Tourists travel for lots of reasons.

Some go to see places with famous or historic buildings. Others want to spend their days in world-class museums and their nights in world-class restaurants. Maybe they also want to be in a place with a rich cultural heritage. There’s also the travel-to-shop set, of course—folks who have money to burn and want to go somewhere where they can spend it.

Still others look for fun and sun—great beaches, trails, golf courses and parks. Then again, many travelers, especially young professional gays, want a glitzy sundown to sun-up nightclub scene, with dazzling video screens, throbbing dance floors and big-name DJs.

There are lots of vacation destinations that have those things, but very few that have all of them.

Welcome to Chicago.

Sure—there are other cities in the world that offer as much as Chicago, but not many. And for gay people, even places such as New York can’t match the combination of experiences that Chicago offers. Look, after all, at our city’s miles of lakefront parks, capped by the spectacular downtown gems in Millennium Park and Grant Park.

Visitors can spend their days in our incredible museums, relaxing in our beautiful parks and shopping on the Magnificent Mile. They can have dinner at some of the world’s finest dining establishments or great casual fare at any one of thousands of diverse cafes and restaurants.

In the evening, Chicago offers one of the world’s best theater scenes, from Broadway-caliber productions downtown to groundbreaking works by tomorrow’s giants in scores of smaller theaters around the city.

And after dark, gay folks find clubs waiting for them all over Chicago—downtown, in Andersonville, Edgewater, the South Side or Rogers Park—or they can just head to North Halsted Street, a concentrated gay entertainment district with a broad array of choices, just like the gay nightclub scenes that used to exist in San Francisco’s Castro and New York’s Greenwich Village.

So why aren’t we telling anybody about it? More to the point, why aren’t we telling every gay person in the world about it?

Leaders in cities such as Philadelphia, Toronto, Montreal and Buenos Aires get it. They’re far ahead of Chicago in promoting their cities to gays as tourist destinations.

It’s easy to understand why—officials in those cities know that once gay tourists get to their destination, they tend to spend far more than the average visitor.

Officials in those cities have also figured out something else—promoting gay tourism is like finding the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s an incredibly cheap investment. Spend a little bit advertising in gay newspapers and magazines around the United States and Canada, even in Europe and Latin America if you want to be ambitious, and your city can walk away with millions of dollars in money spent in hotels, restaurants, clubs and stores. It really is that lucrative a business.

Just ask officials in Mexico City. They recently announced a new effort to attract gay tourists. Eventually, they believe, that small investment is going to translate into an annual economic impact of more than 250 million dollars.

That’s a lot of jobs and a substantial tax stream.

Right now, on the other hand, the City of Chicago spends nothing to advertise itself to gay tourists. Tomorrow’s not soon enough to begin to rectify that shortcoming and start reaping some of the many benefits other cities are already enjoying.

After all, we’ve already got more star attractions than almost anyone else. We just need to get in the game.