Being a more Queer brand

Last month I was asked my my friend Amanda Kendle to contribute to her podcast episode on New Year Travel Resolutions. I’m not one for making New Year Resolutions, in general, for a number of reasons, but the question made me think about realignment and repositioning.

Headshot of two people in a exhibition hall. On the left is a woman with long blonde hair smiling at the camera. On the right is an enby with purple hair and a non-binary bucket hat who is looking more serious.
Me and my travel blogger buddy Francesca (LittleLostTravel).

Obviously you can (and indeed should) make changes to your life and your focus whenever you can and the opportunity arises, but the one thing New Year does is provide a slight bit of external accountability – the whole ‘New Year New Me’ concept and the ‘leaving behind’ of bad practices just as you ‘leave behind’ the previous year. And of course many people around you are doing it too.

Anyway, Amanda’s question was asked with a specific focus on travel – would you (plural) do anything different about the how, where, and why you travel. And many of the people she asked responded with answers relating to slow travel, ethical travel, environmental commitments, and the like. However that’s not where my mind went, because I kind of already think about that kind of thing – I’m, you know, The Barefoot Backpacker (though maybe I should wear shoes less), and I’ve no plans to pivot to cruising or luxury travel!

Someone is standing in a slightly overgrown field. They're wearing a pink hat with daisies, a non-binary facemask, a t-shirt with the words 'Sounds Fake But Okay' on it in a retro font, a bumbag, and a pair of jeans rolled/cuffed to just below the knee. They appear to be barefoot.
The nearest I can get to a pic of me travelling as a barefoot asexual.

Rather, I said two things. Firstly, that I had some trips already planned in, including going to a couple of places that were on my anti-bucket list from a few years back, so maybe one of my travel resolutions is to ignore all previous instructions, and just roll with it.

The other was more content-driven than travel-driven; I said I need to promote myself more anyway, that’s a given, but that I feel who I am is important; there are very few AroAce non-binary Gen-X travel writers out there viewing things through those lenses, and there’s no reason why I can’t be a trailblazer. So I said that I guess I’d resolve to … Be More Queer? By which I mean not just being more comfortable channelling my identity, but actually writing about it more, making it more a driver for content.

It’s not something I’ve done that often, mainly because, well, I’m on record as saying Asexuality doesn’t make for interesting travel blog posts, because from the outside it’s often no different from solo travel, and I do a lot of solo travel content. In addition, the other parts of my Queer identity are ones I only really started appreciating during The Pandemic, so I’ve not done much travelling as Non-Binary, let alone GenderQueer or whatever label I feel best suits me at any given time,

Someone is standing in front of the camera, in front of a stone bridge and some modern buildings. She (?) is wearing a denim jacket, a dress with a daisy motif, glasses, and a woolly bobble-hat in the colours of the non-binary flag. They also have chest-length purple hair. Her denim jacket has two small circular sew-on patches, one is the non-binary flag, the other the is asexual flag.
A selfie I took near where I used to live in Salford. I’ve not travelled as much recently.

Obviously I’m not sure how well this kind of positioning will land – many bands and companies aren’t that keen to ‘rock the boat’, and there’s all manner of people quick to launch themselves on an ‘anti-woke crusade’. But I will just reflect here on a recent vibe I had that suggests at least one advantage.

In November I went to WTM, as I do every year. If you don’t know, WTM, or World Travel Market, is a huge meeting-point of people, businesses, brands, & ideas, all to do with travel, providing a place where travel people come together to talk shop & to make introductions to prepare for later business deals. Travel content creators are considered ‘media’, and we go to network and arrange future work and opportunities.

An overview of part of the exhibition hall at World Travel Market. There are several large banners high towards the ceiling advertising regions of Spain.
Part of the exhibition hall of WTM.

Every year I go with the idea I’m going to have many interesting conversations with tourist boards and I’ll get a huge amount of work off the back of it. And every year nothing happens. Part of the reason why is I don’t assert myself well, but lot of this is I don’t really have a coherent sense of what I stand for. It’s hard to go up to a brand and go ‘Hi, I’m The Barefoot Backpacker and I do … /me gestures vaguely’; rather it would help if I could say ‘I am the Barefoot Backpacker and I am x, I am y, and I am q.’. And I can show them all the posts I’ve written about the topic when I’ve been elsewhere. But instead, I tend to post about, well, ‘stuff’, and that’s a hard sell.

I’ve had thoughts about niches before, and I came up with three. Beer, clearly (Hello Wallonia). Outdoor content like running and hiking. (Hello Falkland Islands). Travel Beyond The Brochure (Hello Guinea-Bissau). But the thing with being very Queer-presenting is that it’s blindingly-obvious and underpins everything I do, because purple-haired dungaree-wearing free spirits make it hard to consciously disassociate content and design. You can’t judge a book by the cover, but sometimes the cover tells you an awful lot about the book.

To get to WTM, I took the Elizabeth Line – whose colour branding of purple matches mine. I stood on the crowded carriage and just saw a vast throng of greys, blacks, dark blues, and tans. Uniformly business beige. I … was not.

A mirror-selfie in a public toilet. Someone is standing in front of it holding their phone to their chest. They're wearing a red plaid shirt, a very stripey skirt, a bucket hat in the non-binary colours, and glasses. They have purple hair. Hooked to their right elbow is an ecru tote bag.
Selfie taken in a toilet at WTM.

I’d gone to WTM dressed in a very GenderQueer way. Casual red flannel shirt over a plain black t-shirt. A skirt with ten different coloured stripes. Black leggings. A hat in the non-binary flag colours. Purple hair. Purple and black choker. Black toenails. Pale blue denim jacket adorned with colourful badges and patches, mostly queer-coded. I was the most colourful thing on that entire train outside of the rail map, and very femme for a male-born enby, though the silicone C-cup breast-forms weren’t *too* obvious.

Now. Some of the tourist board stalls I went to were appreciative of my vibrance – two were genuinely disappointed I hadn’t turned up barefoot (I could probably try it sometime, tho not on a grey November day in a busy professional environment). Interestingly, while the stalls commented on my colour-presentation, the question of gender never came up. What it does show though is there’s something to be said from being distinctive, for being remembered, and it would be very easy for me to leverage that and make far more use of it. In essence, using my Queerness itself as a selling point.

Someone is sat in an office. She's wearing a black short-sleeved dress with a pattern of large daisies, a black hat with smaller daisy motifs, purple hair, and glasses. She's also wearing a headset and there's a wire coming down in front of her from it.
About as formal as I ever get, let’s be honest, but sometimes you need to look vaguely professional.

Because people remember their first impressions of you, so it helps to stand out and be memorable and impressionable. And I think I certainly do that!

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