Going Greek - A Look At LGBT Life In Greece

As St. Petersburg effectively puts a ban on LGBT tourists, I decided to take a closer look at the scene in Greece to see how it compares with other countries in Europe particularly now that Spartacus has published its gay travel index for countries around the world! So just for this once the Gay Crete Blog becomes the Gay Greece Blog!

I don't know about you, but I always love the charts and statistics that get produced showing how gay friendly or un-friendly places are and the current Spartacus chart shows some quite amusing results this year, you can find it here at Spartacus World.

Now I was quite pleased to see that Greece scores a resounding zero on the chart although I was a bit mystified by the fact that Greece got a minus 1 for 'locals hostile' when in fact Greeks are some of the friendliest people you can come across and will welcome virtually everyone, the fact that they are not really interested in your sexuality shouldn't really come into the statistics at all! Strangely the UK also got a minus 1 for the same reason, and Peru got a minus 2 for the same reason, and yet I found during a recent trip to Peru that they were some of the friendliest people in South America, particularly when you compare them to the reception you get from people in Rio de Janeiro.

As you would expect Turkey gets a minus 4 overall (the same as Peru but for different reasons), which makes a bit of a nonsense with Out Traveler listing Turkey as an 'Up and Coming Destination', while at the same time getting humpy about the situation in St. Petersburg!

But I digress as we are supposed to be talking about Greece.......

To say that Greek people are conservative, religiously and socially, would be an understatement, and to many of them the concept of 'gay' is almost impossible to grasp, for this reason many Greeks are not, and never will be, 'out', having said that there are many younger people who are, and will even admit to it on their Facebook profile, presumably they work on the basis that none of their family or friends are on Facebook. Of course many visitors to Greece 'worry' about this and the fact that there do not appear to be any anti-discrimination laws when in fact existing Greeks laws already outlaw discrimination.

Naturally enough a result of this conservatism means that Greeks rarely upset other countries so acts of terrorism against Greece are very rare making it one of the safest countries in the world to visit!

Of course there is the occasional skirmish with Turkey, but then the Greeks have long memories and I always put this down to the debacle over Helen of Troy.

So while the Greeks are mainly totally disinterested in your sexuality, this does not extend into other areas of your personal life, and you can impress a Greek by being au fait with your family history for the last 300 years (at least), and they will have no qualms about asking what you do for a living, whether you own your own home, how much you paid for it, or how much rent you pay etc. etc. etc.

As with any other country you are expected to obey the accepted moral and social behaviour and while, undoubtedly, the sight of two men walking down the street hand in hand would raise eyebrows (but possibly be excused on the grounds that you are 'foreign'), it is perfectly acceptable for a man to greet a close friend or relative of the same sex, that he has not seen for a while, or on a special occasion, with a warm embrace and kiss on each cheek. It is amazing at the way some tourists seem to think that they can do anything they like as a tourist, and seem to regard visiting a foreign country as a right when of course it is actually a privilege to be allowed to do so!

Enough of my moralising and tut-tutting.......As you would expect the most amount of LGBT nightlife exists in the largest cities in Greece, i.e. Athens the capital, and Thessaloniki, and since the Greeks discovered the Internet a couple of years ago there has been a burgeoning of web sites, some of them very nice and some of them exceedingly awful. As with most things Greek they are all in competition with each other and I suspect that most of their owners expect to make a fortune by putting up a web site which they will sell at a vast profit at a later date without ever promoting it or updating it. Nonetheless for the LGBT traveller they can be useful, of course many LGBT travellers head straight for Mykonos or Lesvos and would never dream of going to Athens which is a shame, as there is a lot of incorrect information about Mykonos for instance, when statistically there are likely to be more LGBT tourists visiting, say, Crete, than there are to Mykonos. (Ignore one web site that says Mykonos welcomes millions of gay travellers each year as Mykonos only gets about a million visitors a year in total!)

So let's look at some of these web sites.....One of the oldest is Gay Greece and one of the few that has a reasonable translated English version, it even has a section on Crete although I am not in it because I decline to pay for an entry, apparently it is OK for me to promote the Gay Greece web site for free, but not the other way round.....

