The Unspoken Rules of a Gay Resort Pool Deck

I want to begin with a disclaimer that is also a credential.

I have spent, by conservative estimate, more cumulative hours on gay resort pool decks than I have spent doing any other single activity in my adult life that does not involve sleeping or being on my phone. This includes working, exercising, maintaining friendships, reading books I told people I had read, and whatever I was doing in my twenties that I was calling personal development at the time.

The pool deck is where I live when I am not on the Upper East Side. It is my natural habitat. It is the environment in which I am most fully myself, most socially operational, and most capable of the kind of sustained horizontal productivity that the rest of the world does not recognize as productivity but that I maintain, with conviction, produces more genuine human connection per hour than almost any vertical activity available.

I have watched the pool deck from every angle. I have been the new arrival navigating the chair situation on day one. I have been the established regular who has been at this resort for four days and has therefore accumulated a social standing that I am absolutely using to orient newcomers whether they asked or not. I have been the person who made a pool deck mistake — we will discuss the mistakes — and had to navigate the specific social weather that follows a pool deck mistake, which is mild but real and takes approximately twenty-four hours to fully clear.

I have, in short, done the research.

What I have learned is this: the gay resort pool deck operates according to a set of rules that are nowhere written, never formally communicated, and yet universally understood by everyone who has spent enough time on enough pool decks to have absorbed them through the specific osmosis of paying attention in a socially dense environment.

These rules are not arbitrary. They exist because the pool deck is a commons — a shared space that a community of strangers is temporarily occupying together — and commons require governance, and the governance of a gay resort pool deck cannot be formal because nobody appointed anyone to govern it, and so it has evolved, over decades of gay men figuring out how to coexist in a rectangle of sun and water, into a system that is entirely implicit and entirely functional when everyone is participating in good faith.

This guide is that system, made explicit.

I am writing it because the number of pool deck violations I witness on any given resort trip has been increasing, which I attribute partly to the growth of the gay travel market and the resulting influx of first-time resort guests, and partly to a general cultural decline in the reading of rooms that I will not get further into here because this is a travel blog and not a sociological treatise.

Learn the rules. Follow the rules. Be the person on the pool deck who clearly knows the rules and is operating inside them with the ease of someone who was born knowing them even if they learned them the hard way.

The pool deck will reward you. It always rewards the people who understand it.

Let's begin.

Part One: The Chair

The chair is everything. The chair is the foundation upon which the entire pool deck social order rests, and the rules governing the chair are the rules that matter most and are violated most frequently and produce the most sustained low-grade social friction when violated.

I am going to give the chair its own section because it deserves one and because the chair situation is sufficiently complex that treating it as a footnote to the larger guide would be an injustice to the people who have been wronged by poor chair etiquette and who deserve to know that someone is taking their experience seriously.

I am taking it seriously.

Rule One: You May Not Hold a Chair You Are Not Using

This is the foundational rule. Everything else proceeds from this.

A chair that is unoccupied is available. A chair that is occupied — by a body, by a towel currently being sat upon, by a book currently being read — is not available. The distinction seems obvious. It is apparently not obvious to a meaningful percentage of gay resort guests who arrive at the pool deck at seven in the morning, place a towel on four chairs, return to their room for breakfast, and then materialize at ten-thirty expecting to find their claimed territory intact.

The towel-as-reservation is not a recognized institution of pool deck governance. The towel is a textile. The textile has no legal standing. When you place a towel on a chair and leave the pool deck for an extended period, you have not reserved the chair. You have decorated it.

There is a grace period, and the grace period is approximately twenty minutes. This is the amount of time that a pool deck community will extend to a person who has clearly just stepped away — to use the bathroom, to get a drink, to reapply sunscreen in the shade — before treating their chair as available. Twenty minutes is generous. It reflects the pool deck's commitment to charitable interpretation of ambiguous situations.

