Ever had someone make history so juicy, you forgot you were learning?

That’s Dr. Andrew Lear—Harvard professor turned museum renegade and the mastermind behind Oscar Wilde Tours the first travel company to boldly say:

“Forget tourist traps. Let’s take queer people to where their history actually happened.”

From ancient Greek love stories to Renaissance scandals, from Call Me By Your Name landscapes to secret drag scenes across Asia, Andrew’s leading LGBTQ+ travelers on journeys that are smart, sexy, and spiritually satisfying.

In this wildly entertaining episode of Pride Nomad Unleashed, Ken and Andrew go deep on:

• Why most queer history has been scrubbed from museums—and how he’s putting it back

• The truth about same-sex love in Ancient Rome (spoiler: it wasn’t all togas and orgies)

• His upcoming TV series with Stephen Fry and Tan France (yes, really)

• The power of “slow travel” and how to get adopted by an Italian café

• Queer birds of paradise, rogue princes, and how 3 million hijras are rewriting gender norms in India

• PLUS: A sneak peek at upcoming LGBTQ+ history tours from Japan to the Nordic countries
  

🎁 Mention “Pride Nomad” when booking for a special discount on Oscar Wilde Tours—whether it’s the Death in Venice itinerary or the one where you follow Michelangelo’s gay little footprints across Italy.

For our viewers: 

Get $100 off any tour of Europe and Asia on top of the discounts already offered! Call or email us and we can make a discount code for you. 

Contact Andrew:

• ☎️ (646) 560-3205

• Email 

• Facebook

Watch the Episode here

Listen to the Podcast here

The Gay Indiana Jones: Dr. Andrew Lear Digs Up The Queer History They Never Taught You

Have you ever someone make history so damn fascinating, you forgot your learning? Meet Dr. Andrew Lear, the guy who spent years teaching at Harvard and Columbia about all the stories they conveniently left out of your history books. This isn't your typical boring professor. He's the mastermind behind Oscar Wilde Tours, the first company ballsy enough to say, “Let's not just market to LGBTQ travelers. Let's show them their own damn history.”

Now he's running around the world's biggest museums, exposing all the queer stories they tried to sweep under those fancy renaissance rugs. From the Metropolitan Museum to the Natural Portrait Gallery in London, he's basically a gay Indiana Jones, but instead of finding lost arks, he's uncovering lost legacies.

Apparently, being a groundbreaking historian, a tour guide wasn't enough, he's now teaming up with Tan France and Stephen Fry to blow the lid off centuries of straight washing in an upcoming TV series. Get ready to, for some mind-blowing stories about same-sex love in ancient Greece and Rome and all the fabulous drama they definitely didn't teach you in school. This is Pride Nomad Unleashed with Dr. Andrew Lear, where history comes out of the closet.

Thank you so much, Ken. I want to copy that down because that's my marketing right there.

I’ll tell you what I did. I took your bio, I threw it into a very expensive AI that we're using and I said, “Do it for the Pride Nomad letter,” and there it is.

It’s great. I will ask you for it later.

Tell me then, for people that don't know you, let's give them a little bit of background about Oscar Wilde Tours and what you've been doing because it's cool to have someone who's got the years of experience that knows the planet. We're going to talk about some of the favorites and some of the places that you wish we never went to. People can learn a lot from the sages of the industry.

I like to think of myself as a Time Lord. That’s certainly how I think of Stephen Fry.

I just came back from the Gay Ski Week at Whistler. We were called Vintage.

I’ll tell Stephen that. Yes, we're definitely vintage. We're vintage one of those wine you keep in the cellar for a very long time before you open it.

Some people do want to lock me away, but that's a different conversational together.

Oscar Wilde Tours: Revealing Hidden LGBTQ+ History

I think if I'm going to talk about Oscar Wilde Tours, it's easiest if I do this in a narrative form. As you alluded to, or maybe you did say, originally, I was a professor of Ancient Greek at Harvard very early in my career. It has a big role in my CV because I won the I think it's called Harvard Certificate for Excellence in Teaching five times. That sets everything up. I remember principally I taught at Pomona College in California, which is a wonderful school, and at the very end, at NYU.

