Earlier this week, we told you how a gay cruise operated by Atlantis Events was denied docking in Turkey precisely because the passengers are gay men. The cruise, which left from Athens on July 5, said it would dock in Cairo, Egypt, instead.
There's just one problem: Egypt denied them, too.
Gay cruise turned away by Turkish officials gets banned from docking in Egypt toohttps://t.co/h6jBGBGvW1
— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) July 9, 2026
The Scarlet Lady's 2,000 passengers, including the Broadway performer Patti LuPone, woke on Thursday morning to find a note placed under their cabin doors informing them that the ship was urgently looking for alternative ports.
'Early this morning, we were informed that Scarlet Lady has been denied entry into Egyptian waters, and, as a result, will no longer be able to call in Alexandria today,' Rich Campbell, the chief executive of Atlantis Events, the tour group that chartered the Virgin Voyages ship, told passengers.
'I know how much this visit meant to so many of you. We successfully sailed a similar itinerary last year without issue. So we were surprised by this unfortunate decision,' he wrote.
Why event organizers tried to dock a gay cruise in two different Islamic nations is beyond us. This writer was in Egypt last month, and it's a heavily Islamic country. When she booked her flight, she was warned by the airline that Egypt would not accept a passport that had a nonbinary gender marker on it.
Cruise passengers also spoke out.
PASSENGER SPEAKS OUT: Passengers aboard an LGBTQ+-focused cruise are reacting after two countries refused to allow the ship to dock, forcing itinerary changes and sparking an international conversation about LGBTQ+ rights and travel. https://t.co/eoor4Kvti9
— WPLG Local 10 News (@WPLGLocal10) July 9, 2026
According to Local 10, passenger Josh New was surprised.
“He says to me, well, one of the gay bars in Istanbul was going to have a party for us, and a prominent conservative paper in Turkey got ahold of it, and it became a political problem,” New said. “People were kind of in a lot of disbelief, angry, upset."
I guess all those "I stand with Palestine" t-shirts and posters didn't buy the Islamic goodwill that the queer-crowd hoped?
— Michael Quinn Sullivan 🇺🇸 (@MQSullivan) July 9, 2026
For whatever reason, the Left has aligned itself with Islamists, including the 'Queers for Palestine' movement. Homosexuality is forbidden in Islam and punishable by prison or death. Uganda, where NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani is from, proposed jailing gays for life. And we all know what happens to gays in other Islamic nations.
They'll still come back to the US and claim they have no rights or some s**t.
— The Battle Born In-Phil-sition (@SinCityFC) July 9, 2026
They have no idea how good they've got it in the U.S., and even in Europe or Australia.
I mean, C'mon. Didn't ANYONE organizing this or the cruise line themselves stop to think about where they were docking? I hope "Queers for Palestine" were all onboard.
— TxCowboy (@Flacwby) July 9, 2026
As the Guardian reported above, the cruise ran this same itinerary last year without issue. But it seems officials caught wind of it this year and cracked down.
It’s a cruise to all the places gay passengers can’t safely go and yet countries they support fiercely.
— Magnolia Rose (@MarthaD80784116) July 9, 2026
🤷♀️
Weird they don’t see the connection
Tolerance is purely a concept born of Western civilization's small-L liberal rights and freedoms. Islamic nations do not have such tolerance, and yet the Left refuses to acknowledge this.
Instead, they welcome Islamists into our nation. Is it because they hope they can use Islamists to remove Christianity from the public sphere and to help them dismantle America and Western civilization? Perhaps. But if they think they'll be able to use Islamists to destroy everything to rebuild a Leftist utopia, they're sorely mistaken.
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