Gay Travel News

SWEDEN: We are excited that StockholmLGBT invited us back to Gay Stockholm in the near future and shared with us some exciting gay travel news about Stockholm.

SPAIN: Rather than being confined to a small area, cruising in Gran Canaria can take many forms from sandy beaches with towering dunes and its gay focussed businesses including bars, clubs, and hotels.

GERMANY: Torsten and Sascha, the gay couple chefs behind the food blog “Die Jungs kochen und backen” (engl.: “The guys cook and bake”), love to spend time together in the kitchen.

LAOS: The Democratic People’s Republic of Laos also called Laos for short, has the reputation of being one of the most tolerant communist countries for the LGBTQ+ community.

WORLDWIDE: The path for a change in the right direction always starts with a first step. These 10 people from around the world have made history for the LGBTQ+ Movement.

There sure are many travel blogs out there, some of them are really well written and reliable travel recourses with valuable information about the location. But we all know, that LGBT travelers have some additional needs for their travel planning, especially when it comes to how gay-friendly, open-minded, and save a travel destination actually is. The niche of LGBT travel recourses, including our own gay travel blog, is still quite a niche but they are existing.

CAMBODIA: Running a gay café in Siem Reap is not all that the gay couple are doing to do what they really wanted to do their whole life. “We knew we wanted to help the LGBTIQ+ community” – Enjoy our story of Jason and Tola on Couple of Men and learn more about how the gay couple from Siem Reap is facing the challenge of the Corona crisis together.

Do you still remember MySpace? Well, for some of today’s longterm relationships it was the place to meet likeminded people long before dating apps and even Facebook. It also was the place where the lovely girls from ‘What Wegan did next’ meet each other many years ago. Whitney, a lovely girl from the US-State Kentucky, and Megan from the United Kingdom are a lesbian couple and LGBT entrepreneurs living together with their cute little dogs in Windsor, the UK.

WORLDWIDE: Top list of the best LGBTQ+ and gay travel bloggers who know about the colorful history of the LGBTQ+ community and can show you the best destinations!

NETHERLANDS: We have mentioned it a few times already when talking about our favorite LGBT and gay-friendly places to go in Amsterdam. There is one gay bar we love most.

USA: The story of Chris and Gus. Coming from the formerly isolated country of Cuba, the gay couple knows what it means when “traveling makes you free”.

NETHERLANDS: It was in summer 2018 during our trip to Berlin for Gay Pride when we first met Roxanne and Maartje, lesbian couple bloggers from the Netherlands.

USA: We visited the small town of Galena in the US-American state of Illinois. It is known for its LGBT and gay-friendliness, making it one of the weekend hideaways for the LGBT community.

CAMBODIA: Additionally to the two genders, male and female, Cambodia’s national language Khmer also knows the third gender kteuy, describing a person who has the physical characteristics of one gender but the behavior of the other.

Our Top 10 list of the best Queer Movies 2020 selected for the Amsterdam LGBTQ+ Film Festival Roze Filmdagen 2020. Since 25 years, the biggest Dutch LGBTQ+ film festival is inviting the LGBTQ+ community to see the best new LGBTQ+ related movies. To make sure, you won’t miss any of the great movies and films from the Philippines to Germany, from Argentina to Canada or from Panama to Israel, we teamed up with festival director Werner Borkes to select some of the best movies about queer love, threesome relationships, trans characters and love stories in difficult cultures from around the world. In 2020, the LGBTQ Film Festival in Amsterdam will celebrate its 23rd-anniversary featuring movies like the German movie “Heute oder Morgen”, the trans story from Panama “Todos Cambiamos” and the Canadian movie “Jeune Juliette”.

Our Top 15 list of the best Gay Movies 2020 selected for the Amsterdam LGBTQ+ Film Festival Roze Filmdagen 2020. Since 25 years, the biggest Dutch LGBTQ+ film festival is inviting the LGBTQ+ community to see the best new LGBTQ+ related movies. To make sure, you won’t miss any of the great movies and films from Germany to Mexico, from Argentina to Chile or from South Africa to Israel, we teamed up with festival director Werner Borkes to select some of the best movies about gay love, relationships between different generations, and love stories in difficult cultures from around the world. In 2020, the LGBTQ Film Festival in Amsterdam will celebrate its 23rd-anniversary featuring movies like the German movie “Future Drei”, the Bolivian story “Tu me manques (I miss you)” and the French movie “The Shiny Shrimps”.

