Aspen's Gay Ski Week Is Right Around the Corner, Here's What You Can Expect

From drag brunches to shredding the mountain, Aspen's Gay Ski Week offers it all. Here's what guests can expect.

Most Pride celebrations are typified by summertime parties and parades, save for a few lingering fall festivities that tend to take place in warmer cities like Orlando and Austin. Winter, on the other hand, is not exactly a beacon of well-intentioned bacchanalia. That seasonal stereotype is thawing, though, thanks to the rising popularity of Gay Ski Week — organized outings at iconic ski resorts across the globe that prove rainbows aren’t confined to Pride Month.

The premise of Gay Ski Week is as simple as a bunny slope: an opportunity for a marginalized community to come together in camaraderie and recreate in ways that are fun, inclusive, and safe, all during a time of year — in a post-holidays social lull — when most events come to a freeze.

The first of its kind took place in one of the most famed ski towns of all when Aspen Gay Ski Week emerged in 1977. As is often the case with cultural movements, especially during a time when LGBTQ+ rights were far from where they should have been, Aspen’s inaugural Gay Ski Week began as a small seed of an idea — a gathering of friends from different parts of the country, coming together to partake in a shared pastime. Over the subsequent years and decades, that seed snowballed into the largest Gay Ski Week in the Western Hemisphere, and the only non-profit Gay Ski Week in the country, setting the bar for like-minded events in ski communities the world over, from Tignes, France, to Stowe, Vermont.

“This is the original Gay Ski Week,” proclaims Kevin McManamon, executive director of AspenOUT, which puts on Aspen Gay Ski Week as an annual fundraiser. “It grew organically in the beginning, by guys from the East Coast and California who knew each other and met in the middle to have fun and ski.” Those guys were Jon Busch, David Hoch, Tom Duesterberg, and Russell Anderson, who had so much fun together in 1977 that they decided to make it an annual tradition, inviting other gay ski clubs to partake. Initially, the town of Aspen remained largely uninvolved, and attendees were limited to private condo parties. “It’s grown ever since, and we have attendees that will be here for their 30th year or longer, who keep coming back year after year,” McManamon says of a marquis event that took place in the 2023 season and has come to be one of the town’s biggest money-makers.

The innate familiarity and après coziness is a departure from most Pride festivals, coupled with the fact that Gay Ski Week is a far more intimate affair centered around a shared sporting experience. With attendance maxing out around 3,000 for Aspen, which is high by Gay Ski Week standards, it facilitates connection and friendship in ways that are harder to come by in a crowd of, say, 200,000.

“You can participate in any way that you like,” McManamon adds. “You can just do the skiing, or just do the parties or any combination. Not everyone does everything; some people are just here for the camaraderie.” The same goes for lodging: Designed to offer something for everyone, the Limelight serves as the main hub for Gay Ski Week, while quieter settings, like The Gant, offer condo-style abodes that harken to the event’s earliest roots, providing homey comforts, hot tubs, and Gay Ski Week offerings, like special happy hours and welcome baskets.

For Aspen’s 2024 Gay Ski Week, which runs January 14-21, events include everything from Drag Bingo Brunch at The Little Nell Hotel and daily après-ski meet-ups at the Limelight to the downhill costume contest, an Electric Cowboy dance party at Belly Up, and a pool party at the Aspen Recreation Center. Such events have become so popular that programming expanded to nearby Snowmass this year, and tickets sold out within 10 minutes of their release in August.

It speaks to the growing interest in Gay Ski Weeks, which have since popped up on wintry mountains all over the globe. After Aspen plowed the way, along came peer events like the upcoming 41st annual Winter Rendezvous in Stowe, the 32nd annual Whistler Pride in Canada, the 14th annual Utah Gay Ski Week in Park City, and the 22nd annual Telluride Gay Ski Week. Gay Ski Weeks can now be found in Switzerland, Japan, Austria, and France. There’s even the rare Gay Ski Week in August — the only one of its kind, held in Queenstown, New Zealand.

Each ski week follows a similar rubric but infuses its own flavor. In Telluride, Colorado, Gay Ski Week coincides with the Telluride AIDS Benefit Fashion Show Gala and historical walking tours, while Stowe’s Winter Rendezvous reads like pure Robert Frost poetry, with ice skating, horse-drawn sleigh rides, bonfires, and dog sleds. At Whistler Pride, another event that started as a small gathering among friends in 1992, free daily guided lessons take attendees down the slopes of Whistler Blackcomb, and the Whistler Pride Community Celebrations feature rainbow flags being skied down the mountain and strode through town on parade. Park City is perhaps the most risqué, featuring singular events like onesie après-ski shindigs and frat-themed parties with shotskis.

A through line at Gay Ski Weeks, no matter the flavor, is the sense of welcome, a lack of pretense, and the opportunity to have fun and camp it up — at parties and on the slopes, it’s not uncommon to see body glitter, sequins, costumes, and helmets stylized as unicorns. Despite places like Aspen and Park City still associated with elite celebrities and moneyed machismo, they go the extra mile to include everyone, offering lessons and tours designed for all experience levels, with events and activations that range from late-night clubs and leisurely hot tubs to screenings, panel discussions, and frills-free happy hours. It’s also an opportunity for these resort towns, frequented by international tourists, to stand for LGBTQ+ rights on a loud-and-proud global scale, in environments long typified by straight white athletes.

In Aspen, as at Gay Ski Weeks across the globe, it’s a week in winter that somehow feels a little warmer than the forecast suggests — when Pride flags line the streets, drag queens hit the slopes, and everyone can find a sense of community. See all the events and find accommodations for this year’s Gay Ski Week at gayskiweek.com

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