Big Trips: More Good Gay Travel Writing

Library Journal

The phrase "gay travel writing" suggests exotic climes or more familiar stomping grounds like P-Town or Fire Island, Speedo-clad hardbodies serving mai tais, and the sort of cruising that doesn't necessarily take place on a boat. There's little of that, though, in this sequel to the editor's Wonderlands: Good Gay Travel Writing. As in his previous volume, Kadushin, a food and travel writer, offers an array of well-crafted essays, stories, and even a short play, a few previously published, from a distinguished canon of contributors, some of whom (Edmund White, Philip Gambone, the editor) were included in the earlier work, and again covering most of the continents. The collection also has most of the same virtues and faults. The virtues: the sense of time and place, of pleasure and immediacy, and sometimes melancholy, loneliness, and, yes, romance, that the best travel writing incites. The faults-a certain lack of consistency, coherence, and point-seem somehow less prominent here than in the first volume. Either that, or this reviewer has finally been bitten by the travel bug. Recommended for public libraries serving a gay clientele.
—Richard J. Violette