My Pals in Thailand: The Men Who Made Spartacus in the 1970s

During the second half of the twentieth century, Spartacus International Gay Guide emerged as one of the leading gay travel publications. Following its founding in 1968, the guide catered primarily to western European and North American gay men, often presumed to be white, promising access to spaces marked as gay around the world. This publication and the editorial team behind it, headed by British former seminarian John Stamford, were a crucial part of the formation of gay travel networks in the 1970s and 1980s. However, in order to access the spaces listed in the guide, Stamford and his team built a network of informants and distributors that spanned the globe. Men working in popular travel destinations, including the Caribbean, Thailand, and the Philippines, many of whom were men of color and nationals of those countries, enthusiastically provided information and used the guides as they developed transnational intimacies that blurred the divide between Global South and North. At the same time, the Spartacus editorial team also involved several men of color whom Stamford had met while abroad. Both trouble the idea that the making of Spartacus and the corresponding growth of gay travel were white, western European affairs, even as the assumed audience of the guide very much was. This paper argues that we need to take seriously men of color in countries in the Global South as mobile subjects in order to understand the making of 1970s gay travel networks and the contradictions of racialized desire and transnational mobility embedded within them.