About gayonaway

My name is Michael Benor, and I built gayonaway. I'm a gay traveler — I've spent years exploring a lot of the world — and one question kept nagging at me that ordinary travel never answered: if I were to actually move somewhere to live, where would I go — and how would I even know?

Visiting a place for a week tells you almost nothing about living there as a gay person. What I wanted to know wasn't "is there a Pride parade" — it was the quieter, harder stuff: would I feel safe holding a partner's hand on an ordinary street, could I legally settle for the long term, what would it really cost, and would I find a community once the novelty wore off. That information exists, but it's scattered across legal databases, advocacy reports, cost-of-living sites, Reddit threads, and word of mouth — and nobody had pulled it together in one place with honest, comparable scoring.

I also run several travel websites covering destinations across Europe and Asia. Building those gave me the research habits, the publishing setup, and the SEO discipline to do this properly. gayonaway is the one I built to answer my own question first, and for the wider gay community second.

The scores aren't marketing. A low safety or legal score means exactly that — I wouldn't be comfortable living there, and if those things matter to you (they should), neither should you. A high score means I'd genuinely consider it. The methodology is published and the weights come straight from the scoring code — read how it works.

At launch: 22 cities across Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East — chosen because they appear most often in gay nomad community discussions, not because they scored well. Some score poorly. That's the point.

Each city profile includes a five-axis relocation scorecard (safety, legal status, community, nomad infrastructure, cost of living), a practical overview, and links to accommodation and experience booking. Scores are reviewed at least annually and updated when major legal or safety changes occur.

Found an error in a score? Know of a legal change we haven't captured? Want to suggest a city?

Email Info@gayonaway.com · or message me on Instagram if you'd rather not email.

I read everything and update scores when corrections are warranted. I don't accept paid placements or sponsored scores.

Some links on gayonaway — accommodation booking, tours, experiences — are affiliate links. If you book through them, we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. This income helps keep the site running and the research current.

Affiliate relationships have zero influence on scores. A city's score is determined by the data and formula described in the methodology, not by whether we have a commercial relationship with anyone there.