Then there is Gay Radio and its sister dating site Gay Book Star and then there is the gay chat and guide site Gay Hellas and these are just a few of the general sites. Many of the various bars in Athens and Thessaloniki also have their own site.

For such a conservative country we also have a number of magazines and blogs such as Fagazine, City Uncovered which has a good English version too, and my favourite just for the name and slogan alone Screw - Because Fags Can Read not to mention AntiVirus and 10Percent and our local blog for Crete Lesbian and Gay in Crete

How are we doing so far for a country that is so 'in the closet'??

Naturally most of these sites are in Greek so you will need to have an auto translate installed on your browser, most of these do a reasonable job but sometimes translate peoples' names with hilarious results.

You can also find many of these sites have 'Pages' on Facebook which has the Bing translate on it automatically although it falls flat on its face when it comes across Greek that has been transliterated into Roman characters.

There is a plethora of web sites about Greece generally too, many of these repeat the same things over and over, but one called Travelscope, has taken a slightly different approach, you can read here what they have to say about Crete and prospective visitors to Mykonos might like to take a note of what they have to say about Mykonos here.

Meanwhile here on Crete which statistically almost certainly welcomes more LGBT visitors than Mykonos in an area 100 times greater and therefore, with a lot more to see and do, (unless you really want to spend 10 days in an expensive alcoholic haze fighting for a space on the beach) we will battle on regardless and drop a gentle reminder that we now have two gay bars!

Greece Bias Against Gays-Lesbians Compounds Debt Crisis as Tourism Suffers - Now Read On

A lot of LGBT people are likely to see this headline without reading the article and immediately think that far from being the cradle of Democracy that Greece has become the cradle of homophobia

To begin let me reassure prospective visitors to Greece that Greek people are some of the most welcoming people in the world. While they may not 'understand' homosexuality, as such they have no objection to gay people so you will not find yourselves singled out for 'special' treatment, you will be treated as a visitor to their country and hospitality will be extended to you on the same basis as any other visitors.

You know me I do not get political, I am usually too busy talking about holidays, but every so often I find something which really gets my goat......And this is it.

Doing the rounds of the gay (and other) press over the last couple of weeks has been this article from Bloomberg News, Greece Bias Against Gays-Lesbians Compounds Debt Crisis as Tourism Suffers Now as if the bad publicity that Greece has received because of strikes, demonstrations, and rising taxes were not enough, we get this......One of the best examples of irresponsible journalism that I have ever seen in my life, nothing like kicking a man when he is down!

So let's have a look at the article in more detail to see what it actually says.......

"Gay and lesbian tourists, who for decades flocked to the islands of Mykonos and Lesbos, have removed Greece from their list of top destinations because of discrimination, according to surveys by Amsterdam-based OutNow Consulting."

OutNow consulting are a company specialising in LGBT marketing, i.e. they tell companies and governments what they should do and how they should behave towards LGBT people which I personally find insulting as it suggests that I am a person with 'special needs'! So I had a look at their web site to see if I could see this survey, nowhere could I find a survey that said 'Are you avoiding Greece because they do not allow civil partnerships'? I did find last year's Global survey, and the ongoing 2020 survey, but neither of them has a question along the lines of 'Would you avoid a country that does not have same-sex partnerships'?

So how do they come to this conclusion?

"Greece failed to make the list of the top 10 countries where gay travelers were interested in taking a holiday in the next three years, according to the survey. Athens didn’t appear among the top 20 city destinations."

It is true that many people are avoiding Athens, not just the LGBT population, many visitors have been put off by seeing demonstrations, but if you look at the OutNow Global survey for 2010 you will notice that Athens is not even listed as a possible destination within the next 3 years, small wonder then that it doesn't appear in the top 20! Athens does appear in the 202o survey, but as this is not very representative, being only available in English, it can hardly be taken as fact!

So why are LGBT tourists eschewing Mykonos and Lesvos?

