Issue 61  April 14 2026

I Spent the Whole Cruise Looking at Peoples' Wrists

If you haven't seen my Facebook post about the cruise we took last week, I'll catch you up and fill in some more info.

It turns out by coincidence we ended up on a cruise with 300 gay conservatives. I found this out after asking one of the many men wearing a red Conservative Cruise t-shirt what it meant, and then Jenny verified this via Google.

While I was rattled by this, I was determined not to let it ruin my vacation. So, I decided to at first be nice and polite by chatting up some of the men. When they invited me to one of their parties, I politely declined explaining that I likely didn't agree with anything they believed. Then one tried to convince me that the only way we achieved marriage equality was because of the advocacy of gay Republicans. I begged to differ (as would, I presume, Evan Wolfson, Mary Bonauto, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Jim Obergefell, Barak Obama, and hundreds of grassroots queer activists).

I continued my commitment to politeness even when a man from Utah (Salt Lake City was too blue for him so he lived 20 miles away) told me NYC was a "grand failure," likely because of our new mayor, and when I overheard one of them at dinner say that "nobody works harder than Donald Trump." I tried to ignore the red MAGA hats, the Trump-Vance campaign t-shirt, a "Gulf of America" t-shirt, and many such advertisements.

But I completely lost it when we spotted a woman wearing a "War is Gay" t-shirt. When I asked her what it meant, she said, "what do you think it means?" I wasn't about to play that game. (Later I wondered if she was [ironically?] using "gay" as a slur, like homophobic kids in a schoolyard.)

When she said she didn't like war, I spotted the red, white and blue wrist band she was wearing and realized I had found a unicorn, i.e., one of the few women on this conservative cruise. So, I then went through the entire Trump cabinet and asked her if she liked Trump, Vance, Noem, Bondi, Gabbard, etc. There were some yesses and some nos. I walked away after making some remark that included the phrase "the entire clown car."

You'd think this exchange would have made me feel satisfied or emboldened. But all it did was make me sad and depressed. I'm not a fan of confrontation and don't do it well. I was much happier being polite knowing I wasn't changing them and they weren't changing me. But I knew down deep that they deserved some pushback.

So, for the next few days, all I did was stare at peoples' wrists to see who was with them. One guy told me there were 120 women, but I only saw a few and many, many men. Jenny found a photo on Instagram of about 25 women.

When we got home, I saw a short video, also on Instagram, of some gay conservative influencer, praising the group and saying how well they "blend in" with straight people and how their conservative views ranged from pure MAGA to "I hate taxes and love big business." He called the rest of us, "the alphabet mafia." What he didn't mention that I realized on the cruise was that one of their key beliefs was the exclusion, and likely hatred, of transgender people (and some non-binary folks as well). They always referred to the community as GLB, clearly dropping the T. I wondered then if many of the women they attract were anti-trans TERFs who agree with all of the horrific anti-trans policies of the current administration.

So, we made the best of the cruise. I read a lot of books, drank a lot of cappuccinos, and went swimming. We even had a lovely high tea (see photo). When friends on Facebook commiserated with me about the cruise, I told them we would be detoxing next year on an Olivia Cruise that won't include upsetting wrist bands or red hats.

Two notes about this newsletter: (1) I'll be sending out another issue next week since this one is a week late because of the cruise. This'll get me back on my biweekly schedule and allow me to post the backlog of content I've accumulated; and (2) You might have seen that there aren't a lot of photos in this issue. I'm going to message the app's folks to see if there's a way to fix this.