Tourism studies acknowledge important connections between mobility, intimacy, and sex, yet research has been disproportionately oriented toward heterosexual, commercial sex tourism and outcome-driven encounters. This emphasis has left digitally mediated, queer, and non-commercial practices underexplored. In particular, studies on men who have sex with men have often focused on corporeal encounters or assumed monogamous frameworks, overlooking the affective, digital, and intersectional dynamics that increasingly shape contemporary tourism. Mobile dating apps such as Grindr have transformed how intimacy and desire unfold during travel, yet their role in recalibrating erotic capital, generating emotional ambivalence, and reproducing racialised hierarchies remains under-theorised. Addressing this gap requires a reconceptualization of sex as leisure in tourism that accounts for digital infrastructures, affective complexity, and intersecting inequalities.

This thesis investigate how queer male tourists negotiate sex, intimacy, and desire through Grindr, foregrounding digital intimacy, emotional ambivalence, and the racialised politics of desirability. It draws on 26 in-depth interviews with queer male tourists, complemented by reflexive auto-ethnographic vignettes, and adopts a constructivist-interpretivist approach to explore how mobility and digital infrastructures shape erotic experience.

This thesis by manuscript is presented through three interlinked papers. The first introduces the concept of cyber-sexual leisure, theorising digitally mediated erotic engagements as a significant form of sex as leisure that often produces both pleasure and ambivalence. The second manuscript extends tourism scholarship from dyadic to extradyadic framings, analysing how Grindr enables sexual non-monogamy during travel, resisting heteronormative expectations while supporting wellbeing amongst couples. The third centres queer men of colour, conceptualising racialised digital embodiment and touristic erotic repositioning to capture how erotic capital shifts across sexual fields through mobility. 

Taken together, these contributions demonstrate how sex in tourism can no longer be theorised through narrow categories of risk, deviance, or corporeality. Instead, the thesis advances an intersectional and digitally attuned reconceptualization of sex as leisure, showing how queer tourists’ experiences are simultaneously structured by affect, mobility, digital infrastructures, and intersecting axes of power.