Our Top 10 list of the best Lesbian Movies 2020 selected for the Amsterdam LGBTQ+ Film Festival Roze Filmdagen 2020. Since 25 years, the biggest Dutch LGBTQ+ film festival is inviting the LGBTQ+ community to see the best new LGBTQ+ related movies. To make sure, you won’t miss any of the great movies and films from Germany to Mexico, from Australia to India or from the USA to Austria, we teamed up with festival director Werner Borkes to select some of the best movies about lesbian love, relationships between different generations, and love stories in difficult cultures from around the world. In 2020, the LGBTQ Film Festival in Amsterdam will celebrate its 23rd-anniversary featuring movies like the German movie “Cocoon (Kokon)”, the Australian story “Ellie and Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt)” and the Indian movie “Catamaran (kattumaram)”.

WORLDWIDE: Gay artwork? Of us? On Instagram? What? Well, let us tell you a short story about our photos on our Instagram account.

VIETNAM: Homosexuality was still described as a social evil by a national television broadcaster in 2002, comparable to prostitution and illegal gambling. Over the past years, the situation for the LGBT community in Vietnam has improved.

MYANMAR: …or Burma, still one of the most conservative countries in Southeast Asia, is also the country where life is anything but easy for LGBTQ+ people

Our Top 7 Gay Events this year – It seriously looks like the year 2020 is going to be a great year for celebrating LGBTQ+ events worldwide! We chose seven great LGBTQ+ events for the first year of the twenties that caught our attention and which we would like traveling to this year. Are you ready for the first edition of the Pride of the Americas or the EuroPride in Greece? Or would you rather scream and sing along with 42 new songs that will compete for the European Song Contest crown in Rotterdam? What about an international festival in Germany featuring LGBTQ+ artists from all over the world? Or did you always dream about the magical moment holding hands in front of Mickey Mouse wearing some rainbow colored ears?

LEBANON: The country has a reputation in the Middle East for being the most liberal of all countries when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community in general.

HOME: For a long time, I’ve been struggling with what’s the best and safest way to share our rainbow family happiness with you and the world.

The two men Pavel Stotcko and Evgenii Voitsekhovskii met via the Russian online network VKontakte and fell in love. Pavel’s family knew that the two men lived together, but homosexuality was kept from their fathers. Pavel’s mother, in turn, knew but preferred the word friendship when she spoke of the two.

RUSSIA: A kiss and a murder. This is how recent events in Russia can be summarized in the LGBTQ+ community. Renowned LGBTQ+ activist Yelena Grigoriyeva was found dead in St. Petersburg in mid-July, with several stab wounds in the chest and signs of strangulation.

WORLDWIDE: These people have actively campaigned for gay and lesbian equality fought for LGBTQ+ rights and, in an exceptional way, ensured that attention could be drawn to change the perception of the lesbian, gay, trans and queer lives.

SWEDEN: Kivik with its small harbor is a perfect place to do long walks, drink some local cider and try freshly caught seafood. But Kivik is even more, home to an exceptional person of the LGBTQ+ community.

AMSTERDAM: The 10 Best Lesbian Movies 2019 selected by and for the Dutch LGBTQ+ Film Festival Roze Filmdagen in Amsterdam.

Yasss! We as Gay Travel Blogger will attend the 13th edition of the Pink Lake Festival in Southern Austria this August in 2020. Just two weeks and less to go before we will depart to Klagenfurt in the South of the Austrian state Carinthia. We cannot wait to be in the mountains again, something we really miss in Amsterdam! The small town Pörtschach am Wörthersee will turn pink to offer an LGBTQ+ friendly Get-together to celebrate diversity, love, and equality right on the world-famous Lake Wört (Wörthersee) nestled in the Alps of Austria. Together with the European gay-community, we will put on our Lederhosen to enjoy the beauty of the Austrian mountains close to the border with Italy and Slovenia.

GEORGIA: Although homosexuality has been legal in Georgia since 2000, it is taboo in large parts of the country with far-reaching consequences for lesbians, gays, and queer people in the country.

ANAHEIM: Our visit to Disney’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in Anaheim, California became reality! The Star Wars Universe arrived on planet earth. We were able to be among the first people (also known as Star Wars Nerds) to visit Galaxy’s Edge.

Our Top 5 Gay Events this year – 2019 is going to be a great year for celebrating Pride worldwide! We chose five great LGBTQ+ events that caught our attention and which we think are worth traveling to this year. Are you ready for the biggest World Pride celebration ever in 2019 in New York City? Would you rather scream and sing along with 42 new songs that will compete for the European Song Contest crown in Tel Aviv? Or did you always dream about the magical moment holding hands in front of Mickey Mouse wearing some rainbow colored ears? Join us on our gay travels around the world supporting the lesbian, gay and queers and see the gay-friendly and colored side through a couple of men‘s eyes.

