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The Guide accentuate the positive, directing readers toward travel destinations least likely to pose such inconveniences as robbery, detention, verbal harassment, physical torment, and death. But lately, some gay travelers have taken us to task for failure to warn them of dicey accommodations around the world. We've also been troubled by rumors of fatalities and disappearances at certain vacation spots within the U.S. and abroad.

This April, we've opted to hold our collective nose and give readers a rundown on which gay resorts to avoid at all costs. In view of the number of candidates across the globe, determining the ten worst was no easy task. However, in consultation with correspondents who entered these venues within the past year and lived, we managed to assemble the following list. With one exception, these resorts and hostelries cater strictly to gay men. The entries appear in no particular order.

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1) Fukitup Lodge, Sisimiut, Greenland.

The Inuit call this site Uumaaqaagu, Haunt of the Shape-Shifting Undead Walrus, and will not venture within fifty yards of Fukitup Lodge's main gate. Locals refuse to serve as guides to known guests, excluding them from seal hunts, denying them dogsled rentals, and letting them wander unassisted through terrain cross-hatched with crevasses.

Although Fukitup has somehow clung to its five hectares near Sisimiut since 1976, no one who stays there can expect to be served at Den Forlise Viking, the fishing community's principal bar. "We're not homophobes," stresses bartender Thorvald Skvaddernosse, "but you never know what shape the Undead Walrus may take."

What keeps Fukitup Lodge in business can hardly be its notoriously surly staff, and certainly can't be its cuisine -- an alternating menu of blackened musk ox and blubber fondue. The secret seems to be a week-long, bear-dominated gay men's jamboree called Cold Fusion, held annually in mid-November. Attendees huddle naked under piles of animal skins, ten to an igloo. Unfortunately, this icy free-for-all can be an all-too-literal bear event.

"Every year, polar bears eat two or three guests," admits one Fukitup employee, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Otherwise it's pretty boring, and those animal pelts can cause a rash."

2) Oink Boy Resort, Monda Behinou.

The island city-state of Monda Behinou became a popular destination for gay travelers in the late '90s, when the Bourou Blunchou, the Monda Behinish Ministry of Tourism, began advertising in US and European gay magazines, touting the delights of its clothing-optional discos, bars, and mud spas. (See The Guide, April 1999, 2000, and 2002.)

The Oink Boy complex -- a bar and sex club, with mud facilities tucked away in a fetid rear courtyard -- expanded in 1999 to become the first self-described gay hotel in Monda Behinou. Scores of European and American gay tourists booked rooms, little knowing they would enter a universe of unexpected kinks, a place where elbow fetishism runs rampant, SM means maulings with nine-pronged sticks, and not everyone who ventures into mud pits comes out again.

Because Monda Behinou is the world's most rigorous surveillance state, nearly all sexual activity at Oink Boy (and everywhere else) is caught on camera and -- following perusal by the Ministry of Surveillance and the police -- may find its way into commercial porn compilations or get posted on the internet.

Oink Boy guests responsive to those conditions are offered free surveillance videos as souvenirs upon departure. The videos have undeniable appeal to anyone fixated on elbow-sucking, mud immersion, and strange forms of torture.

3) The Massachusetts Treatment Center, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

If you're caught dallying at a highway rest stop, having sex with a bearded 17-year-old, or indiscreetly pissing in public while drunk, you may be eligible for an indefinite stay at this facility where, courtesy of civil-commitment statutes, many guests remain free of charge for life. As Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is fond of saying, "They check in, but they don't check out."

While in residence, guests can while away the time with a broad range of activities -- furtive consensual sex, PG films, sadomasochistic group therapy, solitary confinement, TV, furtive non-consensual sex, illegal football pools, TV, credit-card Ponzi schemes, beatings, basketball, TV, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), weight lifting, and penile plethysmography.

