One thing I’ve learned while living and traveling abroad is that we Americans don’t always do nuance very well. His rebuke caused me reconsider my angry reaction. You found it last year without having the tourist office publicly announce it to you.” (It’s true that a simple web search for “Gay Croatia beach” shows you the way.) Having lived with his male partner of five years, my friend, age 35, out to family and friends, scoffed at my experiment: “You know where the gay beach is. I arrived at a gay Croatian friend’s home in the evening and recounted this episode. Wasn’t this the definition of discrimination: to treat people differently based on perceptions and prejudices? If the tourist office were to offer such a rehearsed evasion to people looking for a church or fair, wouldn’t people be irate? I’m curious to see if the tourist office in this town of approximately 14,000 people had made any progress beyond the stunted reaction I received last year.
I was curious whether official LGBT recognition had increased now that Croatia had entered the European Union earlier in the month. Here, another woman sitting at a computer shyly held my map and pointed the way. But last year, I achieved a different result: the woman, exasperated by my determination, escorted me to a back office. Last year, a different woman at the front desk answered the same way: “There is no official gay beach here.” She repeated the line again and again as I tried to ask the question in different ways. I entered the office as I did this year and waited patiently to ask.
#You porn gay leather hustler beach how to#
Last year, I genuinely did not know how to get to the gay beach that I first heard about from European friends. This is the second July in a row that I have attempted this social experiment. At that moment, I realize that my chances of getting directions to the gay beach have washed out with the tide. A sun-burned elderly British man and woman enter the tourist office and begin concurring with her beach choices. At this, she grabs my map, and points randomly at general beaches in the area. I wonder if we’re playing a game of cat and mouse, and so I smile and try another tack: “Ok, where might the unofficial gay beach be?” She doesn’t smile along with me. Some have told me that this has become something of a summer meeting point for gay central Europeans.īefore I can gather all this evidence in my head, she repeats the line again: “There is no official gay beach here.” On any given day during the summer months, I have seen dozens of gay men sunbathing on this rocky Rovinj beach-not just local Croatians, but also visitors from nearby countries. “This area is well-known throughout the region for its gay beach.” I consider illustrating my point further. “There is no official gay beach here,” she replies apathetically, as though programmed to reply this way. I hold a map aloft, hoping she’ll point at it. Her eyes dart to the floor as she sits behind the desk in the tourism office and replies to me. I had been waiting patiently until the other tourists had left the office in this seaside Croatian town on the peninsula of Istria to ask my question: “Where is the gay beach here?” I ask the woman behind the desk.