One bed for two men could have caused a scandal. What was it like for gay men to travel before the internet?
Imagine a typical scene at a hotel reception. Two men arrive, hand over their passports, and the receptionist checks the booking.
“You have a room with a double bed.”
“Yes.”
“But you’re two men.”
It was at this very point that, until relatively recently, a problem might have arisen. It wasn’t just a matter of an uncomfortable look or a question that a heterosexual couple would never have been asked. The hotel might have informed the guests that it had prepared twin beds for them. Or that they wouldn’t be getting a room with a single bed at all.
And this isn’t just a story from the distant 1950s. A study published in 1996 in the *Journal of Homosexuality* sent enquiries to 320 hotels and guesthouses requesting a weekend room with a single bed. In one instance, the request was made by a heterosexual couple; in another, by a same-sex couple. Same-sex couples were statistically significantly less likely to have their bookings confirmed.
When the British *Independent on Sunday* tried two years later to ring ten hotels requesting a room with a double bed for two men, three establishments refused the booking or insisted on twin beds. Furthermore, a survey conducted at the time by Stonewall found that seven per cent of gay and lesbian respondents had at some point been refused accommodation in a shared bed by a hotel.
What may seem today like a minor detail of a booking has long symbolised something much greater – travelling meant leaving an environment whose rules one knew, and entering a place where one had no idea how one’s homosexuality would be received.
First, you had to work out where to go at all
There was no internet, no Google Maps, and, naturally, the label ‘LGBTQ+ friendly’ didn’t appear anywhere on Booking.com. If a gay man travelled to Chicago, New Orleans or Los Angeles in the 1960s, for example, he couldn’t simply type ‘gay bar near me’ into his phone.
He needed contacts. Some information was passed on between acquaintances. Someone knew someone in another city, a barman might recommend another venue, and information circulated amongst members of the community. As early as after the Second World War, there were various privately distributed – and sometimes very discreetly coded – lists of places where gay men could meet.
Then came the proper travel guides. One of the first was *The Lavender Baedeker*, published in San Francisco in 1963. A year later, however, a publication emerged that would eventually become arguably the most famous American gay travel directory of all time. It was called Bob Damron’s Address Book.
A gay equivalent of the Green Book? The comparison is no coincidence
Bob Damron owned gay bars and travelled frequently across the United States. In 1964, he began publishing a small booklet listing the addresses of establishments he had come across during his travels. He compiled the first lists himself, but gradually business owners and readers began sending in information. This effectively created the precursor to today’s user reviews – only printed on paper and updated once a year. The directory was small enough to fit in a pocket. Yet inside, it concealed a map of a parallel world.
Bars, restaurants, bookshops, cinemas, spas, hotels, beaches, parks and even places known for cruising. Individual venues were marked with abbreviations and codes, thanks to which the reader knew far more than just the address. There was even the abbreviation AYOR – At Your Own Risk – which might have warned of the risk of police intervention or crime.
The ‘Mapping the Gay Guides’ project, which is currently digitising Damron’s old directories, compares their function to that of the legendary *The Negro Motorist Green Book*. This helped African Americans travelling during the era of racial segregation to find hotels, restaurants and other establishments where they would be served and be relatively safe. Of course, the historical experiences of Black Americans and gay men cannot simply be equated, but the principle behind the guide was similar: you need to know where you can stop without undue risk.
Damron’s directory was therefore not just a tourist guide. It showed readers that the community existed beyond the boundaries of their hometown.
If someone lived in a small American town and knew of only one gay bar far and wide, they might suddenly, whilst leafing through the directory, see dozens or even hundreds of venues across the country. Researchers studying the history of these guides see this as one of their most interesting roles – they helped to create an image of the gay community as something greater than just a few isolated groups in individual towns.
In Europe, people packed Spartacus into their suitcases
Americans had the Damron; international gay travel then gained another iconic book: the Spartacus International Gay Guide.
The first edition was published in 1970. The 100-page guide gradually grew into an extensive international directory and, for several decades, became one of the best-known resources for gay men travelling the world. The Spartacus International Gay Guide contained information on bars, clubs, saunas, accommodation and other social venues.