Because the cuisine, rich in sugar and saturated fats, encourages guests to break furniture and slug one another, many residents receive liberal doses of Percocet, fentanyl, and other dietary supplements.

4) Kor Naarina (House of Males), Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan.

This compound was quietly established in 2003 as an R&R center for gay NATO personnel, including U.S. soldiers who haven't been asked and will not tell. The main building is a bombed-out school. Guests bunk in an open barracks with a maximum capacity of 116.

"What with gang rapes going on all night," says one recent visitor, Corporal John Doe (not his real name), "it's hard to get a wink of sleep."

Others have complained of having to step over human body parts while en route to the mess hall for their customary breakfast of coffee and crullers.

To practice interrogating Taliban prisoners, guests often waterboard one another, with mixed results.

In the central courtyard, battles to the death between snarling mastiffs are presented daily, though spontaneous fistfights among guests often draw bigger crowds. Blows to the head are encouraged. An average of three Kor Naarina patrons succumb to cerebral hemorrhages annually. "Nevertheless, it's all in good fun," insists proprietor Gunther Dwett. "We haven't had any suicide bombings since February 2008, and we've got the Three Ds: doughnuts, dogfights, and decapitations."

5) Cueva de las Babosas (Cave of the Slugs), Ushuaia, Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

Promoted as an ancient gay spiritual site by owners Jaime Fenellosa and Tory Keckless, Cueva de las Babosas is not known to have existed before 1942. "It is not a true cave," says geologist Carlos Guatitas of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, "but a hidey-hole dug by the outlaw El Chabomba, Jaime Fenellosa's grandpapa, who was hanged in Chile in 1952."

Whatever its origins, the underground chamber attracts hordes of bats, many of them rabid. Accommodations for humans include roofless stone huts inspired by enclosures once occupied by tuberculosis patients in Mammoth Cave. Rich guano deposits carpeting the floor of the cave attract a constant influx of feces-eating slugs world-famous for their phosphorescent slime trails.

6) Robert Falcon Scott Hospitality Hut, Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica.

This facility bills itself as the only gay hostelry in the Antarctic, but, as veteran tourist Albert Smork of Calgary observes, "Three days in Hell Hut equal four weeks' aversion treatment at Brigham Young University." The place is a Quonset-hut arrangement evoking the set of John Carpenter's The Thing.

Survivors of Hospitality Hut sojourns dispute its claim to be a gay hostelry at all. "I went there hoping to meet men in furs," says Gilroy Zerklee of Christchurch, New Zealand, "but by Day Two I knew I'd wandered into a freakin' interspecies whorehouse."

In recent years, the Hospitality Hut has catered to Australians belonging to a Melbourne-based group called Merry Gentoomen, an organization whose members have sex with gentoo penguins. ("They're smaller than emperor penguins," explains gentoophile Chips O'Doul, "and they ain't as smelly.")

The Hut is situated next to a gentoo rookery that in October, at the height of nesting season, has a population of about 1200 birds. A recent crackdown on the officially forbidden practice of bringing penguins back for overnight stays in guest rooms has precipitated an uptick in penile frostbite.

Non-gentoophile guests seek out a nearby cruising area, where some of the unavoidable frozen corpses may be 150 years old.

7) Camp Flaccid, Desert Palms, California.

Owners Michael and Michael Stuckey-Bruckner modeled this wellness hideaway after cornflake mogul John Harvey Kellogg's famed sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. "It's an alternative," says Michael, "to those nasty Palm Springs fuck-pits."

True to Kellogg's vision, the Stuckey-Bruckners offer guests a fiber-intensive vegan diet intended to make them defecate at frequent intervals. Rigorous exercise starts every morning at five. Evening sing-alongs emphasize selections from the Stuckey-Bruckner Songbook. ("Add a Pinch of Glucose to Your Spelt" and "Gluten Boy" are perennial favorites.)

At bedtime, everyone receives a yoghurt enema. "We send every one of our visitors home," Michael boasts, "with fresh, clean bowels."