The Southeast Asian state of Brunei Darussalam has massively tightened the laws on same-sex intercourse. The revision of the Sultanate’s Criminal Code, which will come into effect next Wednesday, provides for the death penalty for homosexuals by stoning. This rule also applies to foreigners, and therefore also lesbian and gay tourists, who are in the country on the island of Borneo. In the strictly conservative sultanate, homosexuality was already illegal under current Sharia law.

After the Spiegel had already noticed our blog ‘Couple of Men’ and published an interview about our work last year, the popular news magazine stern (around 500.000 monthly readers) with its online version stern.de followed this spring with an interview including a 4-minute video about gay-friendly travel tips and our work as German-Dutch Gay Travel Blogger. In her inquiry, the video editor of the weekly magazine classified as a German-language leading medium was particularly interested in our motivations for Couple of Men, tips for gay-friendly travel and the worst experiences so far as an openly-gay traveling gay couple. This makes Stern interview one of the highlights of our work as a gay travel blogger in Germany so far.   

NETHERLANDS: Gender, Gender Identities, Sexuality – The recently released Dutch documentary ‘Beste Reizigers’ by draftsman Nirit Pelet for VPRO Tegenlicht deals with the future of gender segregation.

he 10 Best Queer Movies 2019 at Roze Filmdagen, the 11-days Amsterdam LGBTQ+ Film Festival. Like the last two years, we teamed up with festival director and LGBTQ+ movie guru Werner Borkes with whom we chose 10 films and documentaries drag queens, intersex topics, about being trans in sports and more you should put on your movie list for this year’s event. The 22nd edition of the Dutch LGBTQ+ film festival features the world premiere ‘Galore’ about our beloved drag queen Lady Galore. In our list of the “best queer movies 2019” includes contributions from the UK, the USA, the Netherlands as well as Italy, Kenya, and Scotland.

BERLIN: At the recent international tourism fair in Berlin, the Minister of Tourism of ITB partner Malaysia caused a scandal at the opening press conference.

The Spartacus Gay Travel Index 2019: Every year, the German publisher of gay travel information and guide books releases the annual Gay Travel Index with a detailed ranking of 197 LGBTQ+ friendly countries worldwide. In the 7th edition, Berlin-based Spartacus gives lesbian, gay and queer travelers information about how gay-friendly a holiday destination is according to several ranking factors and criteria collecting enough information about LGBTQ+ friendliness and livability for locals. Gay travelers can use this information to prepare for their gaycation as well as taking it as a piece of advice for choosing the holiday destination.

Great news passengers who do not identify as male or female, and thus as non-binary or genderqueer! Several major US American airlines, including Delta (partner of KLM), JetBlue, United Airlines, Alaska Airlines, and American Airlines, as well as Southwest, offer a gender-neutral choice during the future booking process of an airline ticket. In addition to the men and women options, there are said to be two other categories. The action was confirmed by the trade association Airlines For America and is scheduled to be a requirement from Juni 1st 2019 on. More about the great news here on Couple of Men.

AMSTERDAM: This is our list of the 15 Best Gay Movies 2019 selected for the Amsterdam LGBTQ+ Film Festival Roze Filmdagen bringing LGBTQ+ cinema to the Dutch capital city Amsterdam.

With a poster campaign, the travesty artists of the group ‘Travestie für Deutschland (TFD)’ protest against the so-called ‘Homo Cure’. Seven posters with well-known Berlin travesty artists and drag queens have been published on the Internet, sending a clear message, such as “Why fix what is not broken.” The impetus for the action was given by recent recommendations by Protestant Free Churches on homosexual persons to be treated on the basis of their sexual orientation. With its campaign of a protest poster campaign fighting Homo cure, the satirical group wants to draw attention to the conversion therapies that are still not forbidden in Germany. More about this here on Couple of Men.

On February 2nd, 2019 over 15.000 people joined the Mumbai Gay Pride to celebrate the freedom of homosexuality. It was the first time after India’s Supreme Court decriminalized Section 377 in September 2018, a colonial law that declared gay sex to be illegal. The parade that started from Mumbai’s August Kranti Maidan – where Mahatma Gandhi began the Quit India Movement against the British occupation in 1942 – included 27 events to raise awareness for the LGBTQ+ community and educate people about it. We selected some of the most colorful and powerful pics of the gay pride event in India sharing the love and success of the openly queer event Mumbai Pride 2019 on Couple of Men.