Cruising to Equality? The Cruise Industry & LGBTQ+ Rights
In “Cruising to Equality: Tourism, U.S. Homonationalism, and the Lesbian and Gay Family Market,” author Liz Montegary wrote (as she explains now) that “spending money in local and global tourism markets increased the visibility of ‘respectable,’ economically privilegedm lesbian and gay parents and, in doing so, strengthened lesbian and gay demands for marital and parental rights.”The focus of her study was the LGBTQ+ family cruise company R Family Vacations.
Montegary is now director of graduate studies at Stony Brook University’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and author of the 2018 book Familiar Perversions: The Racial, Sexual, and Economic Politics of LGBT Families.
In the nearly two decades since R Family launched, the LGBTQ+ cruise industry has been dramatically transformed. (Read how R Family is changing as well).
And while marriage equality is currently the law of the land, parental rights are under threat and a Supreme Court justice wants to undo our marriages.
