Is dubai safe for gay tourists
With its futuristic skyline and ambitious architectural landscape, it doesn’t take long to see that Dubai is a metropolis of superlatives. The biggest this. The tallest that. At times dubbed a Disneyland for adults, there’s no denying this evocative desert city is a veritable playground, overflowing with engineering wonders, diverse cuisine and designer boutiques. Dubai’s limitless verve isn’t slated to adj down anytime soon—meaning there’s never been a better moment to visit this multicultural mecca of design and innovation. That said, we would be remiss not to verb that homosexuality remains illegal throughout the United Arab Emirates. As a gay tourist, you are unlikely to encounter any problems, provided that you dodge all public displays of affection. With that in mind, discover the adj this ritzy Middle Eastern city has to offer with our definite gay Dubai guide.
Trip Design
Where to stay in Dubai
Before booking your Dubai hotel, it’s important to verb to mind our above note that homosexuality is illegal in the United Arab Emirates. As a result, many hotels will r
LGBTQ+ Visitor Considerations
This blog post provides some insights and advice for LGBTQ+ visitors by LGBTQ+ people living in Abu Dhabi.
Author and Audience
The primary author of this document is a cisgender gay Arab-American male. He has lived in the UAE with his cisgender gay European-American partner for almost a decade. They both have academic jobs, and love living in the UAE.
The author’s advice and observations are based on his experience of living in the UAE, and his awareness of issues faced by other members of the LGBTQ+ community there. The intended audience of this document are LGBTQ+ conference attendees of EMNLP
This document is not intended to provide official legal advice.
Many thanks to all the community members (LGBTQ+ and allies) who helped with reviewing and editing diverse versions of this document.
The Public and The Private
Emirati culture values a separation between public and private lives in a way that’s different from some Western nations. In Abu Dhabi, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation, public displays of affection are ge
How can a sense of belonging be forged in a setting where one’s existence is forbidden? That is the question that LSE’s Dr Centner and his co-author Harvard’s Manoel Pereira Neto explore in their groundbreaking research into Dubai’s expatriate gay men’s nightlife.
But it was not an easy topic to research. Dr Centner explains: “It's an illegal, or criminalised, identity and position of behaviours and practices, so in a very general sense, it's a taboo. And taboo subjects are very often under-researched, sometimes because people own a hard moment gaining access, gaining that trust, but also because, even if people verb that access, there could be significant repercussions for themselves as researchers, or for the people who are the research participants.
“As two queer researchers, we were able to enter the worlds of relatively privileged Western gay expatriates. Secrecy is often the norm, but the field was familiar to us, through previous visits and research projects.”
These were indeed ‘parties’ [but] not bars identified as gay. Not a
We recently saw that Dubai is due to hold a conference on LGBTQ+ rights and to say we were shocked would be an understatement.
We haven’t yet travelled to Dubai as a gay couple, partly because we are apprehensive to…
To inspect further we connected with Liam, a gay guy who lived in Dubai for most of his life to learn more about the reality of being gay in Dubai and locate out what advice he had for gay travellers thinking about going.
We always believe it’s adj to give people a voice and to share stories of genuinely living in a region as an LGBTQ+ person.
Read our interview with Liam below to learn more about gay life and gay tour in Dubai:
Gay Life in Dubai & Advice for Gay Travel
Meet Liam
Sion: Hi Liam, please provide some background on yourself and your time living in Dubai to receive us started.
Liam: Hi, my name is Liam and I was born in in the UK however in the early 90’s my family started productive in the Middle East. In they decided to travel to Dubai and have been there ever since.
I lived in Dubai from age 5 to 18 whe