Sunburnt and Unbordered
A meditation on queer visibility while travelling.
I have never known how to travel without carrying my queerness like a lit candle. Open flame. Exposed wick. Something sacred, something dangerous, depending on the wind. It flickers on trains in countries where I don’t speak the language, on balconies in places where two men touching is still a whispered scandal. In the streets of cities that pride themselves on tolerance, but whose eyes still flinch when the candle is passed too close.
And yet I carry it. Of course I carry it.
When I plan, I map the gay streets of cities, the watering holes of queerness and book near, for safety, for community. Because to travel as a queer body, not a blank canvas, not a safe neutral, but a body marked by defiance and desire, is to move through the world as both witness and spectacle. You become the studied, the stumbled upon, the stranger who doesn’t straighten their spine quite right.
The sun doesn’t ask if you’re straight before it burns you. But the border guards might. The bartender might. The couple next to you on the overnight bus might. And you learn again that safety is a choreography. That even when you’ve survived the dance before, your feet still ache from it.
Some of us can pass. Slip into the customs line with our partners and be read as best friends. Others of us never could, not then, not now, not even if we wore a crucifix and kept our voices low. Some of us are made of draglines and glitter scars and a thousand small rebellions that show up under ultraviolet light.
But this isn’t just about safety. It’s about something else, something gristled and shimmering. Visibility.
That cursed, holy word.
I used to think visibility was the goal. The pinnacle. A rainbow-stained passport, a kiss on the street, a neon sign that says You Are Here and nobody tears it down. But I’ve seen what visibility costs in places where it comes before safety. I’ve seen it mistaken for liberation when it's just surveillance in softer lighting. I’ve seen it weaponised. And still I believe in it.
Because visibility, for me, isn’t always about being seen by others. It’s about refusing to disappear from myself.
It’s pulling my husband’s hand into mine in a square full of tourists, even if the square belongs to a country that wouldn’t give us a marriage certificate. It’s ordering almond milk and watching the waiter raise his eyebrows. It’s wearing my tiny rainbow pin on a denim jacket in a conservative town because grief taught me not to hide. Because HIV taught me that silence doesn’t keep you safe, it just slows the dying.
I walk into every city with my dead behind me. Glenn. James. That boy from Taylor Square who kissed me once and told me he was positive but didn’t want to tell anyone else. The ones who never got to go to Rome or Lima or San Francisco because they were buried before they turned thirty.
I carry them in my wallet. In my laugh. In the small act of living loudly where they could not.
Travel makes an altar of the mundane. The bus ticket. The hostel bed. The sunburn across my shoulders because I stayed too long on a nude beach in Sitges, watching older men press sunblock into each other’s backs with the reverence of priests. Their skin told stories. I wanted to press my ear to their shoulders and listen.
In Berlin, I walked alone through the Tiergarten and thought about what it meant to cruise in a place with monuments. Queer freedom and queer history coiled around each other like lovers who know time is short. I touched the pink triangle memorial with my palm flat against the stone. I shot my seed on a stranger at his request, surrounded by other young men and a lot of trees. Whispered something not quite thanks, not quite apology. Felt the warmth of the summer still lingering in the granite.
In Amsterdam, I let my body speak a language I’d only ever whispered. Fucked a Southeast Asian guy in a concrete backroom with walls that had seen more prayer than any chapel. There was nothing romantic about it, not really. Except the holiness of it. The wet breath of survival. The way he looked me dead in the eyes, like he knew I wasn’t pretending. Like he wasn’t either.
You start to understand what home really is, and what it never was. Australia gave me sunburn and silence. It gave me Mardi Gras but also gay panic laws. It gave me equal marriage rights, eventually. But I still remember the first time I kissed a man in public and someone threw a bottle.
Travelling forces that memory to crackle louder. Because in some countries, that bottle would’ve been a bullet. In others, it might never have come at all.
There’s no universal gay experience. Just maps with different dangers. Different delights.
Oxford was meant to be tame. Academic. Stuffy. But one summer I lived above a gay pub, and the nights taught me otherwise. A threesome with Portuguese boys who insisted they were straight. They weren’t. Or maybe they were, in that fluid, foolish way that boys sometimes are. They laughed when they kissed each other, and cried when they came. We fucked like we were trying to outrun something, or maybe just trying to arrive.
And then there was Mykonos. Of course there was. Hooking up with a French guy on sun-warmed rocks after dark, the tide licking at our feet, the moon our only witness. He tasted like cigarettes and sea salt, and something older than both. When he left, I didn’t ask his name again. Some moments don’t want to be remembered in full. Only felt.
But there’s a strange brotherhood in the way queers nod at each other across language barriers. The quick glance. The subtle lift of a brow. The coded t-shirt. The limp wrist that becomes semaphore. The shared knowledge that we’ve all learned to read a room faster than a preacher scans a sermon.
We know what it means to go silent. And what it means to sing anyway.
So we sing.
We sing on bar stools and balconies and in hotel rooms with the windows cracked open. We sing in secondhand bookstores and sweaty clubs and taxi queues. We sing in museums that pretend we never existed. We sing through languages we barely speak, using only our bodies, our eyeliner, our laughter.
We sing because the world still tries to make us hum instead.
Sunburnt and unbordered, that’s how I feel most days on the road. Too queer to camouflage, too old to give a damn. And maybe that’s its own kind of arrival. Not into safety. Not into comfort. But into truth.
That I will always be a little too much. A little too loud. A little too soft. A little too pink at the shoulders. And still I will stand in the sunlight. Still I will walk through customs holding the hand of the man I married. Still I will ask the hotel for a double bed and wait for the blink.
Still I will carry my candle.
Not just for me.
But for the ones who couldn’t bring theirs.
For the ones still hiding theirs.
For the ones who were taught to hate the flame.
Let them see us.
Let them see us burn.