Beyond twenty minutes, the chair is available, and anyone who takes it is not violating any rule, and anyone who returns after twenty minutes to find their chair occupied and who expresses displeasure about this is the person who violated the rule, not the person sitting in the chair.

I want to be very clear about this because the displeasure-expresser always believes they are in the right, and they are not, and the pool deck community knows they are not, and the pool deck community's collective silent acknowledgment that the displeasure-expresser is not in the right is one of the primary mechanisms of pool deck social regulation.

The Extended Absence Situation. If you need to leave the pool deck for longer than twenty minutes — for lunch, for a nap, for a scheduled activity — take your things with you. Not to signal defeat. To signal that you understand how the commons works and you are a person who participates in the commons with integrity. When you return, you find a chair in the normal way. You do not return to a specific chair expecting it to have been preserved in your absence by virtue of your intent.

The Group Chair Situation. Groups holding chairs for members who have not yet arrived at the pool deck are operating in a gray area that requires proportionality. Holding one chair for a person who is visibly approaching — currently crossing the pool deck, towel in hand — is fine. Holding six chairs for a group that is "on their way" and has been on their way for forty minutes is not fine. The pool deck is not a theater. The chairs are not reserved seating.

Hold what you occupy. Occupy what you hold.

Rule Two: The Prime Real Estate Has a Social Obligation

Every pool deck has prime real estate. The chairs closest to the water, in the optimal sun angle, with the best sightlines. These chairs are understood by everyone on the pool deck to be prime, and the people in them are understood to have arrived early or navigated the chair situation with particular skill.

With prime real estate comes social obligation.

The obligation is this: if you are in a prime chair, you are visible. You are, whether you intend it or not, part of the pool deck's social landscape in a way that the person in the back corner is not. People will walk past you. People will notice you. People will potentially want to talk to you or at least be in proximity to you in the way of people who want to be near pleasant things.

The social obligation of prime real estate is to be worth being near. Not to be entertaining — you are not performing, you are vacationing. But to be present and reasonably open and to treat the people adjacent to you as people rather than as obstacles between you and your uninterrupted phone time.

The person in the prime chair who spends six hours with their headphones fully in, their body language completely closed, and their attention entirely on their screen is technically not doing anything wrong. They got there first. The chair is legitimately theirs.

They are also, socially speaking, taking up space they are not inhabiting, and the pool deck notices this, and the pool deck has a long memory.

Rule Three: The Chair-to-Belongings Ratio

Your chair is for you. The chair next to you, if unoccupied, is not for your bag.

I say this with love and without judgment because I have absolutely put my bag on the adjacent chair and then watched the pool deck fill up around me and had to do the internal reckoning of whether I was going to be a bag-on-chair person publicly and visibly or whether I was going to be the person who puts the bag under the chair where it belongs.

The bag goes under the chair. The hat goes on your head or under the chair. The book goes on the chair with you, balanced on your lap or your chest in the standard horizontal reading configuration that every gay man has mastered by his late twenties.

The exception is food and drink, which may briefly occupy the adjacent surface — not chair, surface — until consumed, after which the surface reverts to its non-storage function.

The general principle is: your footprint on the pool deck should be proportionate to what you have actually claimed. The person who claims one chair and occupies three squares of horizontal territory through strategic bag deployment is violating the spirit of the commons even when they are not technically violating the letter of it.

Part Two: The Water

The pool belongs to everyone. This should not need to be said. It needs to be said.

Rule Four: The Entry Protocol

There is a correct way to enter the pool and there are incorrect ways to enter the pool and the incorrect ways impose costs on the people who are already in or adjacent to the pool without their consent.

The correct way to enter the pool is the way that gets you into the water without creating a wave event or a splash radius that affects the people around you. This may be the steps. This may be a controlled entry from the edge. This may be a graceful slide from the side for the person who has the physical vocabulary for it, which is not everyone and which nobody is obligated to have.

The incorrect way to enter the pool is the cannonball.

