Inn Your Dreams

Right: The Inn at Kent Falls

At Ira Goldspiel’s archetypal New England countryside property -- The Inn at Kent Falls -- everything is just so. Frette sheets cover the overstuffed mattresses on the wrought iron beds, and Aveda products fill the en suite bathrooms. On cold nights a fire roars in the sitting room, and on summer days the outdoor pool is perfectly heated. Like other gays and lesbians who’ve escaped the fluorescent office life by buying an inn, Ira has found that his handsome colonial property is more than a job -- it’s his 300-year-old baby. And like any toddler, this one needs unconditional love and around-the-clock attention.

"For this job," says Ira, "it’s good to be more than a little anal-retentive.”

One recent summer night Ira realized just how demanding his 18th-century little darling can be. The guests from all six rooms had checked out in the afternoon, and he had no reservations lined up that night. Finally alone, Ira convinced his boyfriend to go skinny-dipping in the pool to enjoy a rare quiet moment under the stars, surrounded by the inn’s lush grounds and babbling creek. But, as Ira recalls, “you learn early on when you take this job that you’re never alone.” Sure enough, a couple without a reservation, who had seen the inn’s recent rave review in Travel + Leisure, showed up unannounced and found them.

The Inn at Kent Falls

What’s notable about Ira’s story is not that a gay innkeeper was caught splashing around naked in his pool -- that’s nothing new. It’s that gay B&B owners are increasingly less dependent on gay and lesbian clients. The inn Ira bought and renovated in northwestern Connecticut is gay-friendly -- but hardly pride flag-waving. The couple who caught Ira and his boyfriend in their birthday suits was, like most of his guests, straight.

Scott Coatsworth, who started the online LGBT travel directory Purple Roofs with his partner, Mark Guzman, has noticed a growing trend of inns owned by gay and lesbian people popping up in "nongay" areas. “The places we listed used to be confined to gay meccas,” he says. “But now you can find an LGBT-owned property almost anywhere.” When he started the site in 1998, Coatsworth figured they would struggle to list 100 or so gay- or lesbian-owned B&Bs, inns, and guesthouses. Now they have over 1,000 listings from around the world -- some in fairly non-traditionally gay locations like Utah, Alaska, and Peru. “As the gay and lesbian community has shifted out of the ever-more-expensive urban gay ghettos,” Coatsworth says, “gay-owned businesses have followed.”