It was 2008 and for the first time, American citizens were allowed to apply for a ‘work-holiday visa’ to temporarily live and work in Australia. Being the gypsy that I am, I couldn’t resist the urge to swim with the crocodiles and frolic with the kangaroos. After getting my visa approval, I packed two suitcases and boarded a one-way flight to Sydney.

I knew absolutely no one on the other end. My only lead was a Mormon family I was referred to by an old missionary friend. I landed at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport and that gracious family picked up this gay Mormon gypsy and drove me back to their suburban home… two hours from Sydney. The basement room, in the suburbs, wasn’t quite the experience I had envisioned. Despair set in. I thought to myself, ‘How am I ever going to find a nice place to live with someone like me? Surely there must be a website or something for gay people to find roommates.’ There wasn’t.

After reaching out to friends of friends and spending several nights out meeting people on Sydney’s Oxford Street, eventually I met a guy on a street corner who introduced me to a guy, who offered me a temporary place in the city while I looked for something more permanent. Eventually I found a place, but two years later I relocated to New York and again, the hunt to find a roommate was on. It wasn’t that I was ‘heterophobic’, I just felt more comfortable living with gays. Again, I looked for a quality website to find a gay roommate. Nothing. A few years later I moved to Los Angeles… nothing. Then Madrid, then Barcelona, then Miami… still nothing. You get the picture.

So in early 2020 I decided I was done waiting for ‘someone’ to build a website. I was going to build my own. I wanted to provide a safe, quality resource specifically for the LGBTQ+ community to easily find roommates all over the world. I wanted to provide a way for people to connect with others to live, or spend time, in places they’ve always wanted to see and experience. I wanted to connect gay faces with gay spaces, and that’s why I created gayoom8.com.

It’s a small gay world.   

Jake Reid
CEO & Founder
gayroom8.com

 “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

–H. Jackson Brown, Jr.