In the case of Mykonos the answer is easy....Mykonos is old hat. Forty years ago it was a gay island, until the mass tourism companies got hold of it and realised, probably along with the Mykonites themselves, that you couldn't make money just out of marketing to LGBT travellers, and as anyone can tell you LBGT visitors to Mykonos have long been a minority, indeed, in August and early September, Mykonos is a party island for Greek youth of all sexes! I suspect that the same applies to Lesvos. Whether we as LGBT people like it or not, we are only a small sector of the population and from my own experience we do not spend proportionally any more than anyone else does.

The Bloomberg article, and OutNow, conveniently ignore that fact that over the last forty years a veritable of host of new destinations has become available to travellers with the resources to visit them, which can also account for some of the reduction in tourism to many 'traditional' destinations. In fact, in spite of what the Greek government statistics may say, here on Crete, for many businesses July was the worst month they have had for many years from all sectors of the population not just LGBT.

To be fair to Bloomberg who published the article, they are only passing on information given to them, and the real culprits here are OutNow who are hoping to ingratiate themselves with the Greek government and earn a bit fat consultancy fee by pretending they have the answer to the problem (sorry Ian, I know you are a friend on Facebook, but you really are just looking for opportunities for new business).

"About 75 percent of gay travelers will seek a hotel that welcomes same-sex couples, according to Hannah Burden, spokeswoman for the Thomson, Thomson Cruises and First Choice holiday brands ofTui Travel Plc (TT/), the U.K. majority-owned unit of Germany-based Tui AG (TUI1)and Europe’s largest tour operator.

Thomson last year started marketing vacations for gay and lesbian travelers, including wedding packages to the Spanish island of Ibiza. The company uses the GayComfort Certified accreditation system, developed by OutNow and endorsed by the International Gay and Lesbian Travel Association."

Well yes, but then again possibly no......While I do, to a certain amount, applaud the efforts of Thomson, a brief look at their LGBT brochure reveals that only one of their hotels is actually specifically LGBT and that is on Mykonos and a quick look at the most recent TripAdvisor reports reveals that they all say the same thing, which is that particular hotel is expensive....And this is another feature which has been reported about Mykonos over the last couple of years, it is an expensive island. In fact looking at Thomson's hotel details they have a very negative statement about the hotels 'being open to anyone over the age of 16 but be aware that gay people might be staying there'.....Well that applies to any hotel in the world, and is an open invitation for homophobic people to book into the same hotel and jeer at the gay people or even worse physically attack them. It is also guaranteed to put off straight people with children!

The only real involvement as far as TUI is concerned is putting bums on (uncomfortable) aircraft seats and putting bodies in beds and if you believe they are in business to make anything but a profit then you are sorely mistaken.

The point that is most often missed about tourism is, that it is going to take place irrespective of gay marriage or civil rights. In the case of Greece of course we have several thousand years of history and civilisation and it is rather a case of, 'if you want to see the Pyramids you have to go to Egypt' so if you want to see the Acropolis you have to go to Greece, and if you want to see Angkor Wat.....

As an LGBT person you might like to think that everyone at your holiday destination gets treated the same way as you do in your home country, but you should always remember that wherever you go you are supposed to respect the laws and customs of that country. As things change only slowly in Greece you could well be waiting some time if you intend to boycott Greece until the legalise same-sex unions! It is highly unlikely in the near future that same-sex marriages will be recognised, as such a thing is not within the realms of understanding of many Greek people, even if it were made legal there would be very few Greeks who would take advantage of it as the social structure does not allow for it! You can hardly describe the lack of same-sex partnerships as 'bias' in any case. And legislation does cost money in spite of what the article says and the financial gain by enacting legislation is in any case open to question as the evidence for the 'Pink Dollar' is rather anecdotal......

So what can Greece do to improve its tourism when it already gets 19 million tourists a year?

Where the Greek tourism industry falls down is by not extracting enough cash from the existing tourists because, in spite of what you may hear, Greece has some of the cheapest accommodation in the world, what makes it appear expensive is the mark up put on it by the foreign mass tourism companies and until the Greek government address this by specifying a minimum rate for accommodation or by openly discouraging mass tourism not a lot is going to change and this of course has nothing to do with the sexual preferences of the prospective visitors!