Pride on ice
Travels in "Gay-Friendly Iceland"
by Michael Joseph Gross
The invitation arrived by e-mail early this spring: a gay tour company
called L'Arc en Ciel was inviting me on a junket to "gay-friendly Iceland!"
I'd spent the previous week interviewing dozens of tour operators for a
magazine article about gay travel offerings for New Year's Eve 1999, so the
invitation wasn't exactly unexpected. I'd received plenty of others. But this
one stuck out -- "Gay-friendly Iceland!" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
Gay travel is a large and growing segment of the travel industry; the
International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association has 1350 members who book
$1 billion worth of tickets annually, and I know of at least 40 tour
operators getting more or less rich on the idea that when gay people go on
vacation, their dream destinations are Sodom and Gomorrah. Most of these
operators specialize in filling cruise ships and in hauling gay tourists to
getaway ghettos like Key West, Palm Springs, and P-town, so I wondered why a
business -- whose goal, presumably, is to make money -- would stake its
reputation on Iceland as the Next Big Thing.
I called the tour organizers, pricking up my ears for cues as to whether these
folks had been taking their medication. L'Arc en Ciel (that's French for
"rainbow") is a straight-owned, Philadelphia-based company that runs annual gay
group tours to Iceland, among other destinations, and helps tourists plan
"gay-themed adventures" in the country.
The employees I talked to painted a bright picture of Iceland, with platitudes
about "tolerance" and flattering physical descriptions of the country's
Viking-derived population. According to Sue Ryder-Scott, L'Arc en Ciel's
general manager, the company's Iceland promotion is also part of a trend in the
gay travel industry: as Key West, P-town, and the like grow increasingly
crowded and expensive, some gay travel agents and tour operators are
cultivating a new set of offbeat destinations. Places where life is slower,
where you have to search high and low for a protein supplement, where there's
nary a gym body or an umbrella-topped drink to be found. Places like Moscow or
Minneapolis. Places that aren't predominantly gay, but are being marketed with
the phrase "gay-friendly."
Iceland, as it turned out, is so gay-friendly that it actually made a lot of
gay people on our trip uncomfortable. The L'Arc people are optimistic, though:
"I know gay people will buy this," said one employee. "There's something about
the sterility of Iceland that appeals."
This all happened during one of those rare weeks when I had some extra money in
my checking account and no deadlines pressing, so I said what the hell and
hopped on an Icelandair flight from Boston to Reykjavík. On March 6, I
arrived at Keflavik airport, about 45 minutes outside the capital, so early in
the morning that it was still dark. In the baggage claim area, I met and
mingled with the L'Arc en Ciel contingent -- three lesbians, three straight
(but presumably "gay-friendly") women, and 10 gay men. This was a "fam trip,"
intended to familiarize travel agents with a new destination; except for me and
one other writer, everyone in the group was a travel agent.
The first travel agent who introduced himself asked where I was from, and then
said, "Boston! My only memories of Boston are of the Bird Sanctuary." (Law
officers, avert your eyes: the Bird Sanctuary is a popular outdoor cruising
area in Cambridge.) Having no idea what to do with this piece of information, I
said "oh" and promptly repressed his name, which I still can't remember, even
though we must have been introduced five times in the next couple of days.
We boarded a bus to Reykjavík and drove away from the airport, past a
gigantic sculpture of a rainbow ("See, they're ready for us!" someone in the
back of the bus called out) and then out into a countryside of eerie gray lava
fields surrounded by lumpy snow-capped mountains.
For most of the trip the group was quiet; it was 6:45 a.m. in
Reykjavík, five hours earlier on the East Coast. Then gradually I became
aware of a sucking sound coming from the travel agent sitting across from me,
whose concentration appeared equally divided between scoping me out and
subjecting his breath mint to what must have been near-diamond-producing
pressure. I looked out the window, trying to commune with nature, wishing he
would put the Tic-Tac out of its misery and fall asleep.
When we reached Reykjavík, the driver pointed out just one local
landmark -- "The only shopping mall in Iceland, which has a Hard Rock
Café." Someone asked when it would be open that day. By the time we
reached the city center, the sunrise sky had turned bright pink.
A representative from L'Arc en Ciel gave me this one-sentence description of
the gay travel industry: "Gay men are looking to party; lesbians are looking
for adventure travel." In other words, a tour guide can point lesbians in the
direction of snowmobiles and horseback riding and call it a day. Gay men
apparently need a little more handholding, a little reassurance that they're in
a happening place. So most promotional brochures for gay men's tours promise
"luxury" and "style" in abundance and are loaded with color photos of happy,
musclebound men frolicking in Speedos. (Atlantis Events, whose cruise ship was
notoriously denied port in Grand Cayman last year, uses the slogan "The Way We
Play.")
