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to the gay travel crowd
Where to go in Budapest for the wild thing
By Jeff Bercovici
and Niharika Desai
Wanna know where to find "rent boys" in Madrid?
When the annual "Glamorous Grandma Party" is held in Southwest England?
How to get your hands on some gay porn in Reykjavik?
You’re in luck. Arriving on newsstands this week is Passport magazine, "a lively resource for gay and lesbian travelers who have the spirit for adventure and discovery in their blood."
"Our goal is to cover destinations as destinations, and then find what’s gay about them—and there’s always something," says Passport founder Don Tuthill.
As publisher of QSF, a gay magazine that covers San Francisco, Tuthill learned firsthand just what avid travelers gays and lesbians as a group are.
According to QSF demographic information, its readers travel by plane on average 10 times a year, including business and leisure trips. Forty-six percent of QSF’s readers fly first class and sixty percent fly business more than once a year.
Overall, America’s gay and lesbian population spends $47.3 billion of its estimated annual buying power of $450 billion on travel, according to Travel Weekly.
Despite their knack for peregrination, though, existing travel publications have shown little interest in reaching gay readers. The only other publication devoted entirely to travel for gays and lesbians is a newsletter called Out and About, while traditional travel books such as Travel + Leisure and Conde Nast Traveler ignore the needs of homosexual readers, says Tuthill.
"The reason we are doing this is because the other magazines don’t cover the gay and lesbian aspects to travel," he says. "They don’t discuss what a gay friendly destination or hotel is. They won’t highlight which hotels will embarrass you by giving you two double beds when you really need just one."
With its offerings for business, luxury and adventure travelers, and its stories on Spain, Iceland, England and Miami, Passport is, at first glance, not all that different from other travel titles.
But the numerous photos of glammed-out drag queens and be-thonged beefcakes, both in the articles and in the ads, leave no doubt about who the intended audience is.
Passport is surprisingly frank about matters sexual, with most articles directing interested readers to the hottest cruising spots, nude beaches and darkened back rooms in any given locale. A department called "Sex and the Single Traveler" this month visits the Badehaus am Romerturm, a gay bathhouse in Cologne, Germany.
"Many consider it the finest gay sauna in Europe, and it certainly attracts some of the region’s most attractive guys who will not betray the German reputation for size!" reads the text.
This raises an interesting point: Passport is intended for a dual audience of men and women. Conventional wisdom holds that dual-market magazines can be difficult to pull off. One might expect that to be the case for Passport, given its two distinct readerships, gays and lesbians.
But Tuthill says it won’t be a problem selling a magazine with a tanned stud on the cover to girls-seeking-girls, or vice versa.
"It’s extremely well-balanced," he says. "The important thing is that we will have male and female writers, and that will bring balance to it."
Advertisers in the launch issue include Swissair, Lufthansa, the British Tourist Authority, gay tour groups RSVP and Atlantis, Absolut vodka and Sauza tequila. (The Sauza ad seems quite out of place: A man is pictured getting cozy with two girls in a nightclub, with the caption, "You still look for trouble on Friday nights. Just not with a bunch of guys.")
Passport launches as a bimonthly with a total distribution of over 150,000, says Tuthill. That number includes paid subscriptions (70 percent of QSF readers have already signed on for Passport), newsstand distribution, controlled distribution to gay and lesbian bed and breakfasts, and 1,200 issues distributed to gay and lesbian travel agencies to be given to their best customers.
- Jeff Bercovici and Niharika Desai are staff writers for Media Life.
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