Latest news with #WilliamsInstituteatUCLA
USA Today
02-03-2025
- USA Today
These trips are gay – unapologetically: How adults-only travel fosters a queer connection
These trips are gay – unapologetically: How adults-only travel fosters a queer connection Show Caption Hide Caption Here's some tips for vacationing alone this summer As travel gets back to pre-pandemic levels, more people are traveling alone. Here's how to do it safely. Ariana Triggs, USA TODAY LGBTQ+ travelers may prefer adults-only vacations for a more relaxed and community-oriented experience. Specialized tour operators offer LGBTQ+ travelers a chance to connect with like-minded individuals and enjoy entertainment tailored to their interests. Adults-only LGBTQ+ vacations can be found in various styles, from cruises to land-based tours, catering to diverse preferences. 'Only for Adults' is a six-part series showcasing the best experiences and destinations tailored for adults seeking tranquility, adventure and indulgence. If you'd like to contribute to our future reporting and share your experience as a source, you can click here to fill out this quick form. For many LGBTQ travelers, an adults-only trip just makes more sense. A large majority of same-sex couples do not have children of their own, and some prefer a less family-friendly experience when they travel. According to the Williams Institute at UCLA, just 14% of same-sex couples are parenting children, compared to 40% of opposite-sex couples, according to the Census Bureau, as reported by Forbes. 'It's nice being in an adults-only setting, whether that's gay or straight or mixed because the entertainment can get bawdy and adult-like,' Glenn Troost, a retiree from Palm Springs, told USA TODAY. A gay-specific trip makes the getaway even more relaxing, according to his partner Brett Gilbert. Troost and Gilbert said they have taken seven or eight international trips with Brand g, a gay-focused luxury tour operator, and said they have found it to be a great way to unwind and make new friends. 'It's the people and the comfortableness of being with LGBT people and not having to worry about or hide anything like that, and the staff of these boats have always been amazingly good,' Gilbert said. What happens when you bring your son on an adults-only vacation Brand g ran 24 trips in 2024, with 25 planned for 2025 and 26 for 2026. In 2024, about 2,000 guests attended across the packages. 'It's a very friendly crowd (that attracts) experienced travelers,' Troost said. 'We like to patronize LGBTbusinesses, particularly as they're going to have a harder and harder time in the coming years, I'm afraid, so it's nice to find one that's really quality and looks after you.' Why take an adults-only LGBTQ vacation? LGBTQ vacation packages come in all varieties, from cruises to land-based tours, and for queer travelers, they can be a great way to escape in more ways than one. For the founders of Brand g, who Troost and Gilbert have traveled with, the key to a great gay vacation is the sense of community. 'A lot of these folks that travel with us are more mature and they came up in the gay community at a different time,' Jeff Gunvalson, co-owner and co-president of Brand g told USA TODAY. 'The gay bar scene is where they first met. I think what they enjoy about coming to Brand g is it brings back that sense of community that they once had that's maybe gone away a little bit.' Troost and Gilbert said their own vacations are a testament to that mission. 'We inevitably have found friends on those cruises,' Troost said. 'Brand g has a very loyal following, and we keep meeting old friends on new trips. There's that as well. It's sort of a group you know already.' I ate, drank what I wanted on this cruise without losing my routine or gaining weight Brand g isn't the only gay tour operator out there. Others include Olivia, which focuses on lesbians and LGBTQ+ women, Detours, which specializes in adventure travel for gay groups, and Venture Out, for small LGBTQ group tours. And while some gay getaways, like Puerto Vallarta or an Atlantis cruise, skew toward the raunchy, there are options for all kinds of travel preferences. For Troost, a highlight of a recent trip was a dinner on Britannia, the decommissioned yacht from the British royal family during a tour of Scotland. 'We got to dress up in kilts one night for a farewell dinner. That was a real group experience that you enjoyed together,' he said. For others, the onboard entertainment is a draw. 'On the India trip, they connected with a local group of mostly trans dancers so we had a performance one night where they came onboard our ship in Calcutta and we talked to them and they performed for us and then we danced on the deck together,' said Michael Amend, who has been on 12 Brand g trips since 2015. 'A lot of our guests might have been hesitant because they associated gay travel with a floating bathhouse and they didn't want to be dragged down by an oversexualized image of what gay travel was,' Brian Van Wey, co-owner and co-president of Brand g, said. 'The collective LGBT travel industry has definitely evolved a lot more from that. Those experiences can be found and they're there, but they're not the only experiences.' Gay solo travel A gay-focused getaway can also be great for solo travelers looking for a built-in social group. Amend said he finds it comforting to see people he knows when he's traveling, especially since he lost his husband in 2020. 'It's nice to have familiar faces if I'm traveling by myself,' he said. 'Quite often it's the only time I get to see those people.' Amend also appreciates the adults-only component of these trips. 'Not that I dislike kids but it's just nice being in that atmosphere, one where I know at least some people, and even if I don't it's comfortable, you don't have to introduce yourself and let people figure out what the situation is,' he said. Van Wey said that Brand g attracts a lot of solo travelers, because it has a generous single supplement price on most packages and its slightly older demographic is less inhibited about socializing without a partner. A single supplement is the additional charge assessed on many cruises and other package vacations when a room will only have one occupant. 'People of a certain age they don't have to sit next to their partner, or even want to,' he said. 'People don't just want to sit in a two-top. They're there to meet people and have great conversations.' Advice for queer travelers Amend, Troost and Gilbert all said that the best advice for making the most out of an LGBT trip is being social and getting to know the people you're traveling with. They also said that it can be great to travel in an LGBT group even to parts of the world that aren't necessarily the most LGBT-friendly, so long as the trip is planned responsibly. Many countries still criminalize same-sex relations, and LGBTQ tourists to some locations are in danger of prison or extra-legal violence. It's important for travelers to do their research about the local climate and assess how safe they feel personally before going to any such destination. Still, travelers say, there are ways to do it safely. 'It's kind of a running joke at least in Brand g. You'll go somewhere and be at some village looking at whatever, somebody making baskets and they'll always ask: where are all your wives?' Amend said. 'Sometimes you'll get a curious look but no hostility I've ever experienced.' For Van Wey and Gunvalson, queer travel is just as much about what visitors bring with them to other parts of the world as what they take home. 'Travel is a great way to show the rest of the world that gay people are OK, we're not freaks of nature,' Gunvalson said. 'It's a great opportunity not only for us to go out and experience that culture but for us to give them a part of our culture and learn a little bit about us.' Zach Wichter is a travel reporter and writes the Cruising Altitude column for USA TODAY. He is based in New York and you can reach him at zwichter@