I want to address the cannonball directly because it keeps happening and it needs to stop happening, or at minimum it needs to stop happening in the vicinity of people who have not expressed cannonball consent.

The cannonball is not a neutral act. The cannonball is an act that generates a significant displacement wave, redistributes a quantity of pool water onto the surrounding deck and the people on it, and announces the presence of the cannonballer in a way that is designed to be impossible to ignore.

The cannonball is an attention claim. It is a demand for acknowledgment disguised as spontaneous joy. I do not begrudge anyone their spontaneous joy. I do begrudge the person who chose to express their spontaneous joy in a way that got pool water on my book and my phone and the magazine of the man next to me who had been reading it very peacefully for forty minutes.

The splash zone is not a consent-free zone. Be aware of your splash radius. Enter accordingly.

The Lap Swimmer. If you are swimming laps in a pool that is not a lap pool — the standard gay resort pool, which is a social pool rather than an athletic facility — you are navigating a genuine tension between your legitimate desire to exercise and the pool's current use as a floating social space.

The resolution of this tension is time. Swim laps early in the morning when the pool is not yet a social space. By ten o'clock, the pool has transitioned, and the lap swimmer cutting through the crowd with the specific intensity of a person who is focused on their split times is creating a disruption that the pool's current social function did not invite.

Exercise in the designated spaces. The resort has them. They are inside and they are excellent.

Rule Five: The Social Pool

Once the pool has reached social temperature — roughly the point at which there are more people standing in it than swimming through it, talking in clusters at the shallow end and leaning against the edge with drinks in the deep end — the pool has declared itself a social space and the norms of the social space apply.

The social pool is not a swimming pool. It is a room that happens to be wet.

The rules of the social pool are approximately the rules of any room: be present, be reasonably approachable, be aware of the conversations happening around you, and don't take up more of the space than the space can accommodate without your presence creating discomfort for others.

The social pool at the right moment on the right afternoon at the right resort is one of the great small-scale social environments available to the gay traveler. The floating proximity, the shared warmth of the water, the slight looseness that the drinks and the sun have produced in everyone's social presentation — all of it creates conditions for the kind of conversation that is only available in the specific context of the social pool.

The conversation in the social pool is not the conversation you have at dinner or at the bar. It is lighter and more immediate and more willing to be strange, because you are standing in water in a swimsuit at two in the afternoon and the context has already removed the usual formalities and what remains is the person more directly than usual.

I have had some of my better conversations in pool water. I have met people in pool water who became genuine friends. The social pool is not a frivolous space. It is a specific and valuable space that rewards the person who shows up to it as a participant rather than an occupant.

Part Three: The Deck Itself

The pool deck is the commons at its most commons-like — the shared surface that everyone is crossing and occupying and navigating simultaneously, and that requires a shared understanding of how bodies move through shared space in order to function.

Rule Six: The Walking Lanes

The pool deck has walking lanes. They are not marked. They are understood.

The walking lane is the path between the chairs and the pool that people use to move from one end of the deck to the other. The walking lane is not where you stand and have a conversation. The walking lane is not where you set up your chair. The walking lane is not where you stop to look at your phone while your body blocks the movement of the six people behind you who are trying to get to the bar.

Move through the walking lane or be out of it. It is a lane, not a lounge.

The Greeting Protocol in the Walking Lane. You will see people you know while moving through the walking lane. This is the pool deck. You know people here. The greeting is appropriate and welcome. The greeting that involves stopping in the walking lane and beginning a full conversation is not appropriate, because the walking lane is a lane and you are now a human traffic obstruction and the people behind you are doing the specific polite maneuvering around a stopped body that communicates, without words, that they find the obstruction inconvenient and are being very gracious about it.

Greet warmly. Move to the side. Continue the conversation from the side. This is the protocol.

Rule Seven: The Music Situation

The pool deck has music. The resort has provided music. The music has been curated by someone whose job is to understand what music serves a pool deck at different hours and to execute that understanding through a sound system that fills the space correctly.

