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Photos by Katia Repina & Luca Aimi
Montjuic is a massive hill overlooking the harbor near the city center of Barcelona. Over the centuries it has been the site of Celtic settlers, Roman ceremonies, political executions, and several events during the 1992 Olympic Games. It is now a recreational area, home to parks, gardens, museums and a castle. It is also a meeting place for a community of men who perform cruising – searching for sexual encounters in public places.
The cruising scene, which many participants state dates back to at least the 1970s, attracts men of a variety of backgrounds and desires, not all of whom determine as gay. They juggle the fears of being exposed and judged with the rush of clandestine encounters that make them experience deliciously alive. Although the number of people cruising here has somewhat decreased over the years, many insist that what they appreciate about the training has not been replaced by the mainstream acceptance of homosexuality, or by the rise of dating apps.…
11 things I learned on my first gay cruise
You've probably heard of homosexual cruises and wondered how they differ from "traditional" cruises. Are they unseal to straight people? Is it all about partying? What about the hook-up element?
I sailed with tour operator Vacaya in February 2023 on a one-week gay cruise retiring from Fort Lauderdale and heading to the Caribbean via Celebrity Cruises' Star Reflection cruise ship. For context, I'm a white, cisgender, gay man in my mid-30s. I had a lot of questions about what to await, given this was my second cruise ever and my first one with a queer tour operator.
Here are the top things I'd want someone considering or planning their first gay cruise to know.
People are friendly
The first thing that struck me about the sailing was that almost everyone was smiling and eager to interact. As an Australian living in the U.S. for almost a decade, I generally discover Americans to be open, talkative and curious. This cruise was like that … on steroids.
I would have set up it overwhelming if I weren't an extrovert, but since I'm a social butterfly, I was in heaven.
Tip: Taking the stairs between l
Back to nature: a potted history of queer cruising
The first time Kyle* went cruising for sex, he’d just finished his shift as a supermarket delivery driver. “I’d dropped off some shopping at a house near Hampstead, so I decided to try and detect the Hampstead Heath cruising area,” he recalls. Kyle wasn’t entirely sure where to go when he got to the wooded West Heath, home to London’s most famous cruising ground, but his homing instincts soon kicked in. “Even though it was still light outside, there were more guys there than I’d been expecting,” he says. “I was still in my [redacted] supermarket uniform when I ended up swapping blowjobs in the bushes.”
Kyle, who asked to remain anonymous in case his boss reads this, was drawn to cruising for practical reasons. “There’s so much less faffing around than if you go on Grindr, where everyone wants to understand what you’re into [sexually] before they agree to a hook-up,” says 34-year-old Kyle, who has since cruised on East London’s Hackney Marshes and beaches in Mykonos and Sitges. “When you travel to a cr
Brian Gerald Murphy
These days lots of gay guys are using Grindr for hooking up. But we didn’t always have sex available at our fingertips. For centuries (or longer!) gay and bi guys have start ways to connect with each other, even when doing so was illegal. Most of us don’t come from queer families and so we don’t learn our LGBTQ history at home. So, I set out to bring out the ways that same-sex attracted and bisexual guys include met each other for friendship and sex. Here’s a brief history of gay cruising
These days lots of gay guys are using Grindr for hooking up. But we didn’t always have sex accessible at our fingertips. From bathhouses to bars, sex parties to saunas, even to parks and bathrooms. Gay guys have set up a way to discover each other, even before Grindr.
For the past 11 years, up until this past January, I lived in New York City. It’s one of the centers of lgbtq+ life in the Merged States. It’s a port city and after the sailors returned home from World War II, many of the guys who had found connec