A loss of orientation: just when he thought he had traveled so far from home that his sexual orientation didn't matter to those around him, novelist Michael Lowenthal realizes that maybe, when it comes to being gay, you really can't get away from it all - Gay Travel

In Edinburgh last summer, I attended a dance party called Joy at a club called Ego, where for 5 [pounds sterling] you could buy a pill to boost both. It was fun enough, but the music and the men and their sweaty machinations were virtually the same as I can find at home in Boston.

The next day I boarded a bus to Perth, where I switched to another for Inverness, where I switched again for the port of Ullapool, where after a workday's worth of travel I began the three-hour ferry trip to the Isle of Lewis. The northernmost of the Outer Hebrides, Lewis is a bastion of cultural and religious traditionalism. Just that week the island's conservatism had proven newsworthy: No transportation to Lewis had ever been available on the Lord's day; when Loganair announced plans for Sunday flights, the Lord's Day Observance Society protested vigorously. (It had also balked seven years ago when swing sets in the island's capital were unchained so that children could play on Sundays.).

As a gay man, perhaps I should have worried about traveling to such a place, but in fact I found myself, when the boat's horn blasted, thrilled to be going where gayness would be unspeakable. Not that I believe it should be, nor would I choose to live in such a place, but as much as I want every corner of the earth to be welcoming, sometimes I crave a break from sexual orientation. In the ferry's cafeteria I ordered a plate of haddock, then sat listening to the men around me bantering in Gaelic, with its otherworldly abracadabric lilt.

In the morning I set out hitchhiking. I headed toward the ancient stone circle of Callanish and a middle-of-nowhere restaurant I'd been told was worth the trek, but distance itself was my true destination. My first ride came from an off-duty "estate watcher," whose job entails hiking rugged coastline, with eyes peeled for salmon poachers. We stopped for coffee at a coworker's home, where we spoke of unpredictable island weather and local bird-hunting rituals. I told them I'm American and a writer, and that was plenty; our affection was mutual, immediate.

Next I tagged along with a carpenter who drove me considerably out of his way so that I wouldn't have to walk to a hard-to-find museum. Also, my subsequent ride took me more than two miles from his intended route because he wanted to make sure I saw Dalmore, "the prettiest beach on Lewis." When we shook hands after 20 minutes of intense conversation, I felt we knew some essential truths about each other.

Or did we? Neither my sexual orientation nor his had come up. All the strangers I'd met on Lewis were unfailingly generous--but would they have been so kind if they knew I'm gay?

I wasn't lying, I told myself, or pretending to be straight. I simply hadn't mentioned my gayness, and in doing so I presented a self that, far from being false, seemed more fully authentic than the version of me that many people meet at home, where sexuality often trumps all other traits.

From the beach at Dalmore, I hiked two miles along dramatic cliff tops, avoiding boggy patches and sheep carcasses, to the hamlet of Carloway, population 493. I had to thumb it only a minute before a car stopped and its driver, a bald man with a friendly scrubbed-potato face, waved me in.

"Headed to Callanish, are you?" he asked in rock-a-bye accent.

I told him I was and that I was also looking for a restaurant I'd heard about where the chef served wild scallops that her husband harvested.

"Tigh Mealros," he said. "Lovely food, but a touch dear."

"Really? How much?"

He pondered as we paused to let two ewes cross the road. "Twenty-five pounds at least, I'd say."

I explained that that was well out of my budget.

"Ach, well," he said, "there's plenty to see for free," and he proceeded to take me on a detour to view a 2,000-year-old battlement, then past a home where, through the open garage door, we could see a man weaving Harris tweed. The air was peppery with peat smoke.

After showing me the Callanish standing stones--a mystery as old as the Egyptian pyramids--my new friend insisted on driving me to the restaurant. "After all," he said, "when will you be here again?" He spoke with a salty, timeworn authority that reminded me of why I'd made the trip: to get far from my ghettoized life.

Just downhill from the ancient site, he nodded toward a bungalow as we passed--one of perhaps 20 homes that compose the village of Callanish. "That bed-and-breakfast?" he said. "Run by two men." He raised his eyebrows till his forehead jammed with lines. "There's some on the island say they're gay."

The word was such a shock that I barely recognized it. It might have been a riddle told in Gaelic.

"Terrible, isn't it?" he went on.

No, it wasn't terrible. But I didn't respond; I wanted to know his uncensored thoughts. It had been years since I'd heard how people speak when they think nobody gay is present.

