Gay Hawaii Molokai is your travel guide to the very best that this Most Hawaiian Place has to offer the LGBT traveler: stunning empty romantic Molokai beaches, secluded hotels, and plenty of peace and quiet.

Well, yeah, sort of.

In the 19th century, white Christian missionaries came to Hawaii to "convert" the pure and natural native peoples, and systematically destroy their culture. Missionaries feared their religious ideals were threatened by the existence of any culture that did not share them.

The missionary-saviours decided that nudity, the hula, Hawaiian religious beliefs, the Hawaiian language, Hawaiian history and all other native "perversions of God's true way" had to go.

Also terminated were gatherings expressly organized for the purpose of oral history-telling, crucial to the survival of a culture with no written language.

Hawaiians never had a problem accepting their gay brothers and sisters, but the missionaries set out to change this too. The gay Hawaiians, or mahu as they are called, looked on with dismay as their straight bretheren meekly submitted to cultural suicide and bought into the missionaries' twisted dogma that branded Hawaiians as sinners. The mahu decided that they would take it upon themselves to keep as much Hawaiian culture alive as possible in secret --most importantly, the hula.

When Hawaiian culture was outlawed, the mahu gathered clandestinely and continued to celebrate time honored Hawaiian ways, including relating oral history and performing and teaching, the hula. The mahu kept ancient Hawaiian ways alive and vibrant, while the more submissive non-mahu Hawaiians stood by as the missionaries --many of whom became wealthy businessmen upon realizing the power they wielded over the native peoples-- acquired or were gifted land, destroyed enormous chunks of Hawaiian culture, and defiled Hawaiian spiritual beliefs.

When I arrived on Molokai the first time, I was a little taken aback when, as I ate lunch at the Molokai Pizza Cafe, a very fashionable, well dressed drag queen with fabulous makeup strolled in with two little kids and ordered a sit-down lunch. Now, boys and girls, Molokai only has a population of about 5000 people, and the fashion of choice is the unisex-baggy-T shirt-and-wrinkled-baggy-shorts-look, smartly accessorized with $2 rubber flip-flops. Molokai has few tourists, and lots of the local guys are preoccupied with being very macho, so to see this in broad daylight really took me aback.

Nobody but me even looked twice at her.

That evening I went to dinner at the Oceanside Restaurant (now called Hula Shores) at the Hotel Molokai where I was staying. The place was crowded, people ate and drank as the sun set and the last rays lit the island of Lanai across the channel. "May I take your order?", boomed a big butch voice. I looked up to see my waitress, all 6'2' of her, decked out in full drag, looking very little like a real woman. I was a bit startled, since in all my years visiting Maui and Kauai, the Big Island and Oahu, the only drag I'd ever seen was in big city Honolulu...but on tiny Molokai?

I looked around. ALL three of the waitresses were in drag, and I watched the faces of the customers --mostly tourists-- to see what their reaction would be as they met their waitress for the first time. I was amazed to see nobody react. Either they were so dense that they assumed their server was just a very large, overly made up, extremely fashionable local gal ...or they just weren't fazed by it.

There are no gay beaches on Molokai to speak of, mostly because you’ll rarely see any people, straight or gay. We have visited virtually every beach on Molokai, a couple of them 8 or 9 times, and it’s unusual to see anyone on the beach during the week at all, period. If you are traveling with someone you are intimate with, or you meet someone in town, there are a lot of Molokai beaches where you can be totally alone. The most isolated of these (because they are on private Molokai Ranch-lands) are in the southwest corner of the island.

Other beaches, even the very public and mammoth Papohaku Beach Park, just south of the Kaluakoi resort can be totally deserted, even on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon.