Hi, everybody and welcome to Outward Slate's podcast about the Ls, Gs, Bs, and T's wherever you find us and wherever we may

roam. I'm Brian Lauder, an editor at Slate, and that little greeting should be a hint that today

we're going to be talking about queer travel, or traveling as queers, or queering travel,

maybe all of those things. Stay tuned, and let's figure it out together. But first, I'm delighted to be joined by my adventuresome colleague Christina Carterucci. It's been a while since we've been together in the virtual studio. Christina, how are you? Good. It's great to see you. And I'm so excited about our topic this week. Yeah. Well, you've had some travel recently. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So I went to Costa Rica with my family, which was probably the least gay I've ever been on this trip because we were at this beach resort where I'm pretty sure my wife and I were some of the only gay people besides like one teen who looked very queer.

And two, we were like, I'm sorry, I hope we're okay. But my partner

and I also went to Japan in February and had a magnificent time and also went to a lesbian bar

in Tokyo that just, I mean, this is everywhere we go, we try to find a queer bar or something just to like get a taste of the local culture. And also because it feels very much like home when we're traveling. And sure enough, this dyke bar was like every lesbian bar you've ever been to. Like a ton of people crammed into a tiny space, probably the same soundtrack that you would find at a lesbian

bar here in the States, but, you know, everyone speaking a language, neither of us speak. And, you know,

like young masks kind of like strutting around and acting too cool and like fems looking

incredible. And it was just such a fun reminder that it is like

a little slice of home wherever you are and also a good way to meet people too there were you know

people there I feel like people at queer bars are always a lot more willing to kind of strike up a

conversation than any random other bar also probably people you'd be more interested in talking to

yeah yeah I know you're like doing that thing when you sort of land in a place and random other bar. Also, probably people you'd be more interested in talking to. Yeah. Yeah.

And you're like doing that thing when you sort of land in a place and then like look up immediately

where is the gay bar. It's such a powerful move. Also, I have to say this lesbian bar is called

Goldfinger. That's all I'm going to say about that, but I appreciate the name. And I'm kind of

impressed at there,

at the brazenness of it. Yes, that's incredible. It makes me jealous. I haven't been out of the

country in a while, and now I'm like, can we go out of the country and get back in? I miss that,

so I'm going to put that on my list to do soon. Speaking of which, it probably won't surprise

listeners today that we get pitched a lot of books for

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