It is easy to underestimate the power such a book held. Suppose you arrived by train one evening in an unfamiliar European city. You didn’t know the local language; gay life took place behind inconspicuous doors, and from the outside, the venue often didn’t look like a gay bar at all. Without a recommendation, you could have walked past it ten times without even noticing it. With Spartacus, you had the address.
For generations of men, guides like this served a bit like today’s combination of Google, TripAdvisor, Grindr and the Foreign Office’s safety advice – all in a single paper book.
At the same time, there’s no need to romanticise the world of that era. The history of Spartacus also has its problematic aspects. Among other things, historians point to the links between parts of the gay tourist scene of the time and sexual exploitation, as well as the controversial activities of the founder, John Stamford. This, too, serves as a reminder that the development of gay travel was not a simple story of advancing freedom.
A hotel where you didn’t have to explain anything held a special value
Alongside travel guides, gay-friendly accommodation gradually began to emerge. Some destinations became queer havens long before travel agencies began to regard the LGBT clientele as an attractive marketing group. One of the best-known examples is Provincetown on Cape Cod in the US. Artists, bohemians, gay men and lesbians were flocking here in large numbers as early as the first half of the 20th century, and the town gradually transformed into one of the most distinctive queer holiday destinations in the US.
Today, the Cape Cod Commission also highlights an old captain’s house among the key sites of local LGBTQ+ history; Peter Hand and his partner Edward Damiger transformed it into the first openly gay guesthouse in Provincetown.
Fire Island in New York played a similar role. In the remote Cherry Grove, gay men and lesbians began to appear in greater numbers as early as the 1930s, and in the 1940s and 1950s, an environment emerged there where it was possible, at least for part of the summer, to live in a way that was much more difficult on the ‘mainland’.
A gay-friendly hotel, therefore, offered more than just a room. It offered the chance to walk up to reception as a couple and say nothing. Not to worry that the owner would start asking who was sleeping with whom. Not to have to pretend to be just friends in front of the staff. That was a luxury of a completely different kind.
And then gay men began going on holiday together
In the 1970s, another innovation emerged – a trip designed specifically for gay clients. The German-American travel entrepreneur Hanns Ebensten is regarded as one of the pioneers of modern gay tourism. After his own rafting trip down the Grand Canyon, he came up with the idea of organising a similar expedition exclusively for a group of gay men. He set up a travel agency in the early 1970s, and by 1973 the gay press of the time was already reporting on tours aimed specifically at a gay clientele.
Today, this sounds almost trivial. A gay cruise, a queer resort or a holiday for LGBT travellers no longer surprises anyone. Back then, however, the very notion that a group of gay men could go on holiday as gay men – rather than as individuals who preferred to hide that part of their lives whilst travelling – was radical in itself. Ebensten later recalled that, during these trips, his clients were able to experience something that was often impossible at home – spending several days as part of a group from whom they need not hide anything.
What began as a single rafting trip eventually grew into an entire sector of the tourism industry. In the 1980s, specialised hotels and resorts began to spring up, and in 1986, the first major gay cruise organised by RSVP set sail from New Orleans with hundreds of passengers on board.
The internet killed the guidebook. It didn’t entirely eliminate the need it addressed
Then came the internet, and the world of printed gay guidebooks began to lose its main reason for existing. The information that had previously made it necessary to buy a new Damron or Spartacus every year was suddenly available instantly and for free.
Historians from the ‘Mapping the Gay Guides’ project cite the advent of the internet as one of the main reasons why Damron’s guides eventually disappeared after almost six decades. However, the original issue they addressed has not disappeared entirely.
As recently as 2021, an Expedia employee described his experience at a luxury hotel in Seoul – he and his partner had booked a room with a double bed, but the receptionist automatically decided that, as they were two men, they would be given two single beds. They had to insist that they really did want the room they’d booked.
That is precisely why old gay travel guides hold such a special place in history. At first glance, they are somewhat bizarre relics of the analogue era – long lists of long-closed bars, guesthouses and saunas printed in tiny type. But there is something else recorded amongst those addresses. A time when the freedom to travel openly was not a given. When information about a single safe hotel travelled hundreds of kilometres. When an inconspicuous little book in one’s pocket could tell a person that, this time, they might not feel like a stranger behind the doors of that establishment on the next street.
