<p>The primary aim of this article is to offer a preliminary mapping of public spaces along the Bulgarian Black Sea coast which, although originally designed as sites for staging heterosexual holiday romances, were appropriated in the 1960s by queer men in ways that enabled same-sex sexual practices. Previously unpublished archival materials concerning the situation of LGB tourists, including investigative files produced by Polish and Bulgarian security services as well as the private correspondence of the writer Wilhelm Mach, are analyzed in parallel with press publications on the Bulgarian Riviera, that is, with information that entered the official mass media. This juxtaposition makes it possible, on the one hand, to reconstruct everyday practices of counteracting violence and homophobia, and on the other, to show how dominant heteronormative discourses shaped the spaces of resistance, communication, and self-description of LGB tourists. At the same time, the analysis of descriptions of Black Sea resorts, beaches, and towns where same-sex sexual encounters were possible demonstrates that these sites were constructed spaces shaped not only by state and social control, but also by dynamics of cooperation and contestation linked to class, economic resources, cultural and political capital, as well as colonial narratives that orientalize the Balkans. In order to trace how queer desire became intermittently legible within ostensibly heteronormative environments the article combines the concept of the sexual field developed by Adam Isaiah Green and adapts it to conditions of surveillance by incorporating insights from Alexander Kondakov and Grzegorz Niziołek on the fragmentation of public space and the emergence of counterpublic practices.</p>