Eat Gay Love: 5 Weeks, 6,000 Miles, and the Queerest Road Trip in America

I’ve been trying to write this retrospective for about two weeks, since I got back from New Orleans and adjusted to sleeping in my own bed again and stopped waking up disoriented because my window wasn’t a train window. It’s hard to write about something you’re still inside of. The trip ended when the plane landed at BWI, but I’m not sure the trip is over. I keep catching myself looking at maps.

Five weeks. Six thousand miles. Chicago to Seattle on the Empire Builder. Seattle south to San Francisco and then Los Angeles, down the coast by rental car. Palm Springs for heat I wasn’t prepared for. The Sunset Limited from LA through the Arizona desert and all of Texas and into Louisiana. New Orleans as the last stop, because that was always the plan, because you don’t end a trip like this somewhere that isn’t New Orleans. Thirty-one days, at least twenty restaurants I’d go back to tomorrow, and more gay bars than I’m going to count.

Here’s what I’m still turning over.

The Shape of It

The trip had a structure I didn’t fully understand until I was in it. Chicago was the prologue — two days to shake off the DC feeling, get my head into travel mode, eat some deep dish, remember what it felt like to not have a schedule. The Empire Builder was the overture. Forty-six hours through the plains and the mountains and the Columbia River Gorge, time to just watch America go by and decompress before Seattle.

Seattle was the first real stop and it became the longest. A week on Capitol Hill. Mornings with coffee on Broadway, afternoons at Pike Place or out to Tacoma or Olympia or wherever the day pointed. The Pacific Northwest opened up the trip in a way I hadn’t anticipated — it’s so physically different from the East that just being there rewired something. The evergreens. The water. The quality of light on a cloudy day, which is silver and soft and surprisingly beautiful. I went to Mt. Rainier and came back quieter than I’d left.

The drive south through Oregon and into California was the middle — slower, less city-focused, more about the landscape. The Oregon coast. Portland for one night. The redwoods. Sonoma County, which I’d planned two days for and stayed three because some places don’t let you leave on schedule. Then San Francisco, which had been the destination I’d been pointing toward since before the trip started, and then Los Angeles, which surprised me, and Palm Springs, which did not but was exactly what I needed.

And then the long Sunset Limited back east. Thirty hours through the desert. New Orleans. Done.

The Queer Thread

I called this trip Eat Gay Love as a joke — a riff on a book title, something to put in the group chat so my friends would know where I was. But it became the real frame for what I was doing. Every city on this trip had a queer geography to explore, and I went looking for all of them, not just the obvious ones.

Boystown in Chicago was the warm-up. The rainbow pylons on Halsted, the bars that have been there since the seventies, the sense of a neighborhood that fought hard to exist and carries that history visibly. Capitol Hill in Seattle was different — younger, more fluid, less monument and more organism, a gayborhood that keeps reinventing itself. San Francisco’s Castro I’d been to before but not in years, and it’s changed in ways I want to sit with longer before I write about them. Palm Springs was its own thing entirely: an entire city that has been functionally queer-majority for decades, where queerness isn’t concentrated in a neighborhood because it’s spread across the whole map.

But the queer thread on this trip wasn’t just about gayborhoods. It was about how I moved. Openly, without apology, without the low-level calibration I do almost unconsciously at home — reading the room, figuring out the ambient temperature of a place, deciding how visible to be. On this trip I mostly didn’t do that. I was in cities where the temperature was friendly. I asked for recommendations from other queer people. I went places alone and didn’t explain myself. I sat at bars and talked to strangers and the strangers were often gay and the conversations went places that don’t happen if you’re performing a version of yourself you think a place wants to see.

That’s not something that just happens. That’s a specific decision — to travel as yourself, fully, and to choose places where that decision is likely to be received well. I made that decision deliberately on this trip, and it changed the quality of everything.

The Food

I kept a list. Not a rating list, just a running record of what I ate, because after a few days I realized the food was going to be the thing I remembered most specifically — more than the cities in some ways, because food is precise in the way that memories of place often aren’t. You can forget the general atmosphere of a neighborhood. You don’t forget the taste of something that was perfect.

Deep dish at Lou Malnati’s in Chicago, which was not what I expected and was better. Clam chowder at Pike Place, in a sourdough bowl, in the rain. The pho in Seattle’s International District that I went back for twice. Dungeness crab on the Oregon coast, with butter, at a picnic table with a view of the Pacific. A glass of Russian River Valley pinot noir at a winery in Sonoma where someone poured it and said “take your time” and meant it literally. Sourdough at Boudin in San Francisco. The beignets at Café Du Monde in New Orleans, which I’ll be writing about separately for the rest of my life.

