Turned Away at Sea: 35 Years of Ports Refusing LGBTQ+ Cruises

This July saw something that hasn’t happened in over 20 years. Twice in the same week, an Atlantis charter of a Virgin Voyages ship of over 1,900 mostly LGBTQ+ passengers was barred from entry. Egypt has just barred the Scarlet Lady from docking in Alexandria, days after Turkey refused the same voyage entry to Kuşadası and Istanbul. Atlantis CEO Rich Campbell says bans on this scale have never happened in the company’s history; the ship has now rerouted a second time, adding stops in Greece, Montenegro, and Italy. Broadway star Patti LuPone, a passenger, has publicly condemned both refusals.

While recently rare, these back-to-back denials this month aren’t an aberration; they’re the latest chapter in a pattern stretching back 35 years, through the Caribbean, Russia, Bermuda, and now the eastern Mediterranean, in which ports have refused chartered LGBTQ cruises even as outright legislation banning them has remained rare. Here is that history.

1987: The First Flashpoint — Grand Cayman

The pattern began in 1987, when hundreds of gay men chartered by Minneapolis-based RSVP Vacations disembarked in George Town, Grand Cayman. Passengers walked the streets holding hands, unsettling some residents. Local church groups objected, and some merchants reportedly closed their shops for the day. There was no formal ban, but the incident became the reference point Cayman officials cited a decade later.

1998: Cayman Islands Formally Bars the M/S Leeward

In December 1997, Cayman Islands Tourism Minister Thomas Jefferson sent Norwegian Cruise Line a letter denying docking rights to the M/S Leeward, chartered by Atlantis Events for about 900 mostly gay male passengers. His letter read: “Careful research and prior experience has led us to conclude that we cannot count on this group to uphold the standards of appropriate behavior expected of visitors to the Cayman Islands.” Jefferson later told Condé Nast Traveler the “research” was an informal survey of Cayman ministers, members of parliament, and residents — and he cited the 1987 RSVP incident directly.

The ship diverted to Belize. The fallout was significant: the Human Rights Campaign called the decision “morally wrong,” gay-travel publication Out & About organized a boycott of the Caymans, and the International Gay & Lesbian Travel Association condemned the refusal at a London meeting. No legislation was ever introduced to codify the ban. It remained an administrative refusal by the tourism ministry, one that the government never publicly rescinded, even after the boycott pressure.

2004: Rosie O’Donnell’s Family Cruise, Nassau, Bahamas

In July 2004, passengers aboard the inaugural R Family Vacations cruise — a same-sex-family charter aboard Norwegian Dawn, co-founded by Rosie O’Donnell and her then-wife Kelli Carpenter-O’Donnell — were met by more than 100 protesters as they arrived in Nassau, Bahamas. Led by local Christian pastors, demonstrators gathered in a square facing the cruise terminal, chanting “Gay ways are not God’s ways!” The ship docked as scheduled, but the confrontation proved tense enough that O’Donnell chose not to disembark; family friend Atallah Shabazz addressed the crowd instead. HBO later documented the cruise and the protest in the film All Aboard: Rosie’s Family Cruise.

The fallout outlasted the stop itself. R Family Vacations had arranged a subsequent call in Bermuda, but after word of the Nassau protest spread, local church opposition mounted there too, and the company dropped Bermuda from the itinerary rather than risk a repeat. Travel press at the time framed it as the company “caving” to pressure. Bermuda’s government pushed back on the optics. Premier Ewart Brown later stressed the island’s welcoming credentials and said officials had done everything to accommodate the visit. Unlike Cayman in 1998, Nassau involved no government docking denial — it was a street-level religious protest that achieved a similar chilling effect on future routing, showing that official port bans were only one way gay cruises got discouraged.

2013: Russia’s “Gay Propaganda” Law

Russia’s parliament passed the federal “gay propaganda” law by a 436–0 vote, signed by Vladimir Putin, formally titled a measure “Protecting Children from Information Advocating a Denial of Traditional Family Values” in 2013. Not a cruise-specific statute, it nonetheless carried fines, including deportation risk, for foreign tourists, chilling gay-tourism and gay-cruise marketing to Russian ports in the run-up to the 2014 Sochi Olympics. It was expanded in December 2022 to cover all ages, further discouraging LGBTQ-marketed group travel to Russian waters.

2018: Bermuda’s Marriage Repeal

Bermuda’s legislature passed the Domestic Partnership Act in 2018, reversing a 2017 court ruling that had legalized same-sex marriage. It was the first jurisdiction in the world to repeal marriage equality after enacting it. Because Bermuda is a major cruise-ship flag-of-registry and port, the law directly affected shipboard weddings and onboard recognition of same-sex couples. Carnival Corporation publicly backed a legal challenge by LGBTQ charity OUTBermuda, and the Bermuda Tourism Authority itself warned lawmakers of economic blowback. Bermuda’s Supreme Court struck down the marriage ban later that year, restoring equality before it produced an outright cruise ban.

July 2026: Turkey and Egypt Both Turn Away the Scarlet Lady

Turkish authorities blocked Virgin Voyages’ Scarlet Lady — chartered by Atlantis Events, sailing from Athens toward Venice — from docking at Kuşadası and Istanbul, citing “moral standards” and “family values,” and insisting there was “no possibility” for the ship to dock. Roughly 1,100 of the 1,900 passengers aboard were American. The ship rerouted toward Cairo and Crete — only for Egypt to then deny the ship entry to Alexandria as well, without publicly stating a reason. It marked the first time in Atlantis’s history that a single voyage was blocked from two countries in the same week. The itinerary was revised a second time to add stops in Greece, Montenegro and Italy. Passengers who had booked Egypt shore excursions lost those plans; some vowed to redirect their tourism spending elsewhere. Travel commentators, including Frommer’s, explicitly compared the incident to the 1998 Cayman ban, noting Turkey’s move follows a broader pattern since 2015 of banning Istanbul Pride marches — though, as in Cayman and Nassau before it, neither Turkey nor Egypt passed dedicated legislation; both were administrative port decisions.

Bans over the years and today

Looking back over 35 years, one thing stands out: there have been very few laws passed that specifically ban gay cruises. Most of the time, like in the Cayman Islands in 1998, or Turkey and Egypt in 2026, these ships are turned away by tourism officials or port authorities, not lawmakers. In places like Nassau in 2004, local protests managed to block cruises without any government ban. When countries have passed actual laws, like Russia’s “gay propaganda” law or Bermuda’s repeal of marriage equality, they were aimed at LGBTQ rights more broadly, and cruises were just caught in the crossfire. Atlantis’ Rich Campbell has now experienced this twice, nearly three decades apart, making nearly the same statement of disappointment each time. As the conservative populist movement has spread in recent years, we are returning to the problems faced by the LGBTQ community in the late 90s and early 2000s.