The timing of the email was uncanny. I had just realized that I was burned out. The words “I need a vacation” were forming on the tip of my tongue. I was exhausted even if I slept for 12 hours, hardly able to focus, generally demoralized and dejected. It’s funny how long you can slog through a feeling of alienation from your own body before you actually recognize that something is deeply wrong, but I suppose trans people are especially skilled in that regard.
The subject line read: “SAVE THE DATE! Pride Week in Puerto Vallarta.”
The email itself was tempting, promising a complementary all-inclusive stay at Hilton’s Puerto Vallarta resort — during the tourist town’s Pride week, no less. The representative described a “spectacular beachfront setting with views over Bahia de Banderas and the tropical forests of the Sierra Madre Mountains.” How much better could it be? It was like someone had read my mind.
But saying “yes” to this luxurious escape still felt odd. I had never been to Puerto Vallarta. In fact, I hadn’t traveled abroad since 2018, and never by myself. Perhaps most pointedly, this would be my first press trip — a privilege rarely enjoyed by trans journalists due to our historical exclusion from both the travel industry and the media writ large. While cisgender gay travel journalism has enjoyed a hearty boom over the past few decades — and I mean this totally unironically, good for them — trans people still remain largely invisible from that sub-industry.
Of course, trans travel writers do exist, most famously the late Welsh author Jan Morris. My editor for this essay has written a travel book of her own. For the most part, though, when people think about trans people and travel, what usually comes to mind are reported pieces about our traumatic experiences with Transportation Security Administration checkpoints. The difficulties of traveling while trans are certainly worth highlighting, but so too is our rarely showcased joy.
After accepting the press trip, I excitedly researched everything I could about Puerto Vallarta. The hotel itself looked like a dream, situated right on the beach with the kind of clear turquoise water that brochures were made for. On Google Maps, I scoured the Zona Romántica, the town’s gay enclave, bookmarking bars and taco stands that caught my eye. There was also a gay sauna smack in the middle of the neighborhood, for which most of the reviews were glowing, save for one: “I would have loved to go, but unfortunately after a phone conversation I learned that the policy views transgender men as ‘women,’ and that I am not welcome there,” one person wrote. The owners responded, “We do understand, this is a very delicate issue but decision was made [based] on [the] majority [of] our clients’ votes.”
Despite all this advance scouting, it somehow didn’t quite click with me that Puerto Vallarta is a gaycation hot spot in much the same vein as Fire Island and Provincetown, which is to say glaringly cisgender. And then, when I was sitting at the gate for the connecting flight from Houston to Puerto Vallarta, I made eye contact with a bulky man wearing a T-shirt that read “Some of you should have been swallowed” and a “DADDY” snapback, stylized in all caps. For a moment, I was bewildered. Who the fuck has the energy for all that at the airport so early in the morning? But then the realization dawned on me. It was that kind of gay vacation spot. Then I was reminded again and again as I walked down the aisle of the plane toward my seat, passing dozens of carbon copies of the same lean, muscular, mostly white body type. I’m not sure if the burning sensation of dozens of eyes following me as I made my way toward the back of the plane was imagined, or if I genuinely was subject to such scrutiny, but I felt conspicuous either way.
The hotel itself was absurdly luxurious. The open-air lobby overlooking the beach was even better than the pictures had promised, the ceilings high as a chapel, the ocean gilded gold in the late afternoon light. My room was on the fifteenth floor, which meant I was able to drift asleep to the sound of the waves, swaddled in crisp sheets, awaking to the caws of seagulls and the scent of salt water in the dewy air. I could step out onto my private balcony every morning, enjoying a few minutes of quiet, gazing out at the endless sea and the mountains hugging the coasline. Then I would head downstairs for a poolside breakfast, sipping green juice and coffee while I journaled, noshing on everything from scrambled eggs to lox to chilaquiles to fresh fruit to crispy slices of pork leg that I carved myself from the gargantuan roast iat the buffet on my final morning there. I even had a private cabana for the duration of the trip, with the pool behind me, and the sandy expanse of the private beach at my feet.
Still, I was never quite able to relax in the way I wanted — the way that I needed. The first night there, myself and the other invitees were treated to a lavish Italian dinner at a bayside restaurant, the watery horizon framed by the spire of the city’s iconic central cathedral. Serenaded by a trio of violinists and loosened by free-flowing white wine, I made conversation with my travelmates, some of them seasoned veterans of the Puerto Vallarta gay scene, others newcomers like me, and all of them — to my knowledge — cisgender. I pitched my voice slightly lower than I usually do, unconsciously trying to blend in. That night, I found myself tipsy in the bathroom, trying to see my reflection through the eyes of an outside observer. I mentally asked my reflection the question that never really occurs to me when I am home in Brooklyn, surrounded by trans people: Do I pass?