I don't know if those stereotypes apply to most gay tourists, but they
certainly evoke the experience these travel agents were after. On junket day
one, after checking into our hotel rooms for brief jet-lag naps, the group
rendezvoused in the lobby for a quick city tour, supposedly with an emphasis on
Reykjavík's gay life. But before we even boarded the bus, Mr. Bird
Sanctuary, Mr. Breath Mint, and several others erupted in a high-decibel
hormonal frenzy over a group of strapping young men in the lobby. (We later
learned this was the Israeli national handball team, in town for a match with
Egypt.) "Look at that one!" someone said, and I prayed silently that That One
didn't speak English.
After a few moments of jock-adoration, we were herded onto the tour bus, whose
seats could not have been more appropriately decorated -- upholstered in
rainbow-striped fabric with pink vinyl headrests. (Our guides insisted this was
a coincidence, although they allowed it might be an omen.) What followed was a
whirlwind tour of Icelandic culture. Reykjavík is compact,
fresh-scrubbed, and has the unselfconscious quirkiness of a small town. One of
the most popular art museums, shaped not unlike an igloo, houses violently
symbolic sculptures of things like horse-women raising hammers above the
metaphorical heads of Time and Destiny. The churches are spare and spiky, in a
Reformed tradition our guide called "Lutherian." At Laugardalur swimming pool,
the largest of Reykjavík's dozens of geothermally heated public pools,
our guide explained that open-air swimming -- even on days when it snows eight
inches -- is Icelanders' favorite sport.
Discerning a "gay Reykjavík" on this tour, however, wasn't easy. Our
tour guide was straight, and when she tried to tell us about gay
Reykjavík, she kept saying things like, "On the right is a 'gay
restaurant,' according to the map you gave me."
As a choice for a gay tour group, Reykjavík was seeming curiouser and
curiouser. When I went out for drinks that night to mingle with the Icelanders,
it became clear that the very notion of a gay Iceland that's separate from the
straight one is foreign to the natives. Even the exclusively gay institutions
have an earnest, Rotarian quality about them. There's a gay men's leather club
that meets on Saturday nights (in a room half the size of a grade-school
cafeteria kitchen); exactly four people wore leather the night I visited, if
you don't count shoes. There's a Gay Community Center, which has a thriving
bridge club and an enormous lending library of pornographic videos. My rigorous
inquiries of the principal dancer in the Icelandic National Ballet revealed
that Reykjavík has one outdoor cruising area (on the roads surrounding a
fancy hilltop restaurant called the Pearl) and a mostly gay sauna somewhere out
in the suburbs. Otherwise in Reykjavík, gay and straight people mix so
naturally that they completely jammed the signals of my American gaydar.
For instance, there's a gay-owned bed and breakfast, one of whose owners was
second runner-up at the 1996 Mr. Leather Europe pageant; but when I was there,
two of the three rooms were booked by straight couples. Reykjavík is
also home to Hid Íslenzka Redasafn, the world's only museum dedicated to
the history of the penis -- but it's run by a 56-year-old straight man, a
married father of four, and most of the visitors are Icelandic women. Gay
marriage is legal in Iceland; everyone speaks English but nobody seems to have
heard of "gay-bashing"; and Reykjavík doesn't really have a gay
ghetto.
Sure, gay Icelanders make a point of finding each other (as one
twentysomething gay man told me, "It is very much normal that I know almost
every lesbian in the country"). And sure, in Reykjavík, as everywhere
else in the world, young men report that "It's a full-time job, learning to be
gay." But in a tolerant, open country with a population of 250,000, there's
just no reason to spend much time building a subculture, as long as you've got
a circle of friends. In Iceland, "assimilation" isn't even enough of a
compromise to be called by that name. As queer as this may sound to American
ears, in Iceland being gay is virtually normal.
The biggest homo hangout in Reykjavík is the hetero/gay bar "22," where
I met plenty of Viking-featured men but detected none of the gym obsession of
the American bar scene. (With the testosterone they don't spend on the
skinnyfying sport of swimming, Icelanders play a mean game of chess.) The men I
met were friendly in the way that Dutch people are friendly -- open to visitors
and extremely well-mannered, but not aggressively hospitable like southern
Europeans. There was something almost courtly about the Icelanders I met, so I
was not surprised when they confessed to me, one after another, that they were
inveterate, 18th-century-style correspondents: many Icelanders have up to a
dozen pen pals all over the world.