The music is not a void waiting to be filled by your personal contribution.

The person who sets up a Bluetooth speaker on the pool deck and plays their own music over the resort's music is doing something that the pool deck did not ask for. They are unilaterally deciding that their musical preference supersedes the shared sonic environment that the entire pool deck is occupying, which is the audio equivalent of repainting the wall of a room you don't own.

If you do not like the resort's music — and this is a legitimate position, because the resort's music is a compromise that fully satisfies nobody — the solution is headphones, which are excellent and widely available, rather than the imposition of a personal alternative on the people around you who may have a complicated relationship with the specific genre you have decided the afternoon requires.

The Volume of Conversation. The pool deck is not a library. Nobody expects silence. The ambient volume of a functioning pool deck — music, water, conversation, the specific frequency of a good time being had collectively — is part of what makes it what it is.

The caveat is this: your conversation, however excellent, is your conversation. It is not the pool deck's conversation. The pool deck did not ask to be at your volume and did not consent to the content of what you are saying at that volume.

The pool deck neighbor who can hear every detail of your situationship because you are processing it at the volume of a deposition is not your therapist. She has her own problems. She does not need yours delivered at a range of ten feet.

Use the volume that keeps your conversation with your people rather than the entire deck.

Rule Eight: The Sunscreen Application Zone

You need sunscreen. Everyone on a pool deck needs sunscreen. The pool deck is, by definition, a place of extended UV exposure, and I have written at length in other posts about the specific damage that unprotected sun on a pool deck does to the skin you have been maintaining all year, and I am not going to repeat all of that here except to say: wear the sunscreen, apply the sunscreen, reapply the sunscreen.

What I am going to address is the territorial implications of sunscreen application, specifically the back-application scenario, which involves a social negotiation that the pool deck handles through a specific set of norms that deserve to be made explicit.

If you need your back applied, you have three options. You have a companion who is at the resort with you, in which case the back application is between you and the companion and the pool deck is not involved. You have a very flexible body, in which case you handle it yourself and the pool deck is not involved. Or you need to ask a stranger.

Asking a stranger to apply sunscreen is a legitimate pool deck request. It is a request that has been made and received on pool decks since the invention of pool decks and it is not inherently weird or inappropriate. The social rules governing it are:

Ask once, politely, with full and genuine acceptance of refusal as a possible answer. Not as a flirtation unless the context is very clearly one in which the flirtation has already been established and is mutually welcome. Not with a setup that makes refusal awkward. Just: "Do you mind? I can't reach."

The person asked is fully entitled to say yes or no or to offer the can of spray sunscreen instead of the direct application, and all three of these responses are valid and none of them require explanation or apology.

What is not in the rules: standing over someone and waiting for them to offer. Asking multiple times. Turning it into a negotiation. The back-application request is a single transaction and it resolves quickly in one direction or another and then it is over.

Part Four: The Social Landscape

The pool deck is, above all its other identities, a social space. The chairs and the water and the deck are the physical infrastructure. The social landscape is what the pool deck actually is, and navigating it well is the difference between a pool deck experience that is simply pleasant and one that becomes one of the things you remember about the trip.

Rule Nine: The Eye Contact Calibration

The pool deck is a space of heightened visibility. Everyone on a pool deck can see everyone on a pool deck, which is a social condition that exists in very few other contexts and that requires its own calibration.

The gay pool deck has a specific eye contact culture that is different from the eye contact culture of a bar or a party or a dinner, and the difference is important.

Eye contact on a pool deck can mean: I find you attractive. It can mean: I recognize you from somewhere. It can mean: I am being friendly and acknowledging your presence in the shared space. It can mean: I have been looking at the middle distance and you happened to walk through it. It can mean several of these things simultaneously, which is why the calibration is required.

The rule is proportionality. Make the eye contact that matches the intention. The friendly acknowledgment is a brief look and a small nod or smile and then the eyes move on. The interested look is slightly longer and the eyes do not immediately move on and the mouth possibly does something. The lingering look that has no resolution — that holds for an uncomfortable duration without any social acknowledgment of what it is — is not one of the options.

