The founder and CEO of EveryQueer, a New York-based company that produces travel content, social events and, starting this summer, tours, Meg Ten Eyck is always on the move.
When she started travel blogging in 2012, her price point was closer to that of a backpacker. But over the years she’s certainly glammed it up, serving as LGBTQ2S+ advisor on the board of the ritzy hospitality brand Belmond and hosting upscale events for women. And all with a sense of social responsibility.
We caught up with Eyck to ask about her career, places she’s loved visiting and how to travel safely in places not known to be safe for queer and trans travellers.
Let’s start with what got you interested in travel.
I’ve travelled in a really nontraditional way pretty much my whole life. I have a lot of siblings, and when I was growing up, my parents were divorced and my mother had brain cancer. Because my mom was sick, we were kind of shuttled around to different relatives who would essentially take care of us. I got used to this idea of being nomadic as a way of life because it was all I really knew. As I got older, those skills that I learned translated really well to me exploring as an adult. It also gave me this sense that I can do it, how to do it and the right questions to ask when planning. Whereas I feel a lot of young people who aren’t exposed to travel think of travel as this really far out experience that is unattainable or oftentimes super high-end and super luxurious and inaccessible financially. I realized that you can choose what you make a priority. When I first started, I was doing a lot of budget travel. I was a digital nomad for eight years, travelling full time, then landed back in New York, where I’m based. I’ve been in the industry for 13 years now and I’ve gotten into luxury travel and higher-end travel, in part because I am a professional creator. I own a media company called EveryQueer and do luxury events.
And where does the LGBTQ2S+ fit into that?
I always existed as a queer person and that doesn’t stop when I am travelling. I had started an LGBTQ+ website and then when I got offered a job in South Korea in 2013, I realized that this travel aspect is an interesting thing that folks might want to read about. It went viral in South Korea and that’s how I launched the professional side of LGBTQ+ travel. I was married and my wife and I were writing about our experiences travelling around Asia. Because there was almost no travel content for queer women at the time online, it was indexed really quickly by Google. We also started to get a lot of traffic coming in organically. My professional background is as an LGBTQ+ activist—I worked for The Trevor Project, GLSEN [Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network], the Human Rights Campaign. My undergraduate is in statistics and my master’s in policy, so that informed how I was writing about travel, which was in a very different way than other content that existed at the time. There [were] a lot of beautifully posed couples in beautiful places, but there wasn’t a lot about the realities and the politics of travelling while queer. That resonated with folks.
You mentioned that at the time you started publishing about queer travel, there wasn’t much for women. Do you think that’s changed?
No. No. I have a lot of opinions about this. I think stereotypes work in favour of gay men and travel, and work against gay women because we have this particular image. I mean, statistically we know that gay men [couples] make about 31 percent more than the average straight couple, and lesbian couples make about 27 percent more on average. There’s really only between a three and five percent difference between gay men and gay women. However, when we look at spending and we look at investment from brands—marketing dollars and all of those things—there is this misconception that the gay man is holding a glass of champagne in a private jet while lesbians are lumberjacks or whatever. Neither one of those things are true, but we’re seeing a lot more investment funneled into the gay male side of the industry. There are some resources that exist. On the women’s side of things, travel influencers are picking up the bulk of the content, but a lot of that content is really aspirational. Content that is how to actually do that trip or where to stay or how to be safe is what’s missing in the industry. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least 10 tour companies for gay men, but only one for women. That’s Olivia and their demographic is older. Which is why we at EveryQueer are going to be starting to do tours this year.
It’s interesting because there’s not a lack of desire. I’m on the board of Belmond hotels and resorts as an LGBTQ+ advisor, and I partnered with them to do a luxury event for queer women because there are no luxury events for queer women. I had said I had an idea for a higher-end dinner party. I’ve been to innumerable parties that are targeted at gay men and I felt the same model could work. Everyone said there’s no way it would work. Lesbians have no money. Lesbians aren’t interested in luxury events or luxury anything. In fact, one of my really good friends said that lesbians will never buy a ticket for anything more than $40. We sold out 100 tickets at $175. So a lot of the problem comes from the community itself saying this can’t be done.
You travel a lot so I wanted to ask you about some destinations that have gotten you excited these days.