Throughout Camp Flaccid, clothing is mandatory. Along with alcoholic beverages and illegal drugs, sex is verboten. Bed checks by Michael and Michael serve to enforce celibacy and promote pajamas.

The Stuckey-Bruckners also manage the adjacent Cheryl Jacques Pavilion, restricted to same-sex couples able to produce certificates of marriage or domestic partnership. Married guests must sign a monogamy oath based on vows the Stuckey-Bruckners recited at their own Vancouver nuptials last year. Singles straying into the Jacques Pavilion are sent packing, as are married men (except for Michael and Michael) caught intruding on Camp Flaccid proper.

8) Rubble House, Grozny, Chechnya.

In the maze behind the main compound, guests can cruise for sex, stalk one another with paint guns, or stalk one another with Uzis. Despite posted warnings, many visitors fall afoul of widely distributed exploding poppers. Rubble House culinary staples include green borscht with nettles, nettle tart, and lard soup. At least a fifth of foreign tourists who stay at Rubble House are kidnapped for ransom. "For some," says proprietor Mischa Zadnitsa. "especially anyone who's always dreamed of being abducted by rough, hairy men who carry AK-47s and pick their teeth with knives, this can be a good deal, unless they kill you."

9) GLAAD Gardens, Beverly Hills, California.

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination (GLAAD) established this resort and convention complex in 2003 to help shield its supporters from long-term traumatic effects of hurtful discourse.

"In keeping with our anti-discriminatory mission," says manager Sean Scott Blocker III, "we'll even accept reservations from non-celebrities" -- or anyone who pays $695.80 per night and signs a pledge not to use racist, sexist, homophobic, transgender-insensitive, speciesist, or anti-multicultural phraseology anywhere on the premises.

No expense is spared to help guests feel protected. Tolerance monitors patrol public areas, interrupting private conversations to tell guests to watch their language, or to elicit apologies for problematic terminology. Resident therapists are assigned to guests with abuse issues, whether or not they think they remember any.

Four times a year, GLAAD Gardens presents Diversity U., a ten-day symposium offering such workshops as "Deconstructing Celebrities of Color," "Homophobia and the Oscars," "Nurturing Your Guatemalan Landscapers," "Reggae: A First Amendment Exception?" and "Transgendered Toileting."

GLAAD Gardens is also the site of the GLAAD Wrap Conference, held in the Tipper Gore Ballroom every December. This year David Mixner will present Oprah Winfrey with GLAAD Wrap's coveted Distinguished Achievement in Being Famous Trophy.

10) Muck Island Retreat, Muck Island, Malay Archipelago.

The property encompasses 14 acres of volcanic ash adjacent to Bugwa, the local seat of government, where visitors can engage in lively games of darts before the onset of the 6 p.m. curfew. Owner Harlan Menzies-Leung insists the disco and bar destroyed in the '98 earthquake will reopen soon. He also claims the compound's drinking water has been upgraded to potable since the 2003 cholera epidemic, and that security measures have improved since the last time bandits came through. ("It wasn't that bad," Menzies-Leung protests. "Just robberies all 'round, and lopping off the odd chunk of flesh.") The quicksand problem has never been addressed, however, and Menzies-Leung has yet to install toilets. Mosquitoes carrying dengue fever breed in stagnant pools among the slag. Spitting cockroaches frequently climb into beds, especially in ground-floor suites. Back bedrooms, especially those on the third floor, still offer sweeping views of the local cemetery, where monitor lizards exhume freshly buried corpses and eat them.

Runners-up include Wapiti Creek Step-Dance Camp, Northwest Territories, Canada; Svensen's Electroshock Hostel, Spitzbergen, Norway; The Ik Experience, Mbogo, Uganda; Stasi Torture Village, Oranienburg, Germany; and Chigger Town, St. Albans, Vermont.