Also in between, I was at Columbia. I was a research fellow and so on. A lot of different places. I'm principally known as a classicist, as someone who works on male sexuality in the ancient world. I also work a lot on vase painting and lyric poetry. As my chairman would tell me, “No, you only get one specialty.”

It’s like the male part myself.

It's definitely what sets me apart. The only 3 or 4 people who work principally on that, senior scholars, and I hope they aren't reading, because I say all the other ones are out of their minds. I always feel like I win.

We have to have that level of confidence, don't we?

The Birth Of Gay Secrets: Tours At The Metropolitan Museum

I did do it. I don't have that much of an agenda, really. My career ended more voluntarily than otherwise. I fled to NYU and then the big deans at NYU would not give the department the money to make another professorship for classics. It was just about money. I thought, “What else can I do?” Was in New York, so one of the big LGBTQ+ alumni organizations in New York. It's called like the 7 ivs Plus asked me to give a lecture. That very same week, I happened to have heard from someone that private individuals could give their own tours at the Metropolitan Museum.

I knew I could bring my class but I didn't know you could just walk in and do any tour you wanted. He said, “Yeah you have to pay, you have to reserve, but you just do what you want.” I said to the head of this organization, whose name is Shawn Cowls, “Shawn, why don't I design a tour for you at the Metropolitan instead?” He said, “Yeah, that's a great idea.” I started looking around the Met and I put together this tour, which was originally called The Gay Secrets of the Metropolitan. Now we call it the LGBT Secrets, but I'm sorry, Gay Secrets is a better name.

It's easier to say. It's not many syllables.

Yeah, exactly. It flows. It's sounds more fun. Of course, it is L very LGBTQ. I was doing that for a while and that became fairly popular and then it expanded in many directions. First of all, I started doing many different tours of the Met. I designed one about royal mistresses and courtesans called the Shady Ladies of the Metropolitan, which was the big seller for many years.

You're like a copy dude.

It was such a fun idea. I did all kinds of different things with the Met, but I also started doing LGBT tours of other places. The MFA in Boston was a very early expansions of a great LGBT museum. I designed the first museum trail on LGBT history in the US in the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, which is a great museum that most people don't know, and a great LGBT museum. Also, the National Portrait Gallery in London. I did some work with Attitude Magazine and then it just expanded.

I started doing multi-day LGBTQ+ history tours of countries or areas. Probably for many years, mostly what I did was Greece and Italy, which are obvious. Those I could do every year, basically. It just started to expand because people said, “Why don't you look at this?” I’ll tell you what happened. I started to realize that I had people who'd taken both the Italy and Greece tours and would like to do something else.

The first thing I did was a Germany tour of Berlin and Munich. That was popular. Do you know there's a gay Indian prince? He crossed Europe. He's married to an American. He shows up in America. His name is Manvendra Singh Gohil. He is the heir apparent of a little principality in Gujarat. I met Manvendra. He was standing in front of the Stonewall in a silk turban with a diamond hanging in front of his forehead. I went over and said, “You're not Manvendra Singh Gohil, are you?”

You just asked him like that?

Yeah. How many people are standing in front of the Stonewall in a silk turban with a diamond?

Either that or a drag queen, one or the other.

Global LGBTQ+ History: From Greece To India And Japan

Exactly. He looked Indian. He said, “Of course, yes I am.” We started talking and after quite a long period of time, this turned into an LGBTQ+ history tour of India. We also expanded to Japan. Now it's just doing new tours all the time. In the spring, I'm doing what I call the Call Me By Your Name Tour of Northern Italy,. It goes from Leonardo davinci in Milano through the lakes and the small cities of Northern Italy with a Call Me By Your Name, the movie rather than the book, because the book is really set in the Liguria.

We end up in Venice with the Death in Venice, also Talented Mr. Ripley. Venice, a lot of LGBT stuff. That's one. I'm doing a tour of Paris and the Noir. What else am I doing? I'm just putting together a tour with Christina Gutenberg in the Nordic countries. We're just about to publish it of basically Copenhagen Stockholm in Helsinki. Queen Christina, Greta Garbo, The Danish girl, Hans Christian Anderson, Tom of Finland and Abba. Let’s not forget Abba.

"When one hopes, one lives.”

Andrew, I'm curiously living just through these definitions of what you've been doing, this is beyond cool. I assume you're leading all the tours.

