The Best Gay Bars in the World

I want to be transparent with you about my methodology.

The research for this guide was conducted over approximately eight years, across four continents, in somewhere between sixty and eighty gay bars depending on how strictly you define the word "bar" and whether you are willing to count the place in Berlin that didn't have a sign, didn't have a door in the conventional sense, and operated on a social agreement so implicit that I still don't fully understand how I got in.

I count it. It was extraordinary. It is on the list.

The research involved late nights and early mornings and more conversations with bartenders than I can accurately tally and at least three instances of missing a flight because the night before had developed in directions I had not anticipated and could not, in good conscience, have left early. I have no regrets about any of the missed flights. The flights were rescheduled. The nights were not reproducible.

I am sharing this with you because I want you to understand that when I tell you a bar is worth traveling to — worth building an itinerary around, worth booking the flight for, worth the jet lag and the time zone adjustment and the morning after — I am telling you from a position of genuine, extensive, personally costly field research.

I have done the work.

You are welcome.

Before We Begin: What Makes a Gay Bar Actually Great

This is not a list of the biggest bars. It is not a list of the most Instagram-famous bars, or the bars with the best interior design, or the bars that appeared in a travel magazine published by someone who spent forty-eight hours in the city and called it research.

This is a list of bars that have the thing.

The thing is difficult to define precisely, which is why I'm going to attempt to define it precisely.

A great gay bar does three things simultaneously, and the bars that do all three are rare enough that when you find one, you know immediately. You feel it in the first five minutes. Something in the room settles around you like a key turning in a lock you didn't know you were carrying.

It makes you feel welcome before you've done anything to earn it. Not in the performative way — not the rainbow flag in the window and the corporate Pride merch behind the bar and the energy of a business that has decided gay people are a market segment worth pursuing. In the real way. The way where the bartender looks at you and the look says you're one of us, and means it, because everyone in the room is one of us, and the room was built for exactly that.

It has accumulated history. The great gay bars carry weight. They have been the backdrop of things — celebrations, heartbreaks, first kisses, last drinks before someone moved away or came out or started over. You can feel that weight in the walls when the walls are old enough to have absorbed it. The great bars are not new. They have been somewhere for a long time and they carry the accumulated presence of everyone who needed them.

It surprises you. Every great bar has at least one moment — a drag performance that recalibrates your understanding of what performance can be, a conversation with a stranger that goes somewhere you didn't expect, a song that drops at exactly the right moment, a view or a detail or an atmosphere that you were not prepared for and will not forget. The great bars don't let you be a passive observer. They pull you in and make you part of whatever is happening.

That is what I was looking for. That is what I found, in the bars on this list, in the cities they inhabit, in the rooms that have earned their place here.

NEW YORK CITY

Stonewall Inn — West Village

We begin here because we have to. Not out of obligation — I have no patience for obligatory reverence — but because the Stonewall Inn is genuinely, without qualification, the most important gay bar in the world, and visiting it is an experience that operates on multiple levels simultaneously that I want to prepare you for.

On the surface level, it is a bar. A relatively small bar, darker inside than you'd expect, with a long counter and a back room and walls covered in photographs and memorabilia and the visible evidence of a history that most places can only aspire to. The drinks are good. The crowd on any given night is a mix of locals, tourists, longtime regulars who have been drinking here for decades, and people who are there for the first time with the particular energy of pilgrimage.

On the deeper level, it is the place where everything changed.

The Stonewall Uprising of 1969 — the series of riots that began when the patrons of this bar decided, on a June night, that they were done being raided and arrested and harassed for the crime of existing in a room together — is the foundation of the modern gay rights movement. Everything that came after, every legal protection and social shift and moment of visibility, traces its lineage back to this bar, these people, this night.

I have been to Stonewall many times. I go when I need to remember why any of this matters. I go when I need to feel connected to something larger than myself and my particular moment in history. I go when I have visitors who need to understand, in physical terms, what it means to stand somewhere that changed the world.

I always feel it. Every time, without exception, I stand in that room and I feel the weight of what happened here and I think about the people who were here before me, the ones who were brave before bravery had the cultural support it has now, and I feel something I don't have a precise word for that sits between gratitude and responsibility.

Go to Stonewall. Have a drink. Stand there for a moment without looking at your phone.