Hold the eye contact for as long as what you mean takes. Not longer.

The Non-Recognition Problem. You will, on a pool deck, make eye contact with someone who clearly thinks they know you and whom you cannot place. The pool deck version of the person you met somewhere else, possibly on a previous trip, possibly last night at the bar, possibly in a context that the current swimsuit setting makes unrecognizable.

The rules for the non-recognition situation: engage warmly, allow the context to emerge from the conversation, and under no circumstances say "I'm sorry, I don't remember you" in a way that communicates that not remembering them is a comment on their memorability rather than a reflection of the volume of your social life.

Everyone on a gay resort pool deck has met a lot of people. Nobody remembers everyone. The social grace of the pool deck is the grace of pretending the recognition is more certain than it is until the context provides the actual recognition, which it usually does within three minutes.

Rule Ten: The Acknowledgment Economy

The pool deck runs on a system of acknowledgments — the small social transactions of nodding, smiling, raising a glass, making brief contact — that maintain the sense of shared community in a space full of people who mostly don't know each other.

These acknowledgments are small and they matter.

The nod to the person whose chair is next to yours as you settle in for the day. The smile to the person whose eye contact you met correctly. The small raised glass when someone at the adjacent chairs has something worth raising a glass about, which on a gay resort pool deck is frequently. The brief and genuine "good morning" to the person you passed on your way to the towel station.

These transactions are not burdensome. They take approximately zero energy and produce a disproportionate return in the ambient warmth of the space. The pool deck that is full of people doing the small acknowledgments is a different pool deck than the one where everyone is sealed in their individual experiences. The former feels like a community. The latter feels like a parking lot with nicer furniture.

Be the person doing the acknowledgments. Do not be so generous with them that they lose meaning — the person who is loudly greeting everyone within a thirty-foot radius from the moment they arrive has overcorrected and is now performing rather than participating. But do the quiet, genuine small transactions. The pool deck is made of them.

The Acknowledgment to a Person in Distress. Occasionally the pool deck contains someone who is having a harder time than the setting suggests — the person who came to the resort alone and is finding the aloneness heavier than expected, the person who got bad news on their phone twenty minutes ago and is now sitting very still with sunglasses on that are doing work beyond UV protection, the person who is clearly in the early hours of a difficult feeling and is in a public space and managing it.

The pool deck acknowledgment to this person is not an inquiry. You do not ask if they are okay, because they will say yes, and the yes will cost them something. You make brief, warm, non-invasive contact — a smile, a small nod, the kind of look that says I see you and you are not invisible — and you do not make it about the distress you may or may not have correctly read.

Sometimes being seen without being interrogated is the right thing. The pool deck can provide this. Let it.

Rule Eleven: The Unsolicited Advice Prohibition

The pool deck is not a consultation service.

No one on a pool deck is asking for your opinion on their sunscreen choice, their drink choice, their reading material, their swimwear, their body, their sunbathing position, or their decision about how much time they are spending in the sun versus the shade.

I say this because the pool deck produces a specific condition of familiarity — the shared setting, the reduced clothing, the ambient sociability — that can lead people to believe they are more intimately connected to the strangers around them than they actually are, and this belief occasionally expresses itself as the unsolicited sharing of opinions about those strangers' choices.

The person who says "you should really be wearing SPF 50 in this sun" to the stranger applying SPF 30 is not being helpful. They are assuming a level of care and authority that was not extended to them. The stranger knows about SPF. The stranger made a choice. The choice is the stranger's to make.

The exception to the unsolicited advice prohibition is the exception that involves physical safety — the person whose chair is about to tip backward, the person who is about to step on something dangerous, the situation where saying nothing has a material cost. In those cases, say the thing. The prohibition is on opinions, not on information that prevents harm.

Everything else: keep it.