Yeah, at this point, I'm leading all the tours. I do have someone in mind who I think could lead some of them for me, just one. You have to have someone who's both a pretty serious intellectual and good with talking to groups. They're not that many. Maybe they aren't free. I do know a really great guy who's a professor who's about to retire.

I'm thinking about as a business person, also as a gay traveler. Of course, as the cheerleader for our Pride Nomad community. I'm like, “If Andrew's in Italy and he's in the Nordic countries this year, if I want to go to Japan this year, I'm screwed.” Of course, certainly, from business standpoint, you've got a lot of money left on the table.

Unveiling LGBTQ+ History On TV With Tan France And Stephen Fry

I am at a limit on my own business and that's always been true. I'm thinking about that, and this is something, the other direction this all went into is TV. For a very long time, Stephen Fry and I have been working on getting various LGBT history TV series out there. I think now we're finally probably there. Tan France came on as executive producer, and then we have a bunch of cool people interested. My plan is to have every episode have another big LGBT celeb come on as a cameo. Why not like Elton John, etc.?

We'll talk offline about this. We're doing an online summit. We're going to have 75 speakers all with big audiences to generate what we expect to be over 1 million eyeballs visiting the site to attend. It's going to be free. We figure about 12,000 to 84,000 will actually opt in to come to this thing. It’s a ten-day celebration of how to ultimately make the world your playground. We're calling it the World Playground Summit. We want to bring in some of those celebrities. We're looking to partner with a gate LGBTQ+ cable channel. There's a lot we're going to play with because Pride Nomad is a mission for me.

Yeah, of course, these are all mission-based.

It's all lifestyle-oriented. We've got the nonprofit behind us, the Pride Nomad Foundation, so for sure I want to talk to you about how we can mix and match some of this together. I'm thinking just in terms of also with the digital nomad side of things, I don't want to necessarily promote the idea that we're just ticking off countries like tricks on a bed post, which is also interesting back in the day, at any rate. I want people to actually go to a place and be there for a little bit so that the person at the cafe knows before you walk in the door, what you're going to get.

Immersive Travel: Experiencing Rome Beyond The Tourist Traps

Many people go on a cruise that goes to Rome. In other words, they stop, they get out of a cruise boat in Civitavecchia. I don't know how long that drive is in Rome. It's certainly more than an hour, probably two. They're in Rome for like four hours and they see the Colosseum and the Vatican. They probably eat in some terrible tourist restaurant. They see the Pantheon.

There's the hole all up in the ceiling.

The Pantheon is harder to get into though. Maybe they go to the Trevi Fountain, whatever it is, it's very quick. They're back. I take people to rope on what's called my LGBTQ History and Art Tour of Italy from Caesar to Michelangelo and beyond. We are in Rome for 4 days instead of 4 hours. People will say to me, “How long do you really think you should spend in Rome just to begin to get to know it? I say, “A month.” About a month because then you'll have seen more or less everything you wanted to see. You'll have been to the same place a dozen times and Italians being generally social, they'll have already somewhat adopted you.

That's the challenge also, in terms of time because on my list right now is Colombia. I haven't been there yet.

Neither have I.

I really want to go to Medellin and to a few other places that are there. Every time I’ve talked to someone from Columbia, it's like, “You’ve got to go here, got to go there.” You can't just go to Medellin for like three days. You’ve got to spend at least a couple weeks there.

There’s a gay travel company in Medellin that you should get in touch with. Email me about it. I’ll try to see if I can find their names. I was on a tour with them there in Italy once.

I’ll definitely connect with them. That's the whole point. What I love to do actually is figure out a way as we move forward together is dialing in a beginning or end of a month in Italy that begins or ends or even in the middle and there’s a tour.

Maybe not when I started the company, but maybe like year two, I actually thought of an idea, which I still think is good, but as you say, I may not be able to do it alone, where we would have what I would call like a break tour where you would go to four days, LGBTQ London, or LGBTQ Paris. The idea was that some people would just have four days. They would fly over and do that. For many people, it would just fit into their vacation. I'd love to create a system like that. Also, of course, New York, San Francisco, whatever, American cities as well.

