Finding a gay-friendly hotel

By Matthew Link

Once on a Jerusalem vacation, my boyfriend and I checked into a small mainstream hotel. When I made the reservation, I had asked for one queen-size bed (pardon the pun). I hadn’t mentioned we were two men traveling together, so when we showed up at the front desk the lady looked flustered. "Oh, this reservation is wrong!" she exclaimed. "You men need two beds."

We got to our room, and tried to move the two single beds together to form one bed — a trick we had barely succeeded at before, since someone always ends up falling through the crack in the middle of the night. We soon realized the small room couldn’t be rearranged, so we gave up and spent a night sleeping as "singles" on what should have otherwise been a romantic journey.

In my years of traveling, I have learned this two-bed calamity is horribly common in the gay travel world. Sometimes in traditional places like Jerusalem, there’s simply no way to get around the cultural issues of two men sharing a bed. But there are strategies that help.

The first is that I look for hotels that make themselves known as specifically gay-owned or gay-managed, versus simply "gay friendly." At least then I know there will be "family" on the premises who will understand. Another thing I do is stay in gay parts of town, where even the most mainstream hotels will have a concierge who doesn’t blink when asked about the local gay scene.

I also keep my eyes out for hotels that make a concerted effort to
support gays and lesbians by advertising
in gay media or by supporting gay events and charities, and ones that
do gay sensitivity training for their staff and offer domestic
partnership benefits to their employees. Organizations like the Human
Rights Campaign regularly rate companies on their gay-friendliness — a
good place to start. A little homework like this has helped me avoid
waking up sandwiched in the chasm between two mattresses — and made my gay travel experiences much better!

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Matthew Link (not pictured, incidentally, in the stock image above) is the Editor At Large for The Out Traveler magazine, as
well as a contributor to Newsweek. Having been to over 60 countries and
all 7 continents doesn’t keep him from getting on the next plane away
from his home in New York City.

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