“We lean against railings / describing the colors / and the smells of our homelands / acting like lovers” —PJ Harvey, You Said Something
“I’ll never have the moon.” —Jason Robert Brown, Stars and the Moon as sung by Audra McDonald
Traveling curls my libido into a naughty spring. There is the fascism of air travel, wiring together violence and eroticism into a blue-balled rage— the public humiliation of security theater, the maddening blankness of layovers and delays, the variety of men looking lost, their sweatpants. Famished, I land someplace brimming with novelty and the invitation to explore. I have had stunningly good sex while in this crazed state of arrival, albeit defying a disoriented digestive tract. There is plenty more to do and see, I know, I just have to relocate my right hand first.
Beyond this initial mania, I want to see the place I’m visiting intimately, not by the standard touristic routes, which are dominated by contentious straight families and conspicuously romantic straight couples. When I travel, I’m curious about the how queer people live elsewhere, what their bedrooms look like, how they entertain a stranger, and whether I can distinguish myself from the syrupy pheromone of America. So I pursue holiday lovers, decorating snowglobes of desire with intentions as clear as they are limited. I’m not collecting experiences or cataloging foreign cock, I’m just down to go There without worrying about a Then, to accept the conditions on which I encounter people not as a vanishing point, but as a sense of scale. I’m a Grindr Tourist, open to anything except next week, but I will think of you always.
This is why we travel, isn’t it? To unmoor ourselves as completely as we can bear, sample a life on different terms, and upon return, integrate this other self as memories and lessons and a new resolve. There is always the part we can’t integrate, the desire for more.
If this seems duplicitous of me, inviting romance into a room with low ceilings— if I seem like a shitty, gluttonous tourist— I carry all that desire with me, too. Besides, it all tends to happen with people who are in their own transitional period, people looking for signs to reorient them toward a new direction or away from an old one. Visitors are good for that, people unstuck in space who get the people they visit unstuck in time. I try to keep in touch.
Gay people in New York City circulate so nicely. No less often than every fifteen days, the grid shifts with new boys, boys moving in, boys visiting, boys newly single, boys newly open, boys newly enrolled, boys newly sober, even boys newly horny, having overcome some anxiety about sex or strangers. Boys move out, as well, disappear behind a door locked by a relationship or a program or a disillusionment about their old habits of satisfying desire. Some people hate this transience, and pound desperately at these doors demanding an explanation of how they were not enough to stay out for, or why they were not invited in. I thrive on it, whistling down the halls, reassured that scarcity is an irrational fear, maybe even a myth.
A friend I don’t talk to anymore once told me he doesn’t mind getting messages on cruising apps from people who are thousands of miles away. “People come through New York eventually,” he told me. He smirked and returned to his phone.
I travel a lot, but mostly for work that demands early hours and a sober stomach. Recently, I tried to have a night out with another performer in a city I’d never seen before, but we wound up leaving early because I had a flight in the morning. “I’d like to be here more time anyway,” I said to the anticlimax hanging in the air. My colleague nodded. “When I travel, I want to be somewhere long enough—“
“— to fall in love,” he said with me. Giggling, we looked for signs to the hotel shuttle.
When I was in high school, I was involved in the kinds of extracurriculars that culminated in state and national conferences revolving around sterile abstractions like “leadership.” It’s remarkable how meaningful these all seemed at the time, and how blatantly they were just cashing in on kids’ college admissions anxieties now. But I got to travel a bit because of them, though mostly to northern Nevada.
On a big, special trip to Atlanta, I kept running into this boy from Reno who was, like me, very respectably out of the closet, and when he smiled at me it lit me up like my veins were full of neon. I was very, very, very, very in love with him, and very petrified of ever saying so, just drew out text conversations and teased him for having hooded eyelids. It didn’t occur to me and my weirdly square and insecure teen brain that hooking up with him could ever be on the table, much less that it might alleviate any of those yearnings. Looking back, I still doubt he was ever all that interested, but I also doubt my crush was anything short of obvious.
When I was sixteen, I went up to Reno to visit some friends who’d just graduated and were starting college up there. I reached out to my faraway crush, and he offered to spend a day with me. We did unremarkable things in an unremarkable city, hung out with a girl friend of his, whacked golf balls at a driving range, didn’t bother to smoke or drink. He let me stay the night at his place, but even this was agonizingly chaste— I slept in his bed, he on the couch. I woke up with a nosebleed that stained his pillowcase, which later (not much later) rang as deeply poetic to me. For all that I spent that day and night hanging onto his every word, that’s about all I remember happening. Not even a kiss!
Perhaps I am roaming across the world trying to rectify this.
XO
TY