2005 24
Gay Hotel
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
The other day I was giving a master class at Instituto de Empresa and after I was done, a student came over to me and told me that he wanted to start a gay hotel in Madrid and asked me if I thought it was a good idea.
He said that there was one alreadyoperating in Barcelona. I told him that I did think it was a good idea, as I could see that there would be both a market for it and lack of competition, as this is a new concept for the hospitality industry. When he left I thought a bit further about this concept and I started wondering: why is it that gay people are the only group of people who can get away having their own hotel? Think about it, if you wanted to start a hotel that was Men Hotel it would probably be illegal, same with a White People Hotel, or a Catholic Hotel. Why is this? Why is it that even, if say, Jewish people wanted to have their own Jewish Hotels others would complain, and gays can have a gay hotel and everyone think is fine? I have an explanation but it´s not a nice one. I think that straight people are willing to accept that gay people have their own hotel not only out of tolerance for gay behavior, but also because some straight people prefer not to see gay people. Having them at a Gay Hotel would mean that their hotel would be a straight hotel. Personally, I am not sure that allowing gay hotels is a great idea. Why can´t gay people be gay in any hotel?
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Hernán L. Romay on April 30, 2005 ·
I totally agree with avoiding gender/religion/sexual orientation based things. There is something in Spain called ¨Positive discrimination¨. To me, that is nothing but the most cynical type of discrimination one could conceive. Discriminating in order help in a good way could be something positive when it comes to food, shelter or health, for example, but not in matters of gender, sexual orientation or religion.
I have a problem with ¨women´s day¨, since I feel we should celebrate ¨humankind´s day¨ instead. Moreover, the word ¨working¨ has been added to the title (in Spain), so it´s only the ¨Working women´s day¨… No further comments! We could write a long book about this subject, but I´d prefer we acted more and theorized less when it comes to sharing the world, respecting people based on their values, not their color, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.