I really love destinations that are kind of “in between” in maybe their history or their culture. I am also interested in destinations that are perceived to be anti-LGBTQ+. I don’t believe in travel bans and I think that LGBTQ+ people should be able to go and experience anything that they want, and their gender or sexuality or expression shouldn’t bar them from culturally rich experiences. I did a trip to Jordan last year and absolutely loved it. I actually travelled there with my ex-wife, who is very gender non-conforming, non-binary-presenting. It’s always interesting to see how people in those cultures react to us as visibly queer. We had a beautiful experience. People were welcoming, they were friendly. The food is absolutely incredible. We did the hikes all the way through Petra. We went to the Wadi Rum desert, which was absolutely, breathtakingly beautiful. A lot of LGBTQ+ people wouldn’t necessarily pick a Middle Eastern country as their first choice. I understand why that is. Every individual queer person needs to make that decision for themselves.
Did you feel safe the whole time or were there moments you felt a little nervous?
There are always moments when, in the back of my head, I am thinking about safety, which is one of the biggest issues for queer women travelling. Eroticized lesbianism is a huge problem. Foreign women in general are often eroticized as part of some cultural dynamics. When a man is subtly hitting on me, I have to think about whether I out myself or do I politely back away? I almost never out myself for fear that that’s going to egg them on more because it’s a challenge or the only context they have for queer women is through porn. There were a couple of moments where I just let it go. The same situation would happen in the U.S., or the U.K. or Canada.
Did you catch any whiff of queerness while you were there?
We went to an LGBTQ+ bookstore in Amman [Books@ Café (50 Umar Ibn al-Khattab, Amman)]. We went to a few areas where we noticed rainbow stickers, subtle things like that. There’s one area of Amman that they call “bohemian” [Jabal al-Weibdeh], but I think of it as gay.
What other “in-between” places have fascinated you?
In 2019, I went to Zanzibar, which is an island off the coast of Tanzania. Although they were unified with Tanzania, they were their own sovereign country and have a very distinct culture. Throughout history the island has been used as a shipping port, which has created a really interesting cultural fusion that you wouldn’t expect. The people living there are Black East African people. The majority of the population is Muslim and speak Swahili. But their food is more similar to Indian because of the spice trade during colonization. A lot of the women wear head-to-toe hijab, but they use East African textiles and patterns and fabrics, really fabulous in bright pastel colours. Young women do their makeup in the same style as a lot of Indian women. You see how colonialism impacted the culture, the pieces that stuck, the pieces they chose to reclaim and take as part of their own culture. The history is also dark. Zanzibar was a trading hub for slaves out of East Africa during British colonization.
How did you feel about your safety there?
I felt very safe. But it is very illegal to be gay in Tanzania. It’s 30 years’ imprisonment. I didn’t disclose, but I was also, again, travelling with somebody who is very visibly queer. There were a couple of awkward moments. There were a couple of comments about the gender of my travelling companion, who is six-foot-one, a very androgynous woman who presents as non-binary. But that’s a reality that she experiences every day.
Spot any queerness when you were in Zanzibar?
No, no, no. They have very, very strict anti-LGBTQ+ laws. Even just saying that you’re in support of the LGBTQ+ community can create a lot of issues in Tanzania.
What advice would you give to travellers going somewhere outside their comfort zone?
Bathrooms and gendered spaces are a huge issue. I was in Istanbul in 2019, and Turkey wasn’t my first Muslim country, but it was one of the first Muslim countries where we wanted to do religious tourism. We had a lot of conversations about respecting the culture versus preserving our own safety. So, for example, going into the Blue Mosque, going into smaller mosques, going into Turkish baths, hammams—what was the best way to go about having these cultural experiences while not putting ourselves in danger? Everybody was reading my travelling companion as male and she doesn’t correct them because she doesn’t want the situation to become dangerous. But she wanted to be respectful of the religion and culture. I decided to wear a hijab to respect the religion and culture, and she chose not to, also to respect the religion and the culture. Had she worn a hijab, almost everyone who was in the mosque would think, “Why is that dude wearing a hijab?” Unfortunately, part of my advice is to think about whether you pass as straight and cis, and how that will impact your experience. What is your experience in gendered spaces in the U.S. and how will that translate? Bathrooms are always a huge ordeal because we never know until we’re in a country whether or not my ex-wife is going to pass as male or female. It can be a dangerous situation if everyone in the women’s bathroom thinks she’s male. We’ll build in time in our schedule so she can find single-stall bathrooms, though sometimes they don’t exist abroad. It takes a lot of mental energy.
What’s your next big project?
EveryQueer is launching tours. Our first one this August, a tour based at Maroma, which is a Belmond hotel [a property which has its grand opening August 3] in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. It’s a queer women’s tour. And we’re hosting our VIQ luxury parties.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
