Words by Joe Stone
Design by Yosef Phelan

If hell is other people then it's ninth circle is other gays squabbling on a group holiday. Yes, straight people are awful. But has one ever appropriated your douche on a boy’s trip to Fire Island? Could anyone but a lesbian demand that every Airbnb and restaurant accommodate her gluten-free dog? Don’t write in, the answer is absolutely not. So, why do we do it to ourselves? Because when gay holidays work, they work harder than Dua Lipa’s travel agent. These are the highs, lows and lols of a gay group holiday…

High: Queer people make the best curators

Yes, generational trauma and a toxic dating culture means that a disproportionate number of queer people are walking wounds BUT it is true that we are very tapped into culture. At roughly the same age that we imprint on a female pop star, a sonar system activates, alerting us to the best restaurants, bars, galleries and beauty spots within a 27 mile radius. This inbuilt navigation system comes in particularly handy when pilgrimaging to queer beaches, which are unanimously located on the most treacherous outskirts of any city, reached only by a perilous voyage across unforgiving terrain. If you haven’t had to abseil down a mountain to sunbathe on a sheer cliff face without an inch of shade then you haven’t lived been to Marseille.

Bowen Yang, Torian Miller, Joel Kim Booster, Matt Rogers and Tomas Matos on set of the film FIRE ISLAND (the ultimate gay vacay movie). Photo by Jeong Park.

Low: They might bankrupt you

The phenomenon of gay men of mysterious means with limitless holiday allowances and budgets to match needs to be studied. On an anthropological level, it makes for compelling viewing. The trouble comes when you somehow become enmeshed with a fleet (flamboyance?) of A-gays, but earn under six figures and subscribe to a traditional calendar in which you have less than 32 holiday weeks a year. It's hard not to feel alienated when people appear at breakfast in new designer outfits every day, or reveal that they commissioned a custom look for the theme night they insisted upon (...so that they could wear their custom look). Perhaps the biggest confusion is when you learn about the holiday-after-the-holiday – the weeklong spa break to recover from the festival which ate up your last two days of annual leave and put you firmly into your overdraft. When your heart stops at yet another Splitwise notification it’s time to admit defeat and reconnect with your butch lesbian friends. Do you know what doesn’t break the bank? Camping.

High: Sex positivity guarantees drama

My algorithm recently vomited up an advert for a ‘no sex gay weekend’ (or, as several of the commenters branded it, ‘a straight weekend’). Most of us will have had a group trip disrupted by two of our friends hooking up (one pal went on a nineteen man camping trip and managed to suck off seventeen of them – which is either impressive or pathological, depending on your level of ancestral shame). It's all fun and games until one of the pair develops feelings, or lets slip that the other has an unusually droopy foreskin. If you are going to have sex with a mate on a group holiday, do it on the last night. It's perfectly calibrated so that everyone ca gossip about it on the travel day, without having to experience vicarious anxiety as the power balance shifts back and forth over a succession of taverna lunches. Threesomes with strangers don't count (I'm not Mary Whitehouse).

Low: You unwittingly signed up for the body olympics

It’s a truism that gay men like to take care of themselves. The positive is that there’s usually someone willing to join you on a 7am run. The negative is that it’s impossible not to experience some level of dysphoria when every body in your eye line has a fat percentage in the single digits and a collection of sinews previously unseen outside of medical textbooks. At some point gay men will realise that most of the guys we’re actually attracted to have dadbods, and developing a six pack won’t retroactively force the boys we went to school with to un-bully us. Lead us towards the light, Bears!

High: They make up for lost time

For many queer people, adulthood is an exercise in finding  the community denied to us in our youth. The good news is that now we aren’t teenagers, we have bigger budgets, a wider circle of potential mates and a knowledge of Madonna