Hang onto your towels! In the first part of our Gay Travel Trilogy, the UK’s best-travelled queer, Adrian Gillan, relates the perks and pitfalls of going on hols with your gaggle of gay mates!

I remember my first holiday with a boyfriend. We went to Paris and pushed our little single beds together, but he kicked up such a fuss when I admitted fooling around, just a wee trifle, whilst on my own in Berlin the month prior, that I dumped him up the Eiffel Tower.

So might I - I thus wondered - fare any better on holiday with gay “mates” instead? Just a bunch of single gay male friends on a bog standard group package to Gran Can or ‘biza: what simpler? No smooching off into cliquey pairs, no jealous bickering and no hand-in-hand promenading gingerly down streets too straight for queer romance. Just one long tanked-up doss.

Of course it’s more vodka and coke than beers all round with us gay boys, and we’re drunk as skunks before we reach the airport - louder and brasher than a jock strap in deep heat and scaling new heights of obnoxion. Narrowly missing a rightful mauling from a student rugby team in Departures, we board, only for one of us to mentally lacerate the poor male trolley dolly waltzing down the aisles.

So, we arrive where even the sands seem pink! Ah, the camaraderie and the bitchy banter: those four single beds in a large shared room, a spit-and-a-spunk from the beach. Like some old school outing: queers reunited! The dorm-like set-up prohibits even the most covert of drunken fumbling. And each morning brings anew the ritual rush for the bathroom mirror and the preening of God’s gay gifts.

It’s weird how gay mates can get so embarrassed about seeing each other naked. Maybe “nude male flesh” means sex for some gays, and gay mates aren’t supposed to have sex with each other - that’s the whole point. Also perhaps, the naked truth might remove the very mystery that fuels our chummy, yet flirtatious, repartee.

As with any group spending long periods of time together, “flexibility” and “compromise” are the watchwords. Not everybody will have the money or the perverted mental stamina to shop until they drop. Not everyone will have the body, skin-type or sky-high boredom threshold to strip off on a beach 24/7.

The biggest perk of travelling with single gay pals is the simple thrill of going out and having a ball, with everyone – at least secretly - on the pull. Anyone looks ten times more attractive when animated with their friends. Mates provide a great context for meeting other guys, all relaxed and fancy free.

However, on the downside, you won’t look so instantly “available” as when out on your own. And it’s not much fun if the guy you drool for saunters over and starts chatting up your mate instead; or if you both end up fighting over the local Juan and you’re the loser - not even offered half a scrap from the table.

And even if you do click with your dream Don and make your escape, where to head? Dare you risk dragging the guy back to yours for a brief liaison before others return? Or make straight for the dunes? Or for your new-found acquaintance’s lair? A little hard if he’s holed up with a family of ten.

Worst of all, what if you’re the only one who doesn’t pull - the last one left on the shelf? Looking increasingly dejected and unattractive for all to see, you make that sad, lonely walk back to a deserted base, save perhaps for an insensitive or daring mate who’s already scored and got down to it; or you go where gents oft “take airs” and have the mixed consolation of bumping into a pal who didn’t get his end away in the end either.

Whatever, a close-knit gay male travelling group has a habit of fragmenting and dispersing when out hunting as a pack; then regrouping the next day to compare notes and repeat. Moreover, gay clusters have a habit of imploding under their own homo-inertia, completely unaided by external factors. If it’s not two queens falling out before they’ve even stepped off the plane, you can find mates become shags and then scarce speak, or - far worse - become lovers and just drift off in a misty bliss.

Yet, perhaps more dangerous still is the unfortunate discovery some may make that what is amusing for a couple of nights each week down the local club back home is simply too dreadful all day and all night for a whole week, and you’re actually desperate for a real break - from all your gay mates!

Sod it - just book it!

Adrian Gillan