But the meals I think about most aren’t the famous ones. They’re the tacos from a truck in Tacoma at eleven at night. The scone at a bakery in Olympia that I found because I took a wrong turn and smelled butter. The cheese plate at a wine bar in Petaluma where the owner sat down and introduced me to each cheese by name and provenance and personal opinion. A bowl of gumbo in New Orleans from a place with no sign that I found because someone on Frenchmen Street pointed me down an alley.

Food is how you meet a place. Not the famous restaurants — those are how a place introduces itself. The obscure ones are how a place talks to you after it’s decided you’re worth talking to.

What Five Weeks Teaches You

A weekend trip is a snapshot. A week is a chapter. Five weeks is long enough that the trip stops being something you’re doing and starts being something you are. You stop being a tourist and start being a temporary resident. You have a regular coffee shop. You know which bus to take without the app. You stop looking at your phone every time you leave the hotel and start just walking because you know the general shape of the neighborhood and your feet know where they’re going.

Five weeks also shows you the country at a scale that’s hard to get any other way. I rode a train through North Dakota wheat fields that went to the horizon in every direction and the sky was so big it felt architectural, like a dome built by something that didn’t care about human proportion. Three days later I was in a city where you couldn’t see sky for the skyscrapers and a small coffee was seven dollars. I passed through small towns in Oregon where the only restaurant was a gas station deli, and then drove into a Sonoma tasting room where they were pouring thirty-dollar cab franc into crystal glasses. The range of this country is real and strange and worth sitting with.

What five weeks also teaches you, if you’re paying attention, is that long travel is not the same as accumulated short travel. It changes you incrementally. By week three I was different than I was at the start — more patient, less anxious about plan changes, more likely to take a turn just because something looked interesting, less attached to the original itinerary. By week five I had lost the ability to be stressed about logistics in any meaningful way. The train is late? Fine. The hotel lost the reservation? Fine. Something different will happen. It almost always does, and it’s almost always fine.

I came home more patient. I don’t know how long that lasts, but it was there when I landed.

What I’d Do Differently

More time in the Pacific Northwest. I gave Seattle a week and the Cascades and the Olympic Peninsula together were two days, and that was too brief. You could spend a month in Washington state alone and not see everything worth seeing. Rainier deserves three days minimum.

Less time in Los Angeles. I’d planned for it differently than it turned out and I think LA rewards a specific kind of visit — car-centric, neighborhood-focused, knowing what you want before you arrive — that I didn’t have set up properly. I’ll go back with a clearer plan.

More time on the trains. I had a roomette on the Empire Builder and it was the right call, but the Sunset Limited I did coach for part of it and by hour twenty-two I was aware I’d made that decision. The long-distance trains are worth the sleeper upgrade. Full stop.

I’d also build in at least one day per city where the plan is explicitly nothing. Not museums, not restaurants I’d looked up, not walking tours or neighborhoods to explore. Just: wake up, walk out the door, see what happens. I did that accidentally a couple of times and those were consistently the days I remember most vividly.

The Thing I Came Home With

Not souvenirs. I bought very little. Some wine from Sonoma that didn’t survive the luggage situation as gracefully as I’d hoped. A t-shirt in San Francisco. That’s about it.

What I came home with was the knowledge that queer America is larger and more spread out than the obvious geography suggests. It’s not just New York and San Francisco and the gayborhoods we all know. It’s Capitol Hill in Seattle and the coffee shops in Olympia with the pronoun pins and the hotel bar in Palm Springs where a couple from Phoenix told me about thirty years of coming to the same place and watching it change. It’s the Marigny in New Orleans and the corner bars in the Bywater and the way that city’s queerness isn’t a neighborhood, it’s an atmosphere. It’s everywhere you go looking for it, and in some places you didn’t know to look.

I’m a gay man who travels solo, who has been doing it for years, who has gotten good at the specific skill of being alone in new places without it feeling like loneliness. This trip didn’t teach me that skill — I already had it. But it confirmed something about what the skill is for. Not just for seeing places. For being yourself in places. For moving through the world as the person you actually are, without calibration, without performance, without deciding in advance how visible you’re going to be based on your read of the ambient tolerance.

That’s what the trip was. A queer man crossing the country, eating everything, being himself, finding out that there’s room for that in more places than he’d given this country credit for.

And eat everything along the way. Especially the beignets.