We Left. We've Never Looked Back.
We sold everything, celebrated New Year's Eve 2021 over the Atlantic, and haven't been back to the US since. Four years of full-time travel, four to six months a year in Albania, and a belief that independent LGBTQ+ media matters now more than ever. This is TrueQueer — built from the road.
Who We Are
We're Jeff and Zachary — a married gay couple who have been traveling the world full-time since January 2022. We run withJZ LLC and spend our days writing, shooting photos and video, and building digital projects from wherever we happen to be. Zachary has a deep passion for genealogy — researching family histories and helping others discover their roots and the stories that connect them to the past.
The short version of how we got here: Jeff tested remote work abroad during a London business trip in October 2014 — it worked. In January 2015, we left for a planned year-long trip across twelve European countries. We made it through the year, came home missing family, and got married in 2016 after the Supreme Court ruling. We bought a five-bedroom house in Southern California and ran it as a vacation rental. Then COVID hit, the government shut down short-term rentals, we pivoted to ninety-day leases, and when restrictions lifted we knew it was time to go. We sold the house for double what we paid, sold the car, sold the furniture, and spent the last quarter of 2021 at a Residence Inn planning our route.
We celebrated New Year's Eve 2021 somewhere over the Atlantic, heading to Madrid — where we promptly tested positive for COVID and spent our first week of freedom confined to a hotel room. We eventually made it to Porto, and we've been moving ever since. Four years, haven't been back. Instead of returning to the US to visit family, we fly them out to wherever we are using credit card points.
We spend four to six months of the year in Albania — Tirana, Sarande, Durres — and the rest across Europe. Tirana has become something like a second home. It's not the most obvious destination for two gay Americans, but it's where we keep coming back. The full story of our travels is coming to travelwithjz.com — for now, this is the highlight reel.
Why TrueQueer
We started paying attention to the state of LGBTQ+ media and didn't love what we found. Eighteen US states have zero local LGBTQ+ news outlets. National platforms that used to cover our community have been gutted by DEI rollbacks. Social media platforms have stripped protections for LGBTQ+ content. And the void left behind is increasingly filled by algorithmic clickbait, rage content, and doom-scrolling.
We wanted something different: a site that reports facts without spin, covers the full spectrum of our community, and doesn't treat every story as either a catastrophe or a celebration. The LGBTQ+ community is 25 million people in the US alone. We deserve media that takes us seriously — and that's what we're building.
We also wanted to cover parts of the world that don't get much attention from LGBTQ+ media. The Balkans are fascinating — countries at different stages of building (or resisting) LGBTQ+ rights, with complicated histories and rapidly shifting politics. We're here. We see it firsthand. We write about it.
How We Work
TrueQueer is an independent publication. We don't take direction from political parties, advocacy groups, or corporate sponsors. We use AI assistance in our publishing workflow — that's part of how two people can produce daily content from the road — but we edit everything, stand behind everything we publish, and follow our editorial guidelines strictly.
Our editorial compass: report facts, let readers form their own conclusions, and speak from the LGBTQ+ perspective without injecting political agendas or bias. When we cover rights erosion, we're reporting what's factually happening — that IS the LGBTQ+ perspective, not a political opinion. When we cover a Pride event or a queer film, we approach it as journalists who genuinely care, not as influencers chasing engagement.
We also write honestly about our own lives — what it's actually like to be gay, married, and financially untethered from any single country. Not all of it is glamorous. Some of it is genuinely hard. We write about that too.
The Values
Inclusivity
We cover the full LGBTQ+ spectrum — gay, lesbian, bi, trans, nonbinary, asexual, intersex, queer. Not just the loudest voices.
Innovation
We embrace new tools to publish better, faster content — without sacrificing quality or losing the human voice behind it.
Integrity
We fact-check claims, cite sources, and acknowledge when we get things wrong. Trust is everything for an independent publication.
Independence
No party line. No corporate overlords. No algorithm telling us what to write. Just our perspective and our community's.
Get in Touch
We're reachable by email at hello@truequeer.com. We're also on Bluesky and Instagram. If you have a tip, a story idea, or just want to say hello from wherever you are in the world — please do.