Stuff Gay People Like: Europe

Gay people are lovers of travel – they pride themselves on being knowledgeable of distant cultures and places. But aside from a few ancient landmarks like Macchu Picchu or the Pyramid of Giza distant places are limited to first-world countries: to a gay person in America, Europe is “the rest of the world;” the distant place worth going to.

It works to think of Europe as one big gayborhood; is an overwhelmingly urban continent, where travel between one metropolis and another is a quick hop on the Eurorail. The streets are cobbled and picturesque. The food is fancy. The language is raunchy. Partial nudity is culturally acceptable. Open relationships are strikingly common. The boys are uncircumcised. Religion, Europe’s sole downside, is simply a historical fixture; the continent has moved on from its tumultuous past and turned faith into a fanciful setting for church-themed nightclubs and BDSM dungeons. Traveling to Europe is the best to obtain this worldly knowledge, while always staying in a comfortable setting of affluent whiteness.

A gay person who has been to Europe – and especially one who has lived there for some length of time – will never stop telling you how much better he is after having experienced that. Talking about America as an American is never really as legitimate to him without the “balanced perspective” of having once viewed the states as a European outsider, so you can forget about having a political conversation with him. Americans simply do not know how ignorant they are, says the gay boy returning from his 3-month Study Abroad in Denmark. Forget that colonialism and the slave trade were fucking invented by Europeans; all that stuff is beyond them now, because same-sex marriage is legal in The Netherlands and there was that public billboard in Barcelona that showed part of a lady’s nipple. So I mean, come on. USA sucks.

But if you travel to Mexico or Indonesia, your gay friends will tell you that is not what they were talking about when they inquired about your travels. Those places are sort of icky, what with all the poor people, and besides, they eat foods like beans and chiles that are disastrous for anal sex. No, what he meant was have you been to Paris, the world’s bastion of class and culture, or Amsterdam, the world’s gay Mecca.

Stuff Gay People Like (SGPL) is a satirical/cultural column featured in Out Front Colorado. Visit the Facebook Page or view the whole list.

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