All About Travel: Gay Tourism and Activism in the 1970s
- Gil Engelstein
- 1 hour ago
- 8 min read
The international gay tourism market in Britain experienced a major boom during the 1970s. In some ways, this was unremarkable; International travel at large had radically expanded in that era, with ever growing numbers of middle-class people in the Global North travelling abroad for their holidays. However, gay tourism stood out in the way it reflected a new development in British queer public life: the "coming out" of gay commercial consumer markets from the gray area of supposed illegality into full public view. But the "Pink Market" – the singling out of LGBT people as a consumer demographic – did not spring into existence in 1967 with the passage of the Sexual Offences Act. Its long history owed much to hidden networks of queer people who sought out community, intimacy, and erotic adventures in media, leisure, and travel (a phenomenon historian Justin Bengry has done much to illuminate). It was only in the 1970s that gay travel became openly politicized and anchored in a mass movement with a radical bent. A central reason had to do with the mixed results of decriminalization. Against the expectations of many for a new era of openness, a conservative backlash actually set stricter limits on queer people’s ability to express themselves in public. As historian Harry Cocks has shown, between 1966 and 1974 the number of persecutions for homosexual offences increased by 55 per cent, gay nightlife establishments were subject to routine police harassment, and the charge of “offence of conspiracy to corrupt public morals” curtailed gay media. Against this backdrop, the pursuit of holiday pleasures was no longer simply an individual preference, but rather, a political statement of supposed major social impact.
A major strand in the scholarship of the Gay Liberation movement presents a historical trajectory leading from an initial, chaotic burst of radicalism into an advocacy model based on pragmatic centrism. In these accounts, the rise of "pink markets" signals the later negation of an earlier, anti-capitalist tradition whose vision foregrounded sexual oppression as tightly linked with the market economy. However, a view of the gay tourism market of the 1970s shows that this industry did not simply overlap with gay advocacy, it depended on it. In this sense, the relationship between activism and commodified forms of gay and lesbian existence, oriented around commercial publications, nightlife, and other forms of leisure, was one of generative tension and interdependence rather than of opposition. Gay Liberation called on queer people to form themselves as a counter public, but it was often in spaces of commerce that the call was heard and answered. In what follows, I will look into publicity material, correspondences, and news items regarding the fledging gay tourism industry in England to demonstrate the close links between advocacy and commercial interests.
A cursory reading of the British gay press in the 1970s demonstrates the ongoing interest of readership in gay tourism: gay travel agencies occupied a consistent spot in the ad section, and the catalogues of leading agencies grew in size and print quality with each passing year. A testimony of the growing consumer interest can also be found in the pages of mainstream media outlets at the time. An interview given by Paul Clarkson of the London-based All About Travel agency for the Sunday Times provides one such instructive example of the growing confidence and ambition of gay tourism entrepreneurs. Posing topless in March 1975 with his business partner, Keith Bagnall, Clarkson was unabashed in stating his ambition "to be the first gay millionaire." Despite a modest beginning in 1974 – sending off 150 tourists in one summer, and 700 more in the following year – Clarkson envisioned a much larger market share, noting that "one in six of the British population is gay so we are obviously on to a winner." By publicly placing themselves at the front, as the face (and torso) of their own agency, Clarkson and Bagnall tapped into the importance of identity, imagery, and eroticism, to the business of gay tourism.
Yet, they did not place firm boundaries around gay identity. As Clarkson commented, nearly half of their patrons were married men, "blokes who have realised over the years that they are bi-sexual and want to let their hair down once in the year. Then they go back to being respectable married solicitors or whatever." In this sense, theirs was not a purist approach but an accommodating one, guided more by the pursuit of profit and the ability to reach the widest pool of potential patrons, including Sunday Times readers less familiar with gay social life. All the same, the critical break that Clarkson’s rhetoric signaled was with the traditional, existing model of English same-sex, pleasure-seeking travel, that of discretion and concealment. The product on sale was not merely the travel arrangements, but the (largely phantasmatic) destination: a new, brave Gay world, one un-imaginable only a decade prior.
All About Travel did not have a conventional advantage over traditional travel agents in terms of cheaper prices or unfamiliar destinations. The superiority of their product was to be found in their specialized knowledge of gay social worlds, at home and abroad. Displaying their young and naked bodies, therefore, potentially made sense to Bagnall and Clarkson, because in doing so they embodied the very commodity that they sold: the promise of gay sex. A 1974 marketing brochure for their agency was even more unapologetic, spelling out what was perhaps too risqué for the Sunday Times, inviting clients to "let us help you reach your holiday climax," either through visits to "nudist beaches famed for their permissiveness," or to destinations where "muscular attendants compete to massage customers." On sale was an invitation to get in the know, and to gain access to "special details of specific interests on the National and International gay scene,” usually unavailable to the average patron, surely in the case of those on the margins of urban gay scenes or fully isolated from public gay life. Thus, Bagnall and Clarkson’s own image as trustworthy mediators – reinforced by their self-presentation as objects of male desire – was critical to the integrity of the product.
