Somewhere over the rainbow: Gay porn travel writing and the British gay male imaginary of the late 1970s

This article examines the role of travel writing in British gay pornographic magazines of the late 1970s, focusing on Q International as a case study to explore the construction of a transnational gay male imaginary. Positioned within the socio-economic and political turbulence of late 1970s Britain, Q International addressed a readership navigating the tensions between persistent social stigma, and emerging gay consumer power. The magazine’s travel features, advertisements, and editorial content collectively interpellated an “average homosexual” as mobile, culturally curious, and aspirational, encouraging identification with a broader European (and global) gay world. Travel is framed not merely as leisure but as a route to self-realisation, sexual freedom, and escape. We situate these representations within histories of gay consumer culture, suggesting that gay travel and publishing were integral to the emergence of modern gay identities. We complicate narratives of gay sex tourism as exploitative, demonstrating instead that Q International ’s travel writing articulates complex desires for connection, belonging, and a utopian “elsewhere.” We contend that Q International offers a valuable archival lens onto a pre-AIDS moment of possibility, in which mobility and imagination were central to gay male identity formation. Its travel writing captures both the promise and fragility of this imagined world.