Feel it.

The vibe: Historic, warm, mixed crowd, the specific electricity of a place that knows what it is. Busy on weekends, more intimate on weeknights, always worth it.

Go for: The history, the community, the feeling of being connected to something that started here and spread across the entire world.

Best night: A Tuesday in October when the tourists have thinned and the regulars are there and the bartender has been working here long enough to have stories.

The Boiler Room — East Village

The Boiler Room is the antidote to any bar on this list that gets too precious about itself, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.

It is a dive bar. An actual, un-ironic, un-renovated, un-aestheticized dive bar in the East Village that has been doing exactly what it does for longer than most of its current patrons have been drinking. The lighting is dim in the way of bars that are not making an editorial decision about ambiance but simply have not replaced a bulb. The pool table in the back is the real pool table that people actually play pool on, not the decorative pool table that never gets used because the room is too crowded to extend a cue.

The crowd is young and old and tattooed and not and every variety of gay and queer and questioning and not-sure-yet that the East Village has been producing and absorbing for decades. There is no dress code because the concept of a dress code would be genuinely offensive to the spirit of the room. There is no bottle service. There is a jukebox that people actually use, which is increasingly rare and therefore increasingly precious.

The Boiler Room is what gay bars were before gay bars became brands, and it is surviving in a city that has not been kind to unbranded things, and every time I go I tip generously because I want it to stay.

The vibe: Pure dive, authentic, loud, no-frills in the best possible way. The kind of bar that doesn't care what you're wearing or who you are outside this room.

Go for: A Tuesday night when you want to be somewhere real. The jukebox. The pool table. The particular freedom of a room with no pretensions.

Best night: Any weeknight. The Boiler Room on a weeknight is one of New York's best-kept secrets.

Hardware Bar — Hell's Kitchen

Hell's Kitchen is where Manhattan's gay nightlife relocated when the Village became too expensive to sustain it, and Hardware is one of the anchors of what that neighborhood has become — which is, on a Friday night, one of the most alive stretches of city in America.

Hardware is a bar for men, predominantly, and it does not apologize for this, and the energy inside it on a weekend night is something between a party and a community meeting — the kind of room where you go in knowing nobody and come out knowing several people whose last names you may or may not have caught but whose phone numbers are in your pocket.

The outdoor space, weather permitting, extends the bar onto the sidewalk in a way that the rest of the street catches and amplifies, and the whole block becomes something that feels, at its best, like what New York promises when you move here at twenty-two with nothing but ambition and a terrible apartment.

The vibe: Lively, social, predominantly male crowd, the specific energy of Hell's Kitchen on a weekend night when everyone is somewhere.

Go for: The sidewalk scene in summer. The crowd that has been coming here long enough to have regulars but welcomes new faces without making a thing of it.

Best night: Friday, early evening, when the happy hour transitions into something that doesn't have an end time.

LONDON

The Vauxhall Tavern — Vauxhall

The Vauxhall Tavern has been standing on the south bank of the Thames since 1863, which means it has outlasted empires, survived a World War, weathered the AIDS crisis, and emerged from a cultural moment that tried very hard to make it irrelevant looking, if anything, more essential than before.

It is a Victorian pub in the best possible sense — high ceilings, ornate details, the architectural confidence of a building that was built to last and has — with a stage in the corner where drag has been happening in various forms for so long that the building itself seems to understand it as structural rather than decorative.

The drag at the Vauxhall Tavern is not drag as entertainment. It is drag as tradition. It is drag as the living continuation of a performance art that has existed in this specific room for generations, passed from performer to performer like an inheritance, each new act adding to a legacy that you can feel in the room if you're paying attention.

I have watched performances at the Vauxhall Tavern that I have thought about for years afterward. Not because they were elaborate or technically perfect or well-funded. Because they were true. The performers at the Vauxhall understand something about their relationship with their audience that more polished venues frequently miss — that drag, at its best, is a conversation, not a presentation. The room talks back. The performer responds. Something is created between them that exists only in that room on that night and then disappears.

I have stood in that room and felt connected to the history of what I was watching in a way that is genuinely rare and genuinely moving, and I do not say that about many things.

The vibe: Historic, warm, drag-forward, the specific feeling of a room that has been a refuge for a long time and knows it.

