In the booming gay travel industry, “mainstream gay” media plays an important role in the construction of racialized desire for the Other, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean. Promoting tropical fantasies of local cultures and local men as always already available for consumption, magazines such as Out, Instinct, and Passport blur the distinction between gay travel and gay sex tourism for their readers: largely white, middle-class Americans in their 30s and 40s. 

My paper takes as its main focus quantitative and qualitative analyses of advertising and marketing materials in popular gay magazines. I then buttress my claims that these publications manufacture racialized desire by drawing from ethnographic data and interviews with gay tourists, local gay men, and sex workers conducted in several Brazilian cities during fieldwork conducted in 2006 and 2007 while at the University of Chicago. 

Gay travel is a booming business and a phenomenon that can have important economic consequences for local communities. Gay tourism, especially in less developed countries, frequently includes (quasi)commercial sexual tourism in which payment is not officially negotiated or takes the form of non-monetary compensation like food, shelter, clothes or luxury goods. Payment for sex is framed as “assistance” or “a gift” from a tourist to his new, but impoverished “friend.” Such encounters are seldom thought of as commercial sex and are cast instead as benevolent, civilizing projects that stimulate the development of local gay culture. Because straight-identified men selling sex are believed to be “gay deep down,” they are in need of the Western style gay liberation. In the case of Brazil, the dominant mode of sexual consumerism is based on a “sampling of flavors” of Brazil’s famously diverse population. 

Increasingly, sex tourists are young professionals who do not pay for sex in the US. The most common narrative for tourists (regardless of race) is one that involves searching for “exotic,” “native” men for sex. Because so much of commercial sex is based on a system of “gifts” rather than a prix fixe, sex workers often do not self-identify as such (and tourists are unlikely to disagree). This helps support the popular notion that all locals in impoverished areas (which - relative to the US – can be pretty expansive) are available for the right price regardless of their self-avowed sexual identity. 

Gay magazines target the demographic of young professionals with disposable income and actively work to sell them romanticized, racialized depictions of local culture and local men with carefully crafted ads and articles that encourage consumption not only of local spaces, but also the bodies that occupy them. Ultimately, gay tourism seldom benefits local economies because profits frequently go to large and/or foreign companies, and positive outcomes for local men are not only short-lived but tend to make them increasingly reliant on tourists and the possibilities of commercial sex.

About Gregory Mitchell