Rule Twelve: The New Arrival Recognition

When a new person arrives at the pool deck, the pool deck registers their arrival. This is inevitable — new arrivals create a perceptual event in a space that has been at steady state, and the human eye is calibrated to register change.

The rule is: register, briefly, and return to your own business.

The extended assessment of a new arrival — the prolonged looking, the audible commentary to companions, the turning to watch the person settle in — crosses from involuntary registration into deliberate evaluation, and the person being evaluated can feel the evaluation, and the feeling of being evaluated in a space where you have come to relax is not pleasant.

You may look. You may notice. You may form your opinion. You do this privately and efficiently and then the new arrival is simply part of the pool deck and the pool deck continues.

This rule applies to all new arrivals regardless of what there is to notice about them. The person who arrives with an exceptional body, the person who arrives with an unusual item, the person who arrives in a configuration that is unexpected in some way — all of them get the brief registration and the return to other business, not the extended assessment.

The pool deck is a place to be. Let people be in it.

Rule Thirteen: The Body Neutrality Compact

The gay resort pool deck is a space of significant physical exposure and significant physical variation, and the compact that makes it function as a comfortable space for all of that variation is an implicit agreement about bodies that I want to make explicit because it is one of the most important rules on the list.

The compact is: bodies are not commentary.

No body on the pool deck is there as a statement about anyone else's body. The man with the extraordinary physique is not there to make you feel bad about yours. The man who is visibly comfortable in a body that does not conform to the aesthetic standard that the gay community has spent decades both worshipping and suffering under is not there to make a political point. Everyone is there because it is a pool deck and they are on vacation and they want to be in the sun.

The pool deck, at its best, is one of the places in gay culture where the tyranny of the specific body standard — the tyranny that is real and documented and has done genuine damage to the psychological health of gay men for generations — can be temporarily suspended, because the pool deck contains all kinds of bodies and the shared project of being there together in the sun makes the differentiation between them less urgent.

This is worth protecting. The comment about someone's body — even a positive one, even a complimentary one, even one that the person making it believes is a gift — inserts an evaluative framework into a space that works better without one. Keep the evaluations internal. Let the pool deck be the place where everyone is just here.

Part Five: The Temporal Rules

The pool deck has a relationship with time that is different from the relationship with time in the rest of the resort, and the rules governing that relationship deserve their own section.

Rule Fourteen: The Hours and What They Mean

The pool deck is not the same space at eight in the morning as it is at two in the afternoon as it is at six in the evening. Each hour has its own character and its own appropriate behaviors and the person who brings the energy of one hour to another hour is the person who is slightly out of phase with the pool deck's current self.

Early morning, roughly seven to ten: The pool deck belongs to the early risers, the serious swimmers, the people who have a complicated relationship with sleeping in that they are working through. The energy is quiet and individual. Conversations are brief and low. The pool deck at this hour is best experienced as a meditation on the fact of a beautiful morning, and it does not need to be more than that.

Mid-morning to early afternoon, roughly ten to two: The social temperature rises. The deck fills. The drinks begin, which is not a judgment, the resort has a bar and the bar is there and its operating hours are its operating hours. The conversation expands. The music earns its volume. The pool becomes social. This is the peak pool deck hour and it operates accordingly.

Mid-afternoon, roughly two to five: The settled hour. The chairs are full. The social arrangements of the day have been established. The people who have been building toward a nap are having the nap. The people who have been building toward a conversation are having the conversation. The pool deck at mid-afternoon has a specific warmth that is partly the sun and partly the accumulated comfort of a group of people who have been in the same beautiful space for several hours and have settled into it.

Late afternoon, roughly five to seven: The transition hour. The light changes. The music feels it. The deck begins the slow migration toward the evening — people drifting to their rooms to shower and change, the bar doing its pre-dinner business, the population thinning from the full afternoon crowd to the committed evening crowd. This hour has a bittersweet quality that I find genuinely beautiful and that I try to sit with rather than rush past.

