The Gay Cruise

Some people make really smart decisions. And then there are certain LGBTQ+ people who try to summer vacation in Turkey and Egypt.

I’m sure by now you have seen the story of the 2000 gay men on a gay cruise in the Mediterranean. If you have yet to see this story, let me provide a brief overview. Earlier this week, said gay cruise (Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady) was attempting to dock in Turkey. They were denied entry. The shipping company then decided to make up for this oversight to their passengers by taking them to Israel instead.

Wait no, they didn’t. That would have made sense.

Instead, they decided to take them to another Muslim country: Egypt. And guess what? Egypt too denied the ship and all its passengers entry. Why? Because in Islamic countries it is illegal to be gay. In many it is punishable by death. It does not matter if you are a queer for Palestine, they do not want you. They don’t even want your money.

Don’t believe me? The Turkish authorities said no because the passengers were “known for behavior that does not align with the values and moral standards of our society” and that allowing them to be in Turkey was “absolutely out of the question.”

This passenger still doesn’t seem to understand why. As he says: “but it’s like, we’re too gay to spend a bunch of money in your country?” Yes, that’s right. In much of the Islamic world, they don’t want your tourism if it comes with open homosexuality. Watch:

This wasn’t bad luck. It was a failure of basic pattern recognition.

This is the Western LGBTQ+ activist culture in miniature: performative choices that feel bold in Brooklyn or London but collide with reality elsewhere. They can’t make a good decision to save their lives - literally. They hand out awards for existing, treat selfies as activism, and build echo-chamber “safe spaces” that shield them from dissent rather than preparing them for the world as it is. “It’s the taking part that counts,” they say — the participation trophy logic of adults who’ve convinced themselves that intent matters more than outcomes.

We’re adults. Winning counts. Adapting to reality counts.

The same pattern repeats closer to home. Elliot Page’s appearance at the The Odyssey premiere became an internet spectacle for all the wrong reasons. I don’t condone the jeering. But anyone with foresight could have predicted it. Casting a 5’1” biological female who transitioned in 2020 as a Greek warrior was always going to strain credulity – especially after Page had built a career playing gay women when that was the commercially safe identity. The public isn’t buying the full narrative, no matter how loudly dissent is labeled bigotry.

I am both embarrassed by what is going on here and uncomfortable with the public mauling response, which you’d have to be living inside a Greek fable to have missed. The entire internet broke out in laughter, like they were jeering at a circus freak. Ugly all round, to be honest. I interviewed Page in 2015, when it had just become bankable to be “queer” in Hollywood, and Page had come out as a lesbian – who had four films lined up where the character was a gay woman.

In hindsight it’s interesting that Page said this in the interview (for ELLE):

“I’m friends with many actresses my age and it’s competitive, absolutely, but it’s also the most supportive, lovely environment. Women don’t really get to work together because movies usually involve a lot of men and one woman. When women want to work together, we have to make it happen ourselves.”

Again, I’m not condoning the mass harassment of Page at the premiere this week. And yet, I believe the decision to cast him in this role was - again - not a smart decision. The collective is laughing at a premise they have been forced to accept for many years lest they are a bigot: that if women transition to transmen and perform their version of masculinity, everyone in society will accept them as men at face value, including at the steepest face value in a Hollywood blockbuster.

That is plainly not what is happening.

Page’s recent documentary uses sex-changing clownfish and gay penguin parents to argue human sex and gender are more fluid than we thought. These examples are real in the animal kingdom, but humans are not fish or birds. Our psychology involves layered self-reflection, long-term identity formation, and secondary emotions that animal analogies can’t capture. Reasonable questions remain: Does medical transition reliably alleviate dysphoria long-term, especially for same-sex attracted women who may be grappling with internalized homophobia or misogyny? The evidence is still unsettled.

Feel free to disagree with me on these matters, and do whatever you want with your adult bodies. But what we are doing here is presenting vulnerable people as tokens for commercial and social suicide. But hey - that’s all that social justice movements have done for the last two decades, am I wrong?

This is part of a larger pattern. BLM raised over $90 million after George Floyd, only for much of it to disappear into luxury properties, consultants, and family-linked spending while Black communities saw violent crime spikes and little structural progress. MeToo left many of its public faces (TIME magazine’s Silence Breakers etc) isolated after the cameras moved on, facing SLAPP lawsuits and zero structural support. The expanding LGBTQ+ umbrella has sparked internal criticism from lesbians and gay men who feel sex-based rights and same-sex attraction have been deprioritized in favor of gender identity — with real debates over sports, spaces, and youth medicalization. Detransitioners increasingly describe feeling used as tokens before being sidelined.

Rapid, social-media-driven activism keeps serving up vulnerable people for commercial or ideological sacrifice, then offering little protection when backlash arrives. Christopher Nolan cannot plausibly claim Elliot Page is shielded from the consequences of this casting decision. Progressives keep choosing the path of least intellectual resistance while calling it resistance. This is what “suicidal empathy” looks like: demanding the world ignore biology, culture, and tradeoffs, then acting shocked when reality pushes back.

The cruise passengers weren’t denied entry because they lacked rainbow flags. They were denied because they ignored the actual values of the societies they sailed toward; the same pattern of denial that produces Hollywood own-goals, squandered donations, and fractured coalitions. Until the incentives reward clear-eyed adaptation over performative courage, more people will keep sailing into ports that don’t exist.

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