Turkey barred a cruise with gay travelers before Egypt turned it away. The Trump admin stayed silent

Just after midnight Friday, with the Egyptian coastline close enough to see, a harbor master radioed the Scarlet Lady one instruction: Turn around. Days earlier, Turkey had already barred the ship from two ports over "moral values." Now Egypt was withholding entry too. Aboard, roughly 1,900 LGBTQ+ travelers on an Atlantis Events charter, including Broadway star Patti LuPone, booked to perform for the group, were living out, in real time, an old message delivered in a new form: You are not welcome here.Rich Campbell, founder and CEO of Atlantis Events, which specializes in large-scale gay vacations, was heading to dinner around 9:30 p.m. that night when the Scarlet Lady’s captain called him to the bridge. “I think we’ve got a problem,” the captain said. Campbell had already spent days absorbing Turkey’s rejection. Now Atlantis and Virgin Voyages, which had redirected the ship toward Alexandria so passengers could see the pyramids at Giza and the newly opened Grand Egyptian Museum, didn’t have the clearance to enter Egyptian waters at all.Related: Turkish government blocks gay cruise carrying Americans from docking, citing ‘moral standards See on Instagram By 12:30 a.m., the order was final. Campbell and Virgin executives spent the rest of the night on calls with the company’s Miami office, trying to find a port that could take a ship carrying 1,900 people on short notice.What began as an expensive Mediterranean vacation had turned into an international episode, one in which two governments treated a shipload of LGBTQ+ tourists as a political problem.Related: LGBTQ+ cruise rescues 11 refugees adrift in the Gulf of MexicoTurkey's sudden rejectionCampbell told The Advocate in an interview from the ship on Monday that there was no real mystery about why Turkey called off the planned stops in Kuşadası and Istanbul. "One hundred percent," he said, when asked if the group's LGBTQ+ identity was the reason. "That's clear. There's no disputing that." Official