Go for: The drag nights. The history. The feeling of standing somewhere that has been this thing for longer than you've been alive.

Best night: Saturday, when the room reaches its full capacity and the energy becomes something you carry home with you.

Halfway to Heaven — Trafalgar Square

The location alone would make this bar worth mentioning — a gay bar within sight of Trafalgar Square, in the geographic heart of London, a short walk from Buckingham Palace, which I mention only because the proximity feels, to me, like a small and satisfying statement about visibility.

But the location is not why it's on the list. It's on the list because Halfway to Heaven is the kind of pub that gay men of a certain age will tell you doesn't exist anymore, and here it is existing — a proper British pub with proper beer and proper mix of people, unpretentious in the way of places that have nothing to prove, and with a regulars crowd that treats newcomers with the specific warmth of a community that remembers what it means to need a place like this.

The karaoke nights are legendary. I use that word carefully. The karaoke at Halfway to Heaven is not the polished, rehearsed, semi-professional karaoke of the bars that have made it an aesthetic. It is the karaoke of people who came here on a Thursday night and ended up doing something they didn't plan and the room held them for it. It is joyful in a way that only unrehearsed things can be.

The vibe: Traditional British pub energy, unpretentious, warm, genuinely mixed across age and type.

Go for: The karaoke. The pints. The feeling of being somewhere central and real at the same time.

Best night: Thursday for karaoke. Sunday afternoon for the particular gentle pleasure of a British pub on a Sunday.

Eagle London — Vauxhall

Vauxhall has become, over the past two decades, the center of London's late-night gay scene in a way that has surprised people who remember when the center was Soho, and the Eagle is one of the reasons.

The Eagle is a leather bar, or it began as one, or it maintains enough of that DNA that the understanding between the room and its patrons involves a certain knowledge of what the room is and an appropriate level of commitment to being in it. It is not a bar you wander into accidentally. It is a bar you choose, deliberately, because you know what it is and you want to be somewhere that is unapologetically that thing.

The Vauxhall Eagle runs nights that have become genuine institutions — DTPM, Rufskin, events that the London gay calendar is organized around by people who know what they're doing and have been doing it long enough to know the difference between a great night and a merely good one. The sound system is serious. The crowd knows why they're there. The energy is specific and committed and if you are the right person for that room on the right night, it is an experience that is genuinely hard to find elsewhere at any price.

The vibe: Late night, leather and fetish heritage, serious music, committed crowd. Not for every traveler, essential for the right one.

Go for: The late nights. The music. The particular atmosphere of a room full of people who came here on purpose and intend to stay.

Best night: The monthly events. Research before you go. Arrive after midnight.

BERLIN

Möbel Olfe — Kreuzberg

Berlin's gay scene is vast and complex and could fill its own guide — and will, eventually, when I write it — but I want to start in Kreuzberg rather than the obvious places, because Möbel Olfe is the bar that made me understand Berlin's gay culture more clearly than any of the famous clubs did.

Möbel Olfe is a neighborhood bar in a former furniture store — the name means, roughly, Furniture Olfe — with floor-to-ceiling windows that look out onto the Kottbusser Tor intersection, which is one of the most alive urban spaces I have encountered anywhere in the world. The bar itself is unpretentious and affordable by any standard and absolutely packed on weekends with a crowd that is genuinely mixed across every axis of identity that exists in a city that takes its identity politics as seriously as Berlin does.

There is no door policy. There is no dress code. There is no VIP section. There is a bar, and tables, and the windows onto the street, and a crowd of people who are there because this is where they are on a Thursday night and they are happy about it.

I spent four hours at Möbel Olfe on my first trip to Berlin talking to a group of people I had never met and will probably never see again, and it was one of those conversations that recalibrates something. The kind where you come out the other side thinking about things differently than you did when you went in. Berlin does that. Möbel Olfe does that. The combination is potent.

The vibe: Neighborhood bar energy, genuinely mixed crowd, cheap drinks, the windows onto Kottbusser Tor that make the outside feel like part of the bar.

Go for: The crowd. The conversation. The feeling of being inside Berlin rather than observing it.

Best night: Thursday or Sunday. The Sunday crowd is particularly good.