Despite Clarkson's inclusive, profit-driven approach in regards to the presumed identities of his potential clients, All About Travel also relied heavily on gaining access to gay publics through the most obvious avenue: gay advocacy networks. Throughout the 1970s, several gay tourism agencies sought out contact with the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (C.H.E.). As early as 1974, C.H.E. established their own travel service, CHETS (the C.H.E. Travel Service), and the introductory brochure made clear the link between commercialism and advocacy, stating: "the social side of C.H.E. has always been as important as its campaigning activities." Only paying members of C.H.E. had access to the service's packages, and the offers were, at first, relatively close to home. Offering "Winter Weekends" in Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Hamburg, and all destinations were marked by their affinity to the commercial gay scene. In Hamburg, one could visit the city's "35 gay clubs and bars, including several for lesbians." "Romantic Paris" had "many gay spots all with their own elegance," and Copenhagen, "one of the best gay scenes in Europe," was where "sex is for fun and that's exactly what you'll have in the Copenhagen clubs and bars." Importantly, the brochure also anchored these vacations in the world of gay advocacy; The saunas and nightclubs of Amsterdam, "Europe's gay centre for some years," for example, were presented alongside the possibility to visit the social clubs of "C.H.E.'s sister organization," the Dutch COC.
In May 1974, shortly after setting up his agency, Clarkson wrote to C.H.E.'s Travel Service Working Group offering All About Travel's services with the hopes of becoming C.H.E.'s official travel agency. In making his case, Clarkson expanded on the agency’s professionalism, but mostly emphasized his political credentials. All About Travel’s suggestion was to act as a liaison, hosting British tourists from "overseas affinity organizations" like "Arcadie" in France, the COC in the Netherlands, or "the 'Gay Front' in America." Given that the American Gay Liberation Front had officially disbanded by 1974, the seriousness of Clarkson's promises should be taken with a grain of salt. All the same, it is clear that the expectation of political commitment was shared by both sides of the correspondence. A different All About Travel marketing leaflet from 1974 made a similar point, singling out a visit to the COC club as one of the main attractions of a trip to Amsterdam: "It is a professionally run Club which holds meetings and International Seminars for better understanding of the human conditions… that's during the day. At night a mixture of sophisticated outrageous prevails." The blurring between activism and sociability reflects how gay tourism entrepreneurs did not view pink markets as divorced from advocacy, but rather, as co-dependent.
One might be tempted to view Clarkson and his ilk as predatory agents capitalizing on a social movement to serve their own narrow needs. Clarkson's most radical proposal to C.H.E. certainly raises that possibility. Essentially, Clarkson suggested using the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard helpline as a channel of market research and direct advertisement. Per Clarkson, the helpline should function as "an information service as adjunct to the main travel service, with reference to Spartacus guide and other updated information indexed by collating gay travellers' own experiences and detailed accordingly." While we don’t know how C.H.E responded to this offer, other evidence suggests this view was not a fringe one. In 1975, the Switchboard indeed set up communications with the Spartacus International Gay Guide, providing them with information collected from callers. This collaboration suggests a more complicated relationship than that of co-optation, or at least, one not clearly defined by stark power differences.
The history of the emergence of gay tourism in 1970s Britain as a hybrid field, connecting social actors of competing (and sometimes contradictory) world views in surprising ways, should caution us against a flattened view of the dynamics of social change in history. The political energy that mobilized activists and thinkers of the Gay Liberation movement was indeed often openly hostile to a commodified view of queer life. At the same time, the reach and penetration of the market into people’s lives often surpassed that of radical activist networks, thus acting as more effective mediators of new ideas about selfhood, community, and the interplay between the personal and the political. The patrons that flocked to All About Travel in search of the pleasures of “the National and International gay scene” might have been minor actors in the wider turn that Gay Liberation heralded for queer people in Britain. All the same, a view of them (and the entrepreneurs that catered to them) as standing outside the movement misses the extent to which markets were themselves vectors of liberation.
Gil Engelstein is a historian of queer culture, politics, and commercialism in postwar Europe. He received his PhD in History from Northwestern University in 2022 and is currently completing his first book, The Business of Liberation: A History of Gay Capitalism. His work has been published in Gender & History, the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, and Contemporary British History, among others.
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