Yahoo
16-02-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Perspective: More LGBT-identifying people are religious than you might expect
When people think of a gay man, they often have an image of a coffee-drinking, well-dressed urbanite with a graduate degree who has never darkened the doorway of a church since he came out to his conservative, religious Midwest parents years ago. Like any stereotype, there are probably people who fit it. But with more and more surveys including sexual orientation as a question, we are becoming more aware of the diversity of people who identify as gay. While some recognize that there is the occasional person who identifies as gay or lesbian who attends church, it's easy to assume they are exclusively attending a downtown denomination with a rainbow flag flying in its window where a female pastor gives a homily on global warming. Again, while this does describe some, sexual and gender minority religiosity is much more diverse and extensive than most people realize. First, belying stereotypes about secular gay people, nearly half of all LGBT individuals in the United States are religious, according to a report by the Williams Institute at UCLA, with 1 in 5 identifying as 'highly religious.' Following trends in the society at large, older LGBT people are more religious than younger, and non-white are more religious than white, with a large majority (70%) of Black LGBT people identifying as religious. Similarly, LGBT people in the South are much more religious than LGBT people in the North, with, for example, 3 out of 4 LGBT people in South Carolina identifying as moderately or very religious. So while, yes, there are gay Ph.D.s living in New York City who are in the stereotypically gay professions and who have not attended church in years, so too are there gay loggers and ranchers who attend church religiously. But which church? While there are some churches that are not heteronormative — that is, they ordain sexually active gay clergy, solemnize same-sex marriages and do not treat homosexual behavior as a sin — they are in the minority. Furthermore, in a study I published a few years ago, I found that more sexual minorities affiliated with heteronormative faiths than non-heteronormative ones. So even among gay parishioners, those attending the rainbow-flag waving services are the exception, not the rule. Most go to more traditional churches. But why? While some might see a contradiction inherent in sexual minorities attending a heteronormative faith, one study of Black, gay religious men found that many preferred their more traditional churches for a variety of reasons. For example, some may not want to base their religious experience so centrally on their sexuality, some just because they were raised with it and feel more comfortable, their orientation and its teachings notwithstanding, with one respondent stating that 'I just prefer — I just want to stay with what I know, my regular old church, as long as he's not at the pulpit telling me I'm going to go to hell. I don't want — I think some people may feel like it's kind of like playing around with religion in some aspects.' That's not to say that some churches oriented specifically toward sexual minorities don't have their place. For example, in Africa, a church in Kenya geared specifically toward gender and sexual minorities has been serving a community that has faced violence and abuse for over a decade (and has had to move 10 times). While sexual minorities are less religious generally, even outside of formal religious practice, the vast majority of sexual minorities hold some kind of spiritual beliefs about God, and may pray even if they are not formally religious. I took the past 10 years of the General Social Survey, a large, nationally representative survey that asks a wide variety of questions, including some dealing with religious beliefs as well as sexual orientation, and calculated how many LGB Americans believe in God, finding that: Only 11% of LGB Americans are atheists, and simply do not believe in God. Twelve percent have a position that is somewhat agnostic, stating that they don't know, and there is no way to find out. Twenty-one percent indicated that they believed in a 'higher power.' Six percent indicated that they 'believe sometimes.' Twenty-one percent indicated that they believe but occasionally doubt. Twenty-nine percent believe in God and have no doubt about it. In other words, about half of all LGB believe in God; if the 'higher power' option is included, that number grows to 70%, with only about 1 in 4 being atheists or agnostics. The belief in a personal God is also demonstrated by looking at how often they pray. According to the same survey, over 1 in 3 people identifying as LGB (transgender was not included as an option in the survey) in the United States pray daily and only a little less than 1 in 3 'never' pray. In terms of religious services attendance, about 1 in 5 of sexual minorities attend 'about once a month' or more, and a minority (44%) attend 'never.' According to the same GSS survey, about 6% of the U.S. population identifies as gay, lesbian or bisexual. Since according to the U.S. Census there are 341 million people in the United States, that would equate to 20.5 million LGB-identifying people, according to the GSS survey, and 4 million LGB people attending religious services at least once per month, and at least 6.8 million prayers ascending to heaven from the U.S. every day from this same group of men and women. Of course, they are not 'LGBT+ prayers' any more than other prayers are heterosexual prayers. As Elder David A. Bednar has said, 'We are not defined by sexual attraction. We are not defined by sexual behavior. We are sons and daughters of God.' As shown by the findings in the study above, for many sexual minorities, their lived religion is not reducible to how it interfaces with that one particular part of their identity, instead encompassing the totality of their relationship with God.