I think there's a need for that. As we grow, we're trying to be tour agnostic at Pride Nomad because we're embracing the community. We don't want to be a travel agent necessarily because then we can't play favorites. Although I'm falling in love with everybody as I do this show. Everyone I’ve talked to, I'm in love with you all because I’ve got great guests because we're doing great things.

If there's a way that as we build our Pride Nomad audience, these are people that are either they are location independent already, or they want to be and want to be, then actually are, so many of them may get two weeks at a time if they're so lucky. My objective is to teach them how to say, “Bye, I'm out of here. I'm going to do my life wherever I want,” especially in light of current events.

We want pretty much to get into various aspects of that as well. By we, I mean I and various friends. I’ve been talking to real estate agents in places where people could buy property or rent property or that thing. This is definitely a growth industry at the moment for sure.

Part of it, there was a company that just went out of business. They were sold multiple times. They’re Remote Year. The idea was that you would sign on for them for a year and every month they'd move you to a different location. It was a pretty interesting model. It wasn't gay, but I think they got their first ran, it was, but nonetheless, they were taken over a couple times. They closed up at the end of 2024 and who knows what's going to happen with them or the next iteration of it.

Were they doing like things where you work when you stay like local jobs?

Yeah. You weren't working locally. You had your own online.

We're looking also for people who do that with volunteering things.

My mom years ago was feeding Lions in Africa, which was pretty freaking awesome. What we ultimately want to do is have some a real estate component as well. Whether maybe we buy an apartment or a building, whatever in a different city. People can come and stay at Pride Nomad venues with others so that we're all like-minded.

I actually really like that.

That would be fun.

They're not very far from some things I was thinking about. I happen to travel with an ex-boyfriend in 2023. We went up to just spend the weekend there and he was going to get the car in the garage. I was standing in front of a real estate agency and I was looking in the window. Let me tell you, in Italy, and I bet this is true in France as well, anywhere outside of Rome, Milan, Florence and Venice is so inexpensive that it would really be possible to set up little like commune things. There was like a ten-room house with its own olive trees. It was maybe $300,000. That could be so much fun for so many people.

We should talk about that because at the end of the day, it's something a number of us can come in and do that together. Bringing local management. The cool thing about it is, the stigma are digital nomads screwing up, the economy goes away outside of the area where housing is an issue. We add value to the community.

Thank you. I like that very much. Of course, because of my connections in the travel industry, I know the local management.

I'm going back decades now. When I first started buying real estate in willing Willingboro, New Jersey, and I was buying a HUD property, properties that were boarded up, people that didn't pay their mortgage, they were foreclosed on and so on. There are tons of them. I remember when we bought this one house, 34 Medallion Lane, I remember the name, the place used to live in with my ex. We took the boards off, we rehabbed the hell house, painted it up, new roof, all this stuff, new kitchens.

The neighbors were thrilled because the blight of a boarded-up house was gone. The gays were in town. We had we fixed it up, so we brought property values up, they appreciated us. For us, going into those communities, you're right, outside of that major metro area, and frankly, for everyone reading, it's not just a play for us in terms of for digital nomad. It's a play for anyone that's a real estate investor to look at those areas and really provide those services because it's needed.

We need to go into business together. I’ve been a real talking to people about it. I’ve had two conversations about things adjacent to this.

I used to do syndications back in the day. There's a lot of history there. I had 500-plus acres in Costa Rica I was involved with. The crash hit and it was a mess. I'm not a stranger to that game at all.

These are so many parallels. My partner and I were talking about opening a B and B in Custer. It's really lucky we didn't, because the village we wanted to open in was destroyed in an earthquake. Completely destroyed that the National Highway Service said it could never be built here. That's exactly where we wanted to have it.

I was about twenty minutes away from haco. Yeah. It goes back. There's business. There's things there.

Costa Rica is, of course, often a great place.

I probably shouldn't say it publicly, but I’ve never really been that much of a fan. It was an economic play for me. You know why? I'm a Caribbean boy. I used to live in St. Croix. Had a house in St. John.

I'm a bird watcher because for me it’s great.

I'm spoiled having the Caribbean beaches that was where I was at. I had a mortgage company in St. Croix back in the day.

I'd say Pacific Beaches in Ecuador. That's my suggestion here.

Take me. I haven't been to the Galapagos yet. I have to go. There's a lot of places that are still on my bucket list I haven't been to yet. Of course, it's my responsibility to go for my audience. It's not because I want to go, God forbid. It's for the audience.