The person who tries to extend mid-afternoon energy into the transition hour, who is still running at full social volume while the deck is doing its quiet winding down, is fighting the time of day rather than being inside it. The pool deck has rhythms. The rules say: follow the rhythms.

Rule Fifteen: The Sun Allocation

The pool deck has sun and shade, and the allocation of sun varies across the day as the angle changes, and the rules about sun allocation are the rules about not monopolizing what the environment is providing.

The rule is proportionality, which is the rule that governs most pool deck situations. If the shaded chairs are all full and you are currently in the sun and you want shade, you wait for shade to become available. You do not relocate a person's belongings to create shade. You do not construct a personal shade situation using resort equipment in a way that casts shade on your neighbor's previously sunny chair.

You work with what is available and you let other people have what they have.

Rule Sixteen: The Departure Protocol

Leaving the pool deck correctly is the final rule and it matters more than people think because the departure is the last impression and the pool deck has a long memory and you will almost certainly see these people again at dinner.

When you leave, take your things. All of them. The towel, the empty glasses — returned to the bar or the busing station — the sunscreen, the items that accumulated over the course of the day around the chair that was your temporary home. Leave the chair in approximately the condition it was in when you arrived at it.

The thank-you to the people adjacent to you is not required and is always welcome. Not an extended farewell — the pool deck is not the airport and you are not departing forever. A simple acknowledgment of the shared afternoon. A nod, a brief word, the small social completion of a shared experience.

The pool deck gave you something today. Leave it the way you found it, take the people you met seriously, and come back tomorrow ready to do it again.

Part Six: The Specific Situations

Beyond the general rules, the pool deck produces specific situations that occur with enough regularity that they deserve their own treatment.

The First Day

The first day on any new pool deck is the day of orientation. You do not know the social landscape. You do not know the chair allocation patterns. You do not know who the regulars are or where the sun is best at what hour or which bartender knows what you like or where the unofficial social center of the deck tends to form.

The rule for the first day is: observe before you act. Take the chair that is available and well-positioned without strong claim, not the chair that is theoretically available but that you will later discover is the chair that everyone on this deck understands to be someone's chair, because every pool deck has that chair and you will know which one it is after approximately twenty minutes of observation.

Arrive with openness. Do not arrive with the energy of someone who has a fully formed plan for the pool deck experience, because the plan will be wrong and revising the plan in real time while also orienting to a new social landscape is more than the first morning requires.

Let the pool deck show you what it is. It will show you quickly. Pay attention.

The Run-In With Someone From Last Night

The pool deck in the morning after the night before is the setting for the most socially complex encounter the gay resort produces, which is the encounter with the person you met last night in conditions that the morning pool deck light renders differently.

The rule is warmth and proportion. Whatever happened last night, the morning on the pool deck is a fresh context, and you treat the person as the person they are in this context — a fellow guest, someone you know, someone you had an interaction with — rather than as the specific role they played in last night's specific narrative.

Warm acknowledgment, brief conversation if the conversation is welcome, and then the pool deck proceeds. The pool deck does not need the full last-night debrief at nine in the morning. The pool deck needs everyone to be able to be in the same space comfortably, which is possible as long as everyone commits to the fresh-context principle and nobody decides that the pool deck is the appropriate venue for the continuation of last night's unresolved business.

Last night's unresolved business has other venues. The pool deck is not one of them.

The Solo Traveler

The solo traveler on a gay resort pool deck is in a specific and interesting position that I want to address directly because it is underserved by the general discourse about solo gay travel, which tends to focus on bars and nightlife and does not adequately address the particular social dynamics of the pool deck for the person who is there alone.

The solo traveler has both advantages and challenges on the pool deck.

The advantage: the solo traveler is socially available in a way that the person embedded in a group is not. The person at a pool deck with six friends from home is socially occupied. The solo traveler is genuinely open to the pool deck's social offerings, which the pool deck tends to reward.