Berghain — Friedrichshain

I am not going to pretend Berghain needs an introduction. It is the most written-about club in the world and the most debated door policy in the history of nightlife and approximately sixty percent of all gay travel conversations about Berlin eventually arrive here.

So I will not do an introduction. I will instead tell you three things that the other articles about Berghain don't tell you.

First: The door policy is not about what you're wearing. It is not a checklist of correct items that, if assembled, guarantee entry. It is about energy and intention and whether you read as someone who is there to be part of what is happening or there to observe what is happening from a safe distance. The regulars can spot the difference before you open your mouth. Go there to participate. Know what you're participating in. Mean it.

Second: The experience inside is genuinely unlike anything else available in gay nightlife, and I say this having been to a significant number of clubs in a significant number of cities. The space itself — a former power plant, with rooms that have the acoustic qualities of a cathedral and a darkness that is absolute and intentional — does something to the experience of music and movement and community that is architectural, not incidental. The sound system is the best in the world. This is not subjective. It is a fact that audio engineers agree on. What that means in practice is that the music does not play at Berghain. The music inhabits the room. You are inside the music. It is genuinely different.

Third: The Panorama Bar, upstairs, in the daylight hours of Sunday morning when the windows are revealed and the light comes in at an angle that makes everyone look like they are in a painting, is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in a nightlife context. If you go to Berghain and you leave before the Sunday morning light comes up in the Panorama Bar, you have left before the best part.

The vibe: Industrial, serious, completely dark, the most committed music experience in gay nightlife anywhere on earth.

Go for: The music. The architecture. The Sunday morning light in Panorama Bar. The experience of being somewhere that takes what it does completely seriously.

Best night: Saturday into Sunday. Arrive after midnight. Plan to stay.

SchwuZ — Neukölln

Where Berghain is serious and architectural and globally famous, SchwuZ is joyful and community-rooted and beloved in a way that requires less advance preparation and delivers something genuinely different.

SchwuZ has been running since 1977, which in Berlin years is practically ancient, and it has moved and evolved and survived things that closed lesser institutions, and it has arrived at its current Neukölln incarnation as something that functions like the community center of Berlin's queer scene — a place where the full spectrum of gay and queer Berlin actually shows up, across age and subculture and identity, united by the shared understanding that this is their place.

The parties are organized around different communities and sounds and nights, so the crowd shifts depending on when you go, but the through-line is an inclusivity that is real rather than performed. SchwuZ does not feel like a bar that has decided inclusivity is a market position. It feels like a place that has been genuinely building something for forty-plus years and knows what it has built.

I danced at SchwuZ until the lights came up and then I stood in the street outside in the early morning with three people I had met inside and we talked about where we were all from and how we had all ended up in Berlin and what we were all looking for, and it was the kind of conversation that only happens in cities that give you permission to be honest with strangers.

The vibe: Joyful, inclusive, community-rooted, the full spectrum of Berlin's queer scene in one room.

Go for: The community. The parties that have been running long enough to have regulars. The feeling of being inside something that has been built carefully over decades.

Best night: Depends on the party. Check their calendar. Go to the one that's been running the longest.

AMSTERDAM

Café 't Mandje — De Wallen

Café 't Mandje is the oldest gay bar in Amsterdam and one of the oldest in the world, having first opened in 1927 under the management of Bet van Beeren, a lesbian biker who became one of the great figures of Amsterdam's gay history and whose photograph still hangs behind the bar nearly a hundred years later.

The bar closed after her death in 1967 and remained closed, unchanged, for nearly four decades. It reopened in 2008 as a museum of itself as much as a functioning bar — the ties and handkerchiefs hanging from the ceiling are original, donated by customers over decades as part of a tradition that Bet started, and the space has the quality of a room that time preserved rather than passed through.

Drinking at Café 't Mandje is an act of historical communion that I am not ashamed to describe in those terms. You are in a room that has been this thing since 1927. You are drinking where people drank when being gay was not only illegal but genuinely dangerous, in a bar that existed as a refuge before the word refuge had attached itself to the concept of gay spaces. You are part of a lineage of people who needed this room and came here and were held by it.

The drinks are simple. The space is small. The history is enormous.

The vibe: Historic, intimate, the specific reverence of a room that has earned it.

Go for: The history. Bet's photograph. The ties on the ceiling. The understanding of what it means to stand somewhere that has been resisting for a hundred years.

Best night: Any night. Go in the afternoon if you want it quiet. Go on a weekend if you want the room alive.

Taboo Bar — Reguliersdwarsstraat

The Reguliersdwarsstraat is Amsterdam's main gay street — a short, dense stretch of bars and clubs in the city center that on a summer weekend becomes one of the most energetically gay stretches of public space on the continent.

Taboo is one of the anchors of the street, and what distinguishes it from the other bars in the immediate vicinity is a combination of factors that individually are unremarkable and collectively produce something specific and excellent: the right size, the right crowd, the right music, the right energy of a room that knows what it is and does it consistently.

The outdoor terrasse in summer is the Reguliersdwarsstraat at its best — tables spilling onto the street, the whole area alive with the particular joy of Amsterdam in warm weather, which is a city that takes summer personally because it only gets so many.

The vibe: Social, street-oriented, the beating heart of the Reguliersdwarsstraat on a good night.

Go for: Summer evenings on the terrasse. The social energy of a bar that is part of a street scene rather than isolated from it.

Best night: Friday or Saturday in June, July, or August. The terrasse in good weather is one of Europe's great gay bar experiences.

PARIS

Le Marais District — Multiple Bars

Paris's gay scene is concentrated in the Marais — the historic neighborhood in the 4th arrondissement that has been the center of Parisian gay life for decades — and the honest answer to "which bar in the Marais" is that the Marais itself is the experience, and the individual bars are movements within a larger piece of music.

That said:

Open Café is the terrace bar that functions as the Marais's living room — open to the street, always busy, the place where everyone passes through at some point in the evening whether they stay or not. It is the connective tissue of the neighborhood's social life, the bar you start at and return to, the place where you meet the group before going somewhere and reconvene when that somewhere gets too crowded.

Cox Bar is the institution — darker, more intimate, the bar that has been at the center of the Marais scene for long enough to have regulars who have been regulars for twenty years. The crowd is predominantly male and the vibe is unpretentious in the French way, which is a very specific kind of unpretentiousness that still somehow involves everyone looking good.

Raidd Bar is the one that out-of-towners have heard about, famous for the shower show that happens behind a glass wall — a Paris institution that has been running long enough to become genuinely iconic rather than merely notorious. It is exactly what it sounds like and it is done with a French confidence that somehow elevates it above spectacle into something that is, improbably, charming.

The vibe across the Marais: Sophisticated in the way Paris is sophisticated — effortlessly, maddeningly, entirely without apology. Gay Paris does not try to be gay Paris. It simply is.

Go for: The terrasse culture. The particular French quality of a gay neighborhood that is also a genuinely beautiful historic neighborhood. The feeling of being somewhere that is both gay and cosmopolitan in the same breath.

Best night: Any warm evening when you can sit outside and watch the Marais do what the Marais does.

BARCELONA

Arena Madre — Eixample

The Gayxample — the section of the Eixample neighborhood where Barcelona's gay nightlife concentrates — is one of the great gay neighborhoods in Europe, and Arena Madre is one of the reasons it earned that status.

Arena Madre runs late in the Spanish manner, which means it does not begin to exist until midnight and reaches its full expression somewhere around three in the morning, which if you are accustomed to New York closing times requires an adjustment of both schedule and expectation. The adjustment is worth making. What happens in a Barcelona club at three in the morning is not what happens anywhere at midnight, and the crowd that arrives at that hour has made a commitment to the night that expresses itself in the dancing.

The music policy skews toward the pop and Latin sounds that Barcelona's gay scene has claimed as its own — commercial in the best possible sense, meaning that everyone in the room knows all the words and is not embarrassed about knowing all the words and the collective energy of a room full of people singing songs they love at three in the morning is one of the great available human experiences.

The vibe: Late night Barcelona, pop and Latin music, a crowd that arrived with intention and plans to stay.

Go for: The music. The late-night Barcelona experience. The specific joy of a room full of people who came here to dance and are doing exactly that.

Best night: Saturday, after midnight. Do not arrive early. Eat dinner first. This is Spain.

Punto BCN — Eixample

If Arena Madre is where you go to dance until four in the morning, Punto BCN is where you go first — the warm-up bar, the place where the Gayxample night begins and where the social architecture of the evening gets established.

Punto BCN is smaller and more bar-like and less club-like, and the energy in the earlier evening hours is the social energy of people arranging themselves for the night ahead. It is the bar where you meet the group, where you run into people you met two nights ago, where the conversations that will continue into the club begin.

It also has the specific quality of the best Spanish bars, which is that the staff treat you like you are welcome rather than like you are a transaction, and this seemingly small distinction produces an atmosphere that the bars which don't have it spend a lot of money on design trying to replicate and never quite manage.

The vibe: Social, warm-up bar energy, the beginning of a Barcelona gay night rather than the destination of one.

Go for: Early evening, before the clubs open. The crowd. The conversations that start here and end somewhere else.

Best night: Friday or Saturday from ten onwards, when the neighborhood is assembling itself for what comes next.

MYKONOS

Pierro's — Mykonos Town

Mykonos runs its nightlife at a scale and intensity that is somewhat absurd and entirely correct for the island it is, and Pierro's is the bar at the center of that absurdity — one of the oldest gay bars in Mykonos, operating since the 1970s, a genuine piece of the island's history dressed up in the sequins of its present.

Pierro's is loud. It is crowded. It does drag shows that are performed with the particular energy of people who know they are performing for an audience that has traveled from multiple continents to be in this room tonight, and the shows rise to meet that energy in a way that is, frankly, impressive. The music is unrepentant pop and club, the crowd is international and beautiful and has been drinking since approximately noon, and the whole thing operates at an emotional temperature that you have to experience to believe.

It is not subtle. It is not supposed to be subtle. Subtlety is not what you came to Mykonos for and Pierro's knows it and performs accordingly.

I have stood in Pierro's at one in the morning watching a drag queen command a room of two hundred people from twelve countries and thought: this is the gay bar as pure expression of itself. No apology. No context needed. Just this room, these people, this music, this island, this specific and unrepeatable night.

The vibe: Loud, theatrical, international crowd, peak Mykonos energy contained in one room.

Go for: The drag shows. The crowd. The feeling of being somewhere that is doing what it does at full volume without apology.

Best night: Any night in peak season. Arrive after midnight. Prepare for volume.

Babylon — Mykonos Town

Where Pierro's is theatrical and loud, Babylon is the Mykonos bar that operates at a slightly lower register — which in Mykonos terms still means considerably louder than most bars anywhere else, but the scale is more intimate and the energy is more social and the crowd tends toward the people who want to be in the conversation rather than in the performance.

The terrace, overlooking the narrow streets of the old town, is one of the great places to drink on the island — not because it is the most dramatic view Mykonos offers, but because it puts you at the perfect elevation to watch the town happen beneath you while remaining connected to the room behind you.

I have had some of my better Mykonos conversations at Babylon. This is my way of saying that the bar allows for conversation, which is less common than it sounds in a place where the default volume setting is aspirational.

The vibe: More intimate than Pierro's, social, the old town setting, terrace with views.

Go for: The terrace. The conversation. The version of Mykonos that is slightly more human-scaled.

Best night: Early evening into night, before the island reaches maximum intensity.

PUERTO VALLARTA

CC Slaughters — Romantic Zone

Puerto Vallarta's Romantic Zone has more gay bars per square foot than almost anywhere on earth, and on a weekend night the streets between them become a party that renders the distinction between inside and outside essentially meaningless.

CC Slaughters is the anchor — the bar that has been doing this in the Romantic Zone for longer than the neighborhood's current reputation and that still, despite everything that has grown up around it, maintains the energy of a place that loves what it does and does it without overcalculation.

The rooftop terrace is where you want to be in the early evening, watching the Romantic Zone assemble itself below you as the day transitions into night. From up there the whole neighborhood is visible — the other bars opening, the streets filling, the ocean visible at the end of the block — and it gives you a sense of what Puerto Vallarta's gay scene actually is, which is a community that has chosen this place and made it theirs in a way that is genuine and deeply rooted.

The vibe: Anchor bar energy, rooftop terrace, the Romantic Zone in full expression.

Go for: The rooftop. The early evening crowd. The feeling of watching Puerto Vallarta's gay night begin from the best possible vantage point.

Best night: Friday, from sunset onwards. The rooftop at sunset is a non-negotiable PV experience.

La Noche — Romantic Zone

La Noche is the bar that Puerto Vallarta's gay community goes to when it wants to be itself without the tourist layer — the local bar, the neighborhood bar, the place where the men who live here year-round drink alongside the visitors who have been coming long enough to feel like regulars.

It is smaller and less produced than some of the Romantic Zone's more famous venues, and this is exactly what makes it worth seeking out. The drag shows at La Noche have a quality of intimacy that the larger venues can't replicate — the performers know the crowd, the crowd knows the performers, and the relationship between them has the warmth of a community inside joke that welcomes you in rather than leaving you outside.

I sat at La Noche on a Sunday night with a group of people, some of whom had been coming to PV for twenty years, and listened to them talk about what the Romantic Zone was and what it is now and what they hope it stays, and it was the kind of conversation that travel makes possible and that you carry home with you like the best kind of souvenir.

The vibe: Local, intimate, the real Puerto Vallarta underneath the tourist layer.

Go for: The drag shows. The Sunday night crowd. The conversations with people who know this place properly.

Best night: Sunday. The Sunday energy in PV is its own specific thing and La Noche captures it.

TEL AVIV

Shpagat — Florentin

Tel Aviv is the gay capital of the Middle East and one of the most surprising cities on earth for gay travel, and I want to make an argument for going there that doesn't just rely on the descriptor "surprisingly gay-friendly" because that framing has always bothered me slightly.

Tel Aviv is not surprisingly gay-friendly. Tel Aviv is aggressively, structurally, unapologetically gay-friendly in a way that is built into the culture of the city at a level that makes "surprisingly" feel like an underestimation. The gay scene in Tel Aviv operates with a confidence and openness and total absence of self-consciousness that reflects a city that has, genuinely and thoroughly, incorporated this community into its identity.

Shpagat is in Florentin, the neighborhood that does for Tel Aviv what the East Village does for New York — the bohemian, artistic, slightly rough-around-the-edges area where the real culture of the city lives before it gets polished and moved somewhere more expensive. It is a small bar with an outdoor area that spills onto the street, and the crowd is the crowd of a neighborhood bar in a neighborhood that is full of interesting people who have things to say.

The conversations at Shpagat are the best thing about Shpagat. Not the drinks, not the design, not the music, though none of these are bad. The conversations. Tel Avivians talk in a way that is direct and warm and slightly fierce and entirely without the social performance that makes conversations in some cities exhausting, and Shpagat is a room where that quality concentrates.

The vibe: Neighborhood bar, Florentin energy, direct and warm and slightly fierce.

Go for: The conversations. The neighborhood. The understanding of Tel Aviv that exists outside the beach and the famous clubs.

Best night: Thursday, which is the Israeli Friday.

Evita — Tel Aviv

Evita is the institution — the bar that has been at the center of Tel Aviv's gay scene for long enough to have regulars who can tell you the history of the room and what the neighborhood was when it opened and how the scene has changed and what has stayed the same.

It is on Yehuda HaLevi Street in the heart of the city and the crowd it draws on a weekend night is the full spectrum of Tel Aviv's gay community — young and not-so-young, tourist and local, the people who came here for Pride and the people who are here year-round because this is where they live and where they belong.

The rooftop bar at Evita, on a warm Tel Aviv night — and Tel Aviv nights are warm for a remarkably large portion of the year — is the kind of place that makes you think about what you want your life to look like. Not in an aspirational, Instagram way. In the genuine way. The kind of thinking that happens when you are somewhere beautiful and comfortable and fully yourself and you realize that you want to be somewhere beautiful and comfortable and fully yourself considerably more often than you currently are.

Book the trip. Think the thoughts. Let Evita be the backdrop.

The vibe: Institution, full spectrum of Tel Aviv's gay community, rooftop bar that produces genuine reflection.

Go for: The rooftop. The mix of local and international. The feeling of a city that takes its gay community seriously.

Best night: Friday into Saturday, when the city is fully alive and the rooftop is at its best.