If you don't have a bucket list, I guess you're dead. That's a translation of the German Proverbs, “As long as one hopes, one lives.”

My mom is 90. She's like, “Have you been to Sri Lanka yet? Let's go.” I'm like, “Okay, mom. What's the date?” I did a crazy nutsy mileage run back in December 2024 to make sure I got my 1K with United again because United gives you eight system-wide upgrades when you're 1K, which helps when you're traveling overseas. It's a big deal. Getting into Polaris for free, not bad. I did three round trips back-to-back from Miami to Seoul in the back of the airplane.

I have a suggestion for that, by the way. I just went from Delhi to Johannesburg and then I did a safari. I went down to Cape Town, I looked at the penguins. I saw some people and then I flew to the US. Those are nice, long flights. I said to my cousin, who's a neurologist, “What am I supposed to do with the sixteen-hour flights? Unbearable.” He said, “Take a sleeping pill.” I said, “Yeah, but if I take a sleeping pill, I wake up after five hours.” He said, “That's fine. Take another one. It's not going to do any harm.” I just slept through ten hours of each flight on these sleeping pills and fresh as the daisy.

Favorite Travel Experiences: Birding In India & Cultural Encounters

God bless technology. I love it. What is your favorite travel experience?

For me or for my groups?

Give me both.

First of all, I grew up in Italy. I'm extremely Italy-centric. I know I sound like an American when I'm speaking to you in English, but I assure you, to Italians, I sound like I'm an Italian and why am I pretending to be American?

There have always been people who were sexual rebels, and they have often been speaking in their own defense.

When you pronounce those Italian cities and stuff, I'm like, “Yeah, you got it.”

I travel so bloody much myself. So much of it is bird chicken for me. I have this amazing trip, which I am repeating, way in the Northeast of India. You have India, Bangladesh, and there's more India on the other side that's connected by little corridor on the North Bangladesh near Bhutan. I was near the Myanmar border up in the mountains. The food was terrible. The food in India is so great. The food there was just miserable but the birding was just spectacular, at least at the moment. That's probably the thing I liked best. For me, it was my birdwatching in India.

For my groups, it would be literally impossible to choose. Although I will say that my tour in India, which I'm about to leave for again, was just like a symphony of wonderfulness. Everything was so good and the food was fantastic. Also, we saw so many really interesting things. Speaking of LGBT stuff, we had some great meetings also. You may not know that India's traditionally had a third sex.

LGBTQ+ History In India: The Hijras And Cultural Insights

I heard something but share that.

It’s a little under the radar. I don't think it's something people know about. They're called hijras. It's not easy to locate in a modern American sense of gender and sexuality. Are they trans? That’s certainly the closest thing, but it's not exactly right. India being India, of course there are 3 million of these people in India now. There are millions of hijras. They have existed in India forever. They're mentioned in both the Mahabharata and the Ramayna, so they're clearly a very old phenomenon.

They still have roles in Indian society, weird, very traditional roles like they come and sing at your wedding. If you don't give them money at your wedding, then they curse you. It's really something from the ancient world, hijras. Yeah, I know. Totally amazing phenomenon. There's a center in Jaipur, which is by the way, a gorgeous city, where young hijras can come and stay and maybe learn a trade of some kind. The principal goal is probably to protect them because they're thrown out of their family or something. At the same time, nobody ever says this, but I believe they want to give them something to do other than be a prostitute.

They learn things like hairdressing. We went and had a meeting with these, and I think it was very mixed. I don't think they were all actually hijras in a traditional sense because these kids are adolescents. Obviously, they hear what's going on in the world. I think there were trans boys, I think they were trans girls. I think there was a gay kid. I think it was just a very mix of what we would now call queer Indian kids.

They talked to us. They told us a lot about their lives. They were very interested to find out about LGBTQ life in America. The hijras, among them, or perhaps all of them to some extent, ended up doing like a dance spectacle for us, which is of course what they traditionally do. And then we had a party. It was just magic.

I can feel it.

I'm so sad. We had a guy photographing our tour and he thought it thought all I wanted was pictures of the group everywhere. I was gesturing to him across the river, but he didn't film the whole thing. It was so wonderful.

