Tall people find community and relief at traveling meetup tour

What usually draws stares instead felt ordinary inside a Seattle sports bar, where hundreds of unusually tall people packed shoulder to shoulder and, for a few hours, blended into a crowd built to their scale. Women in high heels and men who normally duck under door frames talked about shoe sizes, airplane seats and the exhaustion of hearing the same basketball question again and again.

The traveling meetup, called Tall Tour, began almost by accident, its founder Tyler Bergantino said. Bergantino, a 6-foot-9 former software salesman turned TikTok creator, said a casual social-media invitation while he was traveling through Texas took off on its own. “It created itself,” he said. Since launching last summer, the tour has stopped in 19 cities, growing from 30 people at an early gathering in Tampa, Florida, to about 4,000 in Orlando, with about 750 turning out in Seattle.

The events have become part social meetup, part dating scene and part support group. Participants trade practical advice on clothes and shoes, swap stories about cramped airline rows and low door frames, and describe the social friction that can come with standing far above average in public. Ksenia Protasenko said dating as a tall woman can make people see her as intimidating, and that many men immediately ask whether she plays basketball. She said she has a standing comeback about mini golf.

In Seattle, organizers added a pageant-style flourish by crowning the tallest man and woman in attendance. The titles went to Susan Mullendore, 44 and 6-foot-5, and her son Grayson, 19 and 7 feet tall. Susan Mullendore said seeing her son have that experience “meant the world” to her. The tour’s official site describes the gatherings as “all sizes welcome,” while also advertising a VIP space for tall people with minimum height requirements of 5-foot-8 for ladies and 6-foot-1 for gentlemen. It also sells branded merchandise built around tall-people jokes, including “can you move your seat up?” and “no, i don’t play basketball.”

The appeal reaches beyond novelty. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reference data put average U.S. adult height at about 5 feet 9 inches for men and about 5 feet 4 inches for women, which helps explain why people far above that range often stand out everywhere they go. A 2025 review in PLOS Mental Health described height as a highly visible and socially significant trait, and linked height dissatisfaction in the literature to self-esteem, body image concerns, anxiety and depression. Another scholarly review described prejudice based on stature as heightism, noting that height has long mattered in employment, education and social relationships. Tall Tour turns that visibility into something else: a room where being noticed first can briefly feel like belonging.