Gay Travel: Cruise Ship Entertainers

Image via Matt Yee

Twenty years ago, Matt Yee (www.mattyee.com) would never have guessed he’d be generating the bulk of his income regaling holiday travelers with show tunes and double entendre dirty jokes (often while sporting a muumuu and a ratty blond wig). The Hawaiian-born son of financial advisors, Yee, who sang and played piano vocationally from the age of three, won a music scholarship to Dartmouth University and moved on to law school at the University of Pennsylvania.

“I was doing mergers and acquisitions in the boomtime 1980s,” he recalls. “You’re supposed to feel so fortunate having an opportunity like that, but I realized that I hated it.”

Yee walked away from his white-shoe firm feeling somewhat adrift. While finding his sea legs as a gay man during the height of the AIDS crisis, he dabbled in real estate development in San Francisco and, ultimately, back home in Hawaii. It was during this period that he returned to music, beginning to develop an act and stage persona while playing in gay piano bars.

“I wasn’t making much money at it, but I was building my craft. One of my first paying solo gigs was a show at the March on Washington in 1993. I started traveling to do Pride events and men’s gatherings in different cities.”

During this period, Yee also led a party band in Hawaii, sporting Janns World outfits and playing a blend of reggae and Hawaiian pop.

Keep reading over at Passport magazine.

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