It reminding me years ago, a few years back, a friend of mine who I was doing a lot of speaking for brought us all to Bali for the holidays. We spent one day, we took a boat to another island somewhere near Bali, Indonesia. We brought to a school. We brought some school supplies because they're very poor outside of the cities. I don't know how it ended up that we had like a ton of tennis balls.

We ended up in the courtyard of this teen little school with these adorable children. I want to just bring them home. They were adorable. We're having tennis ball fights. A freaking tennis ball. You don't need anything else to have happy, just a tennis ball. It was amazing. Those are the most precious things of travel. It's when you get to see the future. I was in Cambodia. I was up in Siem Reap and I'm going on tuk-tuks, the different temples at Angkor Wat.

The kids are waving. I wanted a photographer with me just to shoot all this because way back. I couldn’t hold a camera and how do you manage that thing? It was just amazing, the innocence of these kids. I’ll tell you, because this is going to be interesting, one of my clients, we help people set up nonprofits and get them a Google's $10,000 ad grant. It's one of my businesses. One of my clients is a gay guy of age. What he wants to do is create a nonprofit to help typically young gay guys.

He doesn't really care. He wants to help gay kids that have been abandoned or ostracized, homeless or whatever, help them get through. We brainstorm together. We're going to create something similar to what Richard Branson did in South Africa, the Branson Center for Entrepreneurship. We're going to help teach these kids some way of creating revenue in whatever fashion, whether it's an online this or whatever it may be, so that they can become self-supporting, have a level of independence and, of course, self-esteem to know that they're part of a bigger community.

He should get in touch with this center in Jaipur. Also, the Prince has a refuge that he maintains for LGBT kids who get kicked out of their houses. They should be in touch with each other.

We want to support that because Pride Nomad Foundation, which is supporting everything, what we're doing is helping support him. That's our end result because my belief is the kids are the future of the world. That's beyond cool. To take our tours to interface with that. We're launching a mastermind for LGBTQ business professionals, actually, location independent entrepreneurs because that doesn't exist right now. We're all stuck with the people that wear MAGA hats. It's horrifying to me. I just left an event in Orlando. Fabulous event. Great event. All about AI and stuff. Great. Wonderful people. They were wonderful. The people in the freaking room were wearing fucking MAGA t-shirts. No.

There were 400 people there. There were three queers. Four people but there were only three of us. No, we want our own not because we want to be different, but because we want to be represented. I want us to have 400 people that are gay that can be fun and all that. How many people, by the way, typically are on your tours with tourists?

Intimate Group Travel: The Magic Of Small LGBTQ+ Tours

Usually probably about a dozen. I max them at sixteen. Probably I can run them if I have 6 or 7.

Yeah. I would love to see even just that challenge of more with risk.

I know. It's hard for me to run them if they're larger. First of all, it'd be hard for me to get hotel rooms. I'd have to really shift, make a big shift in where I was staying. Also, many of the restaurants or the smaller things I take people to, if I had a group of 30 people, it would be very hard. It would be a different. It was harder for me to run. I need like an assistant.

There's also more risk there. When I say risk, not liability risk, but the one person’s just a little bit of a high maintenance jackass.

I know. I have to say, if anyone from my tour is reading, we do not have them. I don't know why. Maybe because my tours are focused on a slightly intellectual thing. My groups are great. They all get along incredibly well. They're very supportive of each other. I really notice it when someone has a physical problem, like someone who can't walk as fast as the group for one reason or another. If I look back, there are always two people walking with them. I have a whatsapp group with each group and I see people putting up things that say, “My partner and I are going out to dinner at this place this evening. Does anyone want to come?” “We're going out for a walk to look at stores. Do people want to come with us?”

Here's my take on that. It's because of you. Your energy is so effusive. It's like I want to travel with you. I want to be with you and I and we just really are connecting now. I'm speechless with this. You're attracting people just by nature, that people want to be in that vibe. You have a no dickheads allowed inherency.

Yes. I think this is where my students say is it supportive, but standards are high. We see it in their eyes. Whenever I say, “That's a good question,” the implication is so strong that there could be a question, which was not a good question. I am judging your question.

You and I can go for hours and unfortunately, we don't have hours. We will chop this up into pieces for little shorts of course because this has been so much fun. If people want to play and become part of the Andrew Lear Fan club and groupies that travel the world with you, obviously there's going to be some waiting list after we promote you so much, I hope, but what's the best way for them to reach you?

FYI, we're launching Pride Nomad Hub very shortly. The idea of the Hub is to be the, ultimately the world's largest LGBTQ+ resource for everything gay. From all the pride events to all the possible tours that people would take, to the yoga studio in Bangkok or whatever else. We want everyone in there. We are looking to build that. You'll be represented there as well. That goes for all the IGLTA members. We're upgrading their listings and stuff out of currency to IGLTA because we love them so much.

It's so wonderful. What a marvelous organization. It really is.

It truly is. The way they've embraced us has just been miraculous. I just love them to pieces.

I tell you, I hate conventions. The IGLTA convention is the one convention I enjoy.

It's funny, my first one was Osaka and when I got there, I wasn't an outcast, but I was certainly an outlier because everyone's all doing all the hugs.

Everyone knows each other.

It was like a Tony Robbins event. It's like everyone's all like, “Okay.” Of course, now we're still in touch at Whistler and ran into one of the media guys that was there too. It's a really cool experience.

The guys who run Whistler are big IGLTA people. I can't remember his name. I went on a fam tour with him once too.

I know the guy who runs the Whistler Pride event. I don’t know his last name.

No, I'm talking to the Whistler Gay Ski weekend.

The Gay ski week is a guy named Sunil now who apparently owns it. Someone else. Andrew, I go back twenty-plus years to one that’s called Altitude. We're vintage. Anyway, you've also got a very generous offer to those that are coming from the Pride Nomad community. Do you want to talk about that real quick?

Exclusive Offer: Pride Nomad Community Discount On Tours

Do you want to remind me what offer I gave?

I'm going to leave it this way. You get a discount when you come to one of Andrew's tours with the Pride Nomad community. What I’ll suggest to you do is just message me and I’ll hook you up with Andrew.

Just tell me that you come from Pride Nomad. I think I didn't really understand that you were different from the IGLTA and I think I called your discount code IGLTA.

We'll figure something out. Our objective is, is to support everyone. I'm going to tell you that I'm having such a great time. I’ve got to get on a tour with you. I'm in love with you.

A couple of things that people can do. First of all, I give online lectures once in a while for Out Professionals, which is an organization people should check out anyway because it's a great organization. I will be doing a lecture. As my little response to the world of Elon Musk, etc., I put together a series of lectures called Out and Proud Through the Centuries and Around the World because, of course, modern definitions of sexuality didn't necessarily exist in previous periods.

However, there have always been people who were sexual rebel frequently in the same sex way. They have often been speaking in their own defense. I put together one and now I'm doing another one. I do lectures and tours, but they're mostly local tours, as opposed to my own tours, which are the Oscar Wilde Tours.

We're going to want to collaborate on that in a lot of ways.

I'm totally open.

There's a lot going on. With that, I'm going to close this up right now. Andrew Lear, it has been a joy to have you here. I hope you'll come back again because I definitely want to do it again.

I'd be happy to and I'd love to talk to you, but we may have many duets to write here.

For real.

Alright, cool. Thank you, everybody. Gay travel.

Important Links

• Dr. Andrew Lear on LinkedIn

• Oscar Wilde Tours

• Oscar Wilde Tours on Instagram

About Andrew Lear

Andrew Lear is a world-renowned scholar and expert on same-sex love in ancient Greece and Rome, with many publications and a long record as a beloved professor at Harvard, Columbia, and Pomona College. Among many honors, he won the Harvard Certificate for Excellence in Teaching four times. In retirement he founded Oscar Wilde Tours, the world’s first tour company that not only offers tours to the LGBTQ+ market, but offers them tours about LGBTQ+ history, art, and culture. He offers “LGBTQ+ Secrets” tours of museums such as the Metropolitan Museum in NYC, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the National Portrait Gallery in London, and multi-day tours of France, Germany, Italy, Greece, India, and Japan (with more countries coming in the next 2 years). He is also working with producer Tan France and host Stephen Fry on an LGBTQ+ history TV series called “Straightwashed”—which will uncover hidden LGBTQ+ stories and history and explore the ways in which they have been erased.