"Well," he said, with a quick glance into the rearview, "I suppose there are some who think that kind of thing's all right. People do it for all sorts of reasons."

Still I said nothing. I concentrated on the roadside piles of peat.

"Like you, maybe. A hitchhiker on a budget?"

We'd arrived at the restaurant, which I saw was just a private home at the end of a short drive. My ride pulled to the road's shoulder, hazards flashing.

"If I were to give you 25 [pounds sterling]," he whispered, "would you do it?"

At first I wasn't sure if this was idle talk or an offer. His trembling hand on the gearshift made me certain. I trembled too; I'd never had sex for money. It would make a great tale to share with all my friends back home. It would pay for my wild-scallop dinner.

He must have interpreted my pause as bargaining. "Thirty pounds, then?"

"No," I said. "I don't think so. Not today." I thanked him for the ride and got out.

As the man sped away, I tried to understand why I'd acted as I did. I wasn't interested in having sex with him--for money or otherwise--but why hadn't I at least told him that I'm gay? I imagined his life in this remote, religious outpost, a life of bleak loneliness and lies. I should have let him know he'd met a kindred spirit.

But maybe he hadn't. Does being gay give me an automatic bond with every sex-hungry stranger? With every sweaty shirtless man in a late-night club? It's more complicated than you think, I might have told him. What you're looking for is what I came here to escape.

Then, ashamed, I knew the truth was not all that complicated: It's a luxury to have acceptance to run away from.

I approached the restaurant only to learn from the cook-owner that she was not offering dinner that night. I decided to backtrack the mile or so to the stone circle. I would stand at the center of the ancient monoliths and feel the chastening holy charge of such sites: dwarfing and simultaneously magnifying.

As I turned up the narrow lane to Callanish, I thought guiltily of the man who'd made the pass at me. How desperate he must have been to concoct the story of a gay B&B on this strict, Sabbatarian island--a rash ruse to broach a terrifying subject. I'd employed similar tricks myself as a closeted teenager.

Just then I happened to notice, on a clumsily lettered sign next to a rickety mailbox, a dusty 3- by 5-inch decal of a rainbow flag. In Boston's South End, I've mocked gay people for putting stock in similar emblems: community by lowest common denominator. But this small sticker on a windswept shore of Scotland filled me instantly with pride and tribal yearning. Could there really be gay men here?

I marched up to the porch, where a squint-eyed man asked, from around the cigar he was roughly smoking, if there was something he could help me with.

"I don't want to make any assumptions," I said, "but I saw your rainbow flag sticker, and I've got a story I think you'd find interesting."

Now another man joined him at the door: barefoot, with a gone-to-seed beard and a jolly paunch.

I told them what had happened, and immediately they invited me inside. What did he look like? they asked. What color was his car? Their eyes gleamed in a way I've witnessed among men in similar conversations the world over: part titillation, part urgent hopefulness. But they honored my decision to keep the man's description vague. "Right, probably safer," said David, the squinty man. "We were just keen to find out, because, as I'm sure you know, there are no gays on Lewis." He and the other man laughed heartily.

They were lovers, David explained, and had moved here together after years on an even tinier, more remote island. They hadn't announced their gayness, but they surely hadn't hidden it. They lived quietly among their neighbors, cutting peat and keeping warm like all the rest.

When I told them I'm American, Tom, the barefoot one, said that just that afternoon he'd been watching the American Queer as Folk, which they received via satellite on the Sky Channel. "The soundtrack's brilliant," he said. "But altogether I like the British version better."

He poured me a cup of tea, and we sat together for nearly an hour, discussing the merits of both shows. We compared notes on clubbing in Glasgow and New York City. At times I could hardly understand their porridge-thick accents, but I recognized a familiar sense of humor: a sidewise glance that spots hypocrisy head-on. And also there was the foursquare dignity of those who've been called "queer" and learned to gain strength from it.

Had I fooled myself into thinking there are places beyond gayness? That sexuality is something someone might outrun?

A phone call came from the next-door neighbor, one of whose rams had gotten his horns stuck in a fence. As David pulled on his boots, preparing to lend a hand, I thanked the men and left them to their work. My lodgings were a 30-mile hitch clear across the island, but I wasn't worried about finding my way back.

Lowenthal's most recent novel, Avoidance (Graywolf Press), is a 2003 Lambda Literary Award nominee.

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