Two roads diverged in a wood, and I– I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
What does the average person expect from travel? More specifically, what do gay men expect from travel and is it different than what everyone else expects? If gay men do expect something unique from travel, why do they and why should they?
For the last two years these questions have occupied a great deal of the time I have spent thinking about what to write. And I still do not have convincing answers. While I am convinced that most gay men undoubtedly seek something from travel that the average traveler does not, I am still unsure whether the difference is one of kind or degree. But I am also convinced that most people who travel – gay and straight alike – miss so much of what is available to them.
I do not consider myself a travel writer even though the focus of my writing for the last two years has been about the act of traveling. Many great writers – and not-so-great writers – have made forays into either travel writing or writing about familiar places with an eye to the traveler.
Travel writing, as a distinct category of writing, is a fairly recent genre. For the U.S., I would look for roots in the travel guides of the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) of the 1930s and 40s as the beginning of the construct. Most significantly, the FWP launched the careers of dozens of important American writers, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Saul Bellow, John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever and Studs Terkel.
Is travel writing more journalistic? It can be. Should it only impart resource information? Hopefully, not. Should it provide a new perspective or create a sense of place? Every time.
Like all writing, the act of writing about travel is a journey unto itself in which where you end up is not necessarily the destination you had in mind at all. One’s ability to enjoy and learn something from the surprising and unfamiliar (and maybe even the unpleasant) is perhaps what separates the traveler from the tourist.
In a sense, I am asking the readers of this space to come on a journey with me without exactly knowing where we are going. I know coming on such a journey requires an appreciation for the unexpected, but that is my kind of trip.