A little-discussed dilemma of the LGBTQ experience is foreign travel. For many opposite-sex couples, exploring the world together is one of their great bonding experiences, teeming with adventure and generating a lifetime of soppy memories. For LGBTQ couples, this experience is rather more fraught. There are, after all, 69 countries where homosexuality is prohibited altogether, 11 of which can enforce the death penalty for same-sex attraction.
In many other countries – take your pick: Indonesia, Russia, Madagascar – being gay may be legal, but that doesn’t preclude widespread discrimination and stigma. Booking a shared hotel room for you and your partner, or worries about public behaviour outing you as a romantic item, may deter you from most countries’ borders. As for traveling solo to somewhere like Egypt – now hosting COP27 – you’d do so likely knowing that authorities there have used dating apps to entrap and persecute LGBTQ people.