TOKYO

Advocates Bar — Shinjuku Ni-chome

Shinjuku Ni-chome is one of the denser concentrations of gay bars on earth — a small area of Tokyo's Shinjuku district that contains several hundred gay bars in a space that would, in any Western city, contain perhaps a dozen. The bars are small, sometimes tiny, often themed around specific communities or interests, and the experience of Ni-chome is less like a neighborhood with bars and more like a city made entirely of bars, each one a different universe.

Advocates is the exception — the large, Western-style bar where people who want a more familiar experience congregate, where the non-Japanese tourists find each other, and where the crowds from the surrounding smaller bars come when they want to be somewhere that can hold a crowd.

But I want to push back gently on the idea that Advocates is the destination in Ni-chome. It is the starting point. The destination is the small bars.

Go to Advocates first. Get your bearings. Have a drink. Meet someone who will point you toward the bar that's right for you — the jazz bar, the bear bar, the bar that's been open since the 1970s and has a clientele whose average age reflects it, the bar that serves no alcohol only coffee and green tea and operates as a different kind of gay refuge entirely.

Ni-chome is not one bar. Ni-chome is an argument that gay community, in its most concentrated form, produces something that cannot be replicated anywhere else, and the argument is correct.

The vibe: Gateway to Ni-chome, Western-familiar, the place where the evening begins rather than ends.

Go for: The entry point. The people who will direct you deeper into the neighborhood. The beginning of an evening that will not go where you expect.

Best night: Friday or Saturday, early in the evening. Then disappear into the smaller bars. Return to Advocates when you need to reconvene.

SYDNEY

The Oxford Hotel — Darlinghurst

Oxford Street in Sydney's Darlinghurst neighborhood has been the center of Australian gay culture for decades — the street that Sydney Pride marches down, the street that has seen the AIDS crisis and the marriage equality fight and every significant moment of Australian gay history expressed in public — and the Oxford Hotel is one of its oldest and most enduring institutions.

The Oxford is big in the way of Australian pubs, which means bigger than you're expecting if you're arriving from the more intimate bars of Europe, and it operates across multiple levels with different energies on each floor, which means the Oxford you experience on a given night depends on which floor you end up on and who's there.

The rooftop, on a Sydney summer night — and Sydney summers are the kind of summer that make you understand why people move to Australia and never leave — is one of the great outdoor bar experiences on the gay travel circuit. The city is visible around you. The air is warm and slightly salted from the harbor. The crowd is the crowd of a city that has been through a lot and come out the other side with a particular quality of resilience that expresses itself, in the best Sydney bars, as pure unguarded joy.

The vibe: Australian pub scale, multiple floors, the resilience and joy of Sydney's gay community in physical form.

Go for: The rooftop in summer. The Oxford Street context. The feeling of being on the street that Australian gay history was made on.

Best night: Saturday in December or January, when the Sydney summer is at full volume.

THE BARS THAT ARE GONE: A NECESSARY GRIEF

I cannot write this guide without this section, even though it will not be the most fun part of the guide to read, because the best travel writing is honest about loss as well as about discovery.

The following bars are gone. They are gone because rents went up, or because the neighborhood changed, or because the owner died and nobody could sustain the thing they had built, or because the culture shifted in ways that left them behind, or simply because the world is not always careful with beautiful things.

I mention them here because they shaped me and shaped the cities they were in and shaped the people who went to them, and because the gay bars we have now exist in a lineage that includes the ones we lost, and understanding that lineage is part of understanding what we're protecting when we go to the ones that are still standing and spend our money there.

The Lure, New York. A leather bar in the Meatpacking District that closed in 2004, when the Meatpacking District became something else entirely. The building is a restaurant now. The restaurant is good. I cannot fully enjoy it.

Barcode, London. One of the great Vauxhall institutions, gone. The community it built still exists in the people it brought together.

Substation South, Sydney. A two-decade institution on Oxford Street that closed in 2010 and left a gap in the neighborhood's late-night landscape that has never been entirely filled.

I could continue. I won't, because the list gets long and the grief gets complicated and this guide is supposed to give you places to go rather than places to mourn.

But go to the ones that are still standing. Go specifically and intentionally and gratefully, because they are standing and that is not guaranteed and the world gets worse each time one of them closes.

The List You're Going to Screenshot

Because I know some of you skipped to here, and I understand completely:

New York: Stonewall Inn, The Boiler Room, Hardware Bar London