I ultimately ruined any sort of illusion the following day, when I laid back in my cabana after breakfast and took my shirt off to reveal a black bikini top as one of the other attendees and his companion lounged in the adjacent structure. The top was plain and fairly androgynous, but in the heat of the rapidly intensifying sun, I was itching to tear it off. What started as a simple sensory issue became so much more than that: a forced awareness of my body and the limitations imposed upon it in this space.
If I were at Riis Beach, my beloved summer queer haven back in New York City, I wouldn’t hesitate, but I was not at Riis. Here, I simply couldn’t go topless in the same way cis men could. I suddenly felt like I was floating far above myself. Like I needed to claw my way out of my skin. I had not expected to feel this overwhelmingly dysphoric. I had come here to, ideally, forget the fact of my body, and instead here I was, confronted at every turn by the fact that my body was an anomaly; that I was, as the exclusionary Grindr adage goes, fat, (somewhat) femme, and Asian.
Adding to my distress was the fact that Puerto Vallarta Lesbian Week was also occurring while I was there, and its home base was the Hilton. At first, the news came as somewhat of a relief. Not that I’m a lesbian anymore, but being able to observe a queer culture that didn’t just consist of jacked cis dudes sounded like a welcome reprieve. But I soon found myself feeling even further alienated, the stark differences between the two cultures highlighting the fact that I didn’t really belong in either.
I am not demanding that these cultures change to accommodate me, to be clear. Every niche is for someone, even if that someone isn’t me. And as cringeworthy as I often find cis gay and lesbian cultures, there are a few things that I admire about them. The hedonistic sexual freedom of queer men, the intoxicating intimacy that can develop between queer women at the drop of a hat — these are beautiful experiences in their own right.
But what would it look like to have a vacation getaway where I, and everyone else who falls in-between, could fully engage in both, fucking and falling in love and everything else, too? What kind of new social and sexual possibilities could we imagine beyond the scripts that have so far defined gay travel culture? What would it take for me to let my anxieties about being trans in America melt away and revel in the warmth of sunlight on my bare body?
The moments on the trip that I felt closest to that freedom emerged almost at random. One of the items on the itinerary was a rooftop drag brunch; as it turned out, it was mostly a ballroom brunch. The performers in Puerto Vallarta’s first kiki house, the Kiki House of Paradise, twirled, dipped, and vogued across the rooftop, while pointedly contextualizing the history of ballroom as an art form originated by Black and brown trans girls.
The best part, though, came after the planned performance was over. As the rooftop party wound down, the DJ continued to spin, playing “Let’s Have a Kiki,” which led to another impromptu performance from the dancers. One of my travel mates whom I had befriended engaged in a dance battle of his own with his boyfriend in the center of the floor, egged on by the thwacking of fans and raucous gay screaming. Surrounded by queers of color and feeling welcomed, if only for the duration of a song, I felt the ease that I had been searching for the whole trip.
The following night — the final evening before I flew home — I felt slightly delirious as I wandered around Zona Romántica with my new dance floor pals. The group had gone on a walking tour of Puerto Vallarta’s central neighborhood in the morning, and had marched in the parade immediately afterward. We were all worn out. But it was Pride. At the very least, I wanted to see the sights (and get one last plate of tacos). On some streets, the sights were largely indistinguishable from those you might find in West Hollywood or Hell’s Kitchen, which at this point, I had come to expect.
But throughout the night, we ran into two of the House of Paradise members, who embraced us as though we were old friends even though we had only met yesterday. We snuck into a technically ticketed area of the neighborhood to find ourselves surrounded by throngs of people crowded around a stage, drunkenly, adoringly singing along with an older diva in Spanish. I didn’t understand a single word, and for once, I felt the beauty of a joy in which I could not partake. Every niche is for someone, after all.
The trip to Puerto Vallarta may not have been the opportunity for boundless rest and relaxation that I had imagined it would be. Thrust out of my little Brooklyn bubble, it was a first-person reminder that the world at large is not exactly a trans utopia. But it was also a lesson in the crafty perseverance of queerness, even amid a harrowing time for trans rights. Those spontaneous moments of liberation — impromptu dance battles, cruising a stranger you’ll never see again, the electric jolt of eye contact with someone else who looks like you — can never be stolen, only found.
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