you,” shouted Charles from the driver’s seat of his black Cadillac Escalade, as he zipped down the freeway, passing rows of mansions and lush palm trees. I had to ask: “What makes Fort Lauderdale any more special than South Beach?” If you’re a gay snowbird, most so-called A-gays— especially the contingent known as the circuit boys— would tell you to start with Miami’s posh South Beach. “[But] South Beach is pretentious, and people are cold as ice if you’re not in their circle,” contends Matt, the younger friend of Charles. “Fort Lauderdale isn’t like that.” I was hard-pressed to disagree. After all, here I was sitting in a vehicle with two nearly complete strangers who were doing me a huge favour in the middle of the night. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg: beyond its lively party scene, Fort Lauderdale has all the ingredients for a memorable gay-cation. “We sell sun and beaches, but we have a very large LGBT scene,” says Richard Gray, managing
director of the LGBT market for the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau. That includes almost 20 gay resorts, dozens of bars and attractions of LGBT interest, such as the world’s first AIDS Museum (worldaidsmuseum.com) and the Stonewall Museum (stonewall-museum.org). The latter is one of the few spaces in the U.S. devoted to exhibitions about LGBT history and culture. Not to mention that lots, and I mean lots, of gay people live in Fort Lauderdale. The 2012 U.S. census revealed that it has the country’s highest concentration of same-sex households, out-gaying such obvious contenders as San Francisco. Samesex couples in Fort Lauderdale make up 2.8 percent of total households. What’s even more telling is Fort Lauderdale’s leadership in honouring the “T” in LGBT. The city’s visitors bureau recently led a groundbreaking study on transgender travel trends, in which 700 selfidentified members of the transgender community
→ Always on One of Fort Lauderdale’s most gayfriendly beaches (top). The city’s nightlife rocks (above, left). Guests of the W hotel (above) enjoy celebrated ocean views.
were surveyed about their travel habits—from what kind of hotels they prefer to what they value in a destination. It’s no wonder the Southern Comfort Transgender Conference (sccatl.org) has signed on to bring its 2015, 2016 and 2017 events to Fort Lauderdale. And Gay Days (gaydays.com), the popular gay vacation series that takes place at Disney World in Orlando, held its first Fort Lauderdale edition last month at the W Hotel (wfortlauderdalehotel.com). The W Fort Lauderdale is a trendy spot “where all the gays stay,” as one local told me. Coincidently, that was where I was staying, and I quickly discovered the W’s 50 shades of gay. Case in point: just 30 minutes after landing at Fort Lauderdale’s airport (which is relatively close to downtown), I was in the W lobby checking in and walked into the thicket of an Equality
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