Often, I coast through such trips on chain coffee and airport food. It’ll be an in-and-out affair: one work event sandwiched between two travel days. I recently tested out the NGLCC’s site for myself when planning an upcoming business trip to Madison, Wisconsin. “That’s not just in New York City and San Francisco and Fort Lauderdale that’s in Texas and Iowa and everywhere in between.” (For help finding LGBTQ+ owned businesses abroad, NGLCC recommends consulting the International LGBTQ+ Travel Association.) “If you can buy it, there’s an LGBTQ+ owned company that can supply it,” NGLCC Senior Vice President Jonathan D. NGLCC has local affiliates all across the country that are conveniently linked on their website, which means that long lists of LGBTQ+ owned businesses are a few clicks away no matter where you’re going or what you want. But anything more than that? I don’t know where to start.Īxel Hotel Madrid #WeAreHeterofriendly, wearing Įnter the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC), an organization that advocates for the estimated 1.4 million LGBTQ+ business owners in the United States. Sure, I’ll look up the local gay bar-and if I’m in town for a while, I’ll ask around. Even though I recently wrote a queer cross-country travelogue that spotlighted nightclubs and cafés as a matter of course, I realized at Otters Pond B&B that when I travel merely for pleasure, I don’t go out of my way to find LGBTQ+ owned businesses. Otters Pond B&B is among the LGBTQ+ businesses on Orcas Island.įor me, this is a new way of thinking about travel. But the most material way to help LGBTQ+ people is to put dollars in their hands, whether you’re part of the community or a friend to it. Voting for candidates who support LGBTQ+ rights is important, as is protesting politicians who strip those rights away. “But I have also had many guests like you come in and say, ‘Oh, thank God,’” Zimlich said.Įnding up at Otters Pond was a happy accident, but it was also a reminder to put LGBTQ+ owned businesses on my itinerary instead of stumbling onto them. Some guests discover that Otters Pond is LGBTQ+ and woman-owned beforehand, thanks to advertising that highlights that fact, Zimlich told me by phone shortly after our stay.
(The eggs came from her four hens, who are named after the Golden Girls.)
Five minutes later, she served us two goat cheese omelettes that became the subject of all my postcards. After a day of hiking through old-growth pine forest and basking in waterfall mist, my wife and I woke up the next morning to find Zimlich in the kitchen, ready to take requests. Lo and behold, this stranger turned out to be a lesbian-and a damn good cook, too.
But when we booked a last-minute anniversary trip to Orcas Island, Washington, this July, there was only one vacancy left in town-at Otters Pond B&B, owned by professional chef Amanda Zimlich.
Clarifying that my wife and I would like to share a bed-yes, one bed-is awkward enough in the lobby of a hotel, let alone in the living room of a stranger. As a traveler in a same-sex couple, a bed and breakfast is never my first choice.