On a Thursday night in November, my wife and I were having drinks in the legendary Tokyo lesbian bar Gold Finger (2 Chome-12-11 Shinjuku, Tokyo), with our tour guide Aya Hirai. It was about 10:30 p.m., and the tiny space was dark and busy with a neon pink “girls girls girls” sign acting as a beacon inside the entranceway.
This was our second stop of the night on the “Explore Tokyo’s LGBTQ+ Area” tour, in Shinjuku Ni-chōme (often shortened to “Ni-chōme”). Aya was our queer navigator for the evening, and we had so many questions for her about Japanese lesbian and queer culture. What she shared with us is the kind of insider scoop we never would have found online or in guidebooks, and she provided us with insights for the rest of our time in Tokyo. That’s why one of the first things I do whenever I travel to a new destination is search out a queer tour.
Twenty years ago, it was difficult to find these kinds of experiences. But today, pop the name of a major city and “LGBTQ+ tours” into Google, and you’ll likely find a number of options. These tours tend to focus on gaybourhood walking tours, queer bar tours or historic/cultural tours. Many are available as Airbnb experiences, while others are run through established mainstream tour companies or independent operators. Which made me wonder: What’s involved with creating an LGBTQ+ tour and being a queer tour guide? Can any queer person develop their own tour and make a living from it? I reached out to a number of guides I’ve met over the years to find out.
Tania Villigran, a Mexican LGBTQ+ and feminist advocate, has been offering two queer tours in Mexico City for the past four years through Airbnb Experiences: MX City for the Girls, Gays and Theys, and LGBTQ Nightlife Extravaganza-Drink, Sing and Dance. Tania refers to her tours as “walking around the city with a friend,” which matched my experience with her. My wife and I spent more than four hours with her on a private afternoon tour that opened our eyes to the unique nuances of Mexican queer culture.
Earlier in her career, Tania worked in marketing and was also a “traditional” guide who was disappointed by the official historic narratives she was expected to share on her tours, so she decided to strike out on her own. Before she did that, though, she took several months to research and build out stronger knowledge and connections with the local feminist and queer community before submitting her tour proposals to Airbnb Experiences. For some new guides, this is the easiest way to launch a queer city tour since Airbnb provides an infrastructure with easy booking, a web presence and direct payments. But a wannabe Airbnb guide needs to prove to the platform that their tour is unique, high-quality and a good value, which can be challenging if there’s a lot of competition in the destination.
Back in Tokyo, Aya also worked as an assistant and translator with a mainstream tour company, but says she was “so, so, so much better at showing what it’s like to be LGBTQ+ in Japan than the old man [doing the tour].” It was enough for Aya to decide to do her own thing.
“I already had about 15 years’ experience hanging out in the gaybourhood and have many friends who are owners or workers in bars, so it was such an easy decision for me to pick which places I would take my guests to,” she tells me. This personal connection is obvious as we felt like VIPs everywhere we visited with Aya.
While most queer tours are led by a single person, Close Friends Collective in New York City takes a different approach. The collective is a team of six friends with interdisciplinary backgrounds in academia and public history, straddling everything from historic preservation to playwriting, with a shared passion for unearthing lesser-known queer stories. And the name Close Friends Collective? “It’s a joke about the way that so many historical figures, regardless of how much evidence there is, were sort of considered ‘close friends,’ right?” says founding member Daniel Walber. “Like Jane Addams and her partner of decades and decades were ‘just roommates.’”
The collective offers queer NYC history walking tours and is an independently run organization with a constantly evolving offering. So far, I’ve joined their Lower East Side, East Village, Green-Wood Cemetery and Brighton Beach (aka Sodom by the Sea) tours. The joy, depth and breadth of knowledge of their historical storytelling, and their ability to research and reveal hidden narratives that have rarely been told is such a pleasure to experience—like the story of drag king Florence Hines who for a time in the late 1800s was the highest-paid Black woman performer in America.
I’m a somewhat typical participant for the collective’s tours: a queer local who loves LGBTQ2S+ culture and history. This is a different clientele from Airbnb users who are usually visiting from different cities or countries. Another difference is the frequency of tours. Most guides using the Airbnb platform offer tours at different times, several days a week, to capture tourists who are on a schedule or looking for a last-minute activity. The collective hosts tours about twice a month, from March to November, with tickets often selling out long beforehand.
So, this leaves, of course, the big question: Can someone actually make a living guiding a queer tour?
Well, maybe?
To be successful, it takes a lot of hard work, knowledge, commitment, industry relationships, the right personality and some luck. For both Tania and Aya, guiding is their only income. They both say it’s not a lucrative profession, and you can never count on how much you may earn in any given month or year. Close Friends Collective team members are paid for their tours, but they only do a few each month. They’ve all got positions in academia, museums and other areas of interest that help feed back into the collective work.
One main thing all of the guides I spoke with share, though, is a passion for LGBTQ2S+ lives and storytelling. But passion is just the beginning of the hard work and research needed to create a tour. That’s something to remember the next time you take a tour and are considering what to tip. You’re not just having an entertaining afternoon, you’re helping preserve queer culture and history. It’s a public service.