According to a middle-aged man who's the closest thing to a professional
homosexual I found in Reykjavík (with Mr. Leather, he runs the gay B&B),
promiscuity is rare in Iceland, except during the summers, when the rule is:
"Sleep with as many tourists as possible." The first night I visited "22," I
saw a hand-lettered sign written in Icelandic, which a nice lesbian translated
for me: 15 americans (and 1 canadian!) visiting friday-saturday. many men, some
women. come and welcome them. be friendly.
On day two of the junket, we got back on the rainbow bus and headed into the
Icelandic countryside. Within 15 minutes we were on an expansive glacial plain
where the only focus our cameras accepted was infinity. Even though there were
no obstacles in view (save the extinct volcanoes in the distance), the gravel
roads twisted like Lombard Street in San Francisco. Our guide explained that
they'd been configured to avoid the dozens of small hills where elves lived.
Before we could follow up on the elf issue, our guide indicated a bunch of
shrubs to our left -- she referred to this as a "forest" -- and quoted an old
Icelandic proverb: "If you get lost in an Icelandic forest, simply stand up and
you will find your way."
A few minutes later we stopped at a Yellowstone-quality geyser; then we moved
on to a spectacular frozen waterfall (nearly defaced by a power plant in 1930,
but saved by the suicide-threat protests of a local farmer's daughter named
Sigrid, now hailed as "the first Icelandic feminist"). At a humongous floral
greenhouse, our hosts served Black Death -- the anise-flavored Icelandic
national liquor -- in cups that would have done Martha Stewart proud: they were
painstakingly made of carved-out cucumbers.
The lesbians in our group peppered our guide with interesting questions about
history and geology. The men, however, seemed all but blind to local color. The
Bird Sanctuary guy took one look at the geyser and spent the rest of the day
referring to it as "a big hole." At the frozen waterfall, much of our group
chose to stay near the bus, the better to photograph the Israeli handballers,
who were also sightseeing. You can guess what kind of jokes got made about the
cucumber cups.
By the end of the tour, which took about six hours, the men were clamoring for
their cocktail naps, so our tour guide dumped us at the hotel. She suggested we
have a bite of dinner before hitting "22" and sweetly advised us to make the
most of our last night in Iceland. Today's tour guide was a lesbian, so she
knew better how to speak our language: "You are free tonight," she said, "to
find whoever you want to come back with."
That night, however, a plurality of our group stormed out of "22" after one of
them looked around the place and loudly asked, "Why are there so many straight
people in our bar?" I don't know where they ended up going, but considering the
options I can't imagine the night was a big one for cross-cultural carnality.
Many travel agents on our trip told me they wanted to give their clients a
strong roster of alternative gay destinations, but many of them also found the
assimilation of gay life in Iceland jarring. And in a way their reactions were
understandable. Reykjavík challenges a presumption that is fundamental
to the gay travel industry and to much of American gay life in general,
especially for people born after 1970: that ghettoization, or intentional
exile, is the creative precondition for gay experience. But what repelled my
traveling companions may be one of the best reasons for gay Americans to visit
Iceland. Gay Icelanders are realizing a dream that a lot of gay Americans find
too challenging to realize, and therefore abandon: they're living an out gay
life without separating themselves from the world they grew up in.
For many gay Americans, it's actually scary to move in a society so tolerant
of sexual difference. In America, sexual orientation is so loaded that it's
inescapably central to individual identity. In Iceland, people appear mostly
indifferent. Such an accepting atmosphere creates a serious quandary: in a
place where you're no longer "queer," what the hell are you? After returning
home, while hashing out this trip with a friend, it occurred to me that the
travel agents on this trip are probably the types who will put on their pink
triangles during Pride and take to the streets, protesting intolerance -- but
they stormed out of "22" precisely because near-perfect tolerance made them
feel threatened. Careful what you wish for: the reality of acceptance may be
even more frightening than the dream.
Even though you won't find a thriving gay subculture in Iceland, it's possible
to see plenty of fairies there. Real ones. With wings. A lot of people believe
this. The most interesting person I met in Iceland is one of the country's
leading folklorists, a white-haired old bachelor of indeterminate orientation
who spends his days compiling tales of trolls and tinkerbells. His English is
not very good (and my Icelandic is nonexistent), but we had a long conversation
that ended with a bit of wisdom about the power of dreams for bringing
invisible worlds to light.
"Some people," he told me, "they take very good care of their dreams."
Michael Joseph Gross, a freelance writer in Boston, is writing a book called
Republican Guys: An Almost-Sexual Fetish. He may be reached at
MJG25@aol.com.