What Happens In Lisbon, Stays In Lisbon... Except A Sore, Overworked Jaw, Which Sometimes Takes a Few Days To Shake Off.

We are writing this post from a crowded Western Union in Lisbon. We're just finishing up a fantastic long weekend here, where we helped to celebrate the birthday of SP, a charming man who we didn't know before Friday. FHC invited us along because he was a little bit worried that we were lonely in Madrid and needed some gay company. He was afraid that we might have a difficult expat experience, similar to his when he first moved to America, but we've yet to find ourselves high on hashish with our ankles tied behind our heads in the dorm hallway of a Catholic seminary.

Anyway, we've had a wonderful time in Portugal, and the capital city is very gorgeous. We've had a lot of pastries and port, and have met many new international gays (mostly skinny Frenchmen). It was all very charming and included several nights of clubbing and a bus tour.

Which leads us to the question of today's post: What is it about traveling that makes gay people so goddamn horny? From our account, there were five new hookups in our weekend group of 20 people. We'll leave unaccounted how many of those were our very own. And there many more attempted ones, and probably ones that we don't know about.

When traveling to a foreign place, like Madrid, or Rhode Island, we find that gays are generally more touchy feely, more uninhibited, and less selective. Is it because everything feels so much more anonymous, as opposed to the cliquey "everyone will know what you did in the morning" atmosphere of New York or Washington? Or is it more related to the fact that being around so many exotic one-of-a-kind artisinal home furnishing boutiques just really sets our loins on fire?

Either way, after this weekend, we are very excited to return home to Madrid with some port, a few nice hand-painted wall tiles, and a whole new neighborhood of Paris to avoid next time we go to visit.