The challenge: the pool deck is a space where most people are with other people, and the solo presence, if managed with any anxiety or self-consciousness, can feel more exposed than it actually is.

The rule for the solo traveler is: be present without being hungry. The energy of genuine relaxed presence — I am here, I am comfortable, I am open to what happens — is the energy that the pool deck responds to. The energy of visible hoping-something-will-happen is the energy that paradoxically makes things less likely to happen, because pool decks, like most social environments, move toward ease rather than toward need.

Be at ease. The pool deck will come to you.

The Large Group

The large group on a pool deck — anything above six people traveling together — requires specific management that the group itself must do rather than the pool deck doing it for them.

The large group occupies significant shared real estate. The large group's internal conversation is louder than the pool deck's ambient conversation by virtue of more people contributing to it. The large group has internal social dynamics that do not always read as legible from the outside and that can create an atmosphere of exclusion for the pool deck community around them even when the group intends no exclusion.

The rules for the large group: be aware of your footprint, keep the volume proportionate, and make occasional contact with the pool deck beyond your group's perimeter. A large group that is completely closed to the pool deck around it is a large group that is taking up space in the commons without contributing to the commons, and the commons notices this even when it says nothing.

The large group that is warm and occasionally porous — that welcomes the brief conversation from the person in the adjacent chair, that acknowledges the pool deck community around it as part of the shared space — is the large group that the pool deck incorporates rather than accommodates, and the distinction produces a better experience for everyone including the group itself.

The Couple on the Pool Deck

The couple at the gay resort pool deck is doing something that is at once simple and, if done well, one of the more quietly beautiful things available in gay travel: they are being a couple, in public, in a space that was built for them, without apology or vigilance or the low-level monitoring of the environment that being a couple in many other public spaces requires.

The rule for the couple: let the pool deck see you being happy. Not as a performance. Not as a statement. Just: be the couple you are, in the full relaxed expression of it, in the space that was built to hold exactly that.

The pool deck benefits from couples who are genuinely, quietly happy in it. It is one of the things the pool deck is for.

The Last Rule: Why All of This Matters

I want to end with the rule that contains all the other rules, the one that the specific prohibitions and permissions are all pointing toward, because the specific rules are means and this is the end.

The gay resort pool deck is a commons built by a community for a community, and what it does — when it is working, when everyone in it is participating in good faith — is something that is available in very few other contexts.

It makes two hundred strangers into a temporary neighborhood.

Not a permanent one. Not a deep one. But a real one, with the genuine characteristics of a neighborhood: shared space, shared norms, mutual recognition, the ambient comfort of being among people who are like you in the fundamental ways that matter and who are here for the same reason you are here.

For a lot of gay men, the pool deck is the most surrounded-by-your-people they feel outside of their specific circle of friends and chosen family. The specific ease of a space that was built for you, full of people who share your experience of the world in some fundamental way, without the vigilance that public spaces in the rest of life sometimes require — that ease is real and it is valuable and it does not happen automatically.

It happens because the people in the space respect it. Because they follow the rules — the spoken ones and the unspoken ones. Because they treat the commons as something worth protecting rather than something to extract maximum individual benefit from. Because they understand that the pool deck's value is collective and that the collective value is only available when everyone is contributing to rather than consuming it.

The rules are not restrictions on your freedom. They are the architecture of a space that is freer than most spaces you will be in this year.

Follow them. Protect the thing they protect.

And if someone puts their towel on four chairs and leaves for an hour, you have my full permission to take one.

Be nice to Fluffy. Love Fluffy. Let Fluffy get you to the pool deck with a chair, a drink, and the full working knowledge of every unspoken rule in it.

Fluffy is a Manhattan-based luxury gay travel specialist, pool deck veteran, and the self-appointed informal enforcer of sunbed etiquette on three continents. He has never once put his bag on an adjacent chair. This is a lie. He is working on it. Luxury gay travel, planned by someone who actually goes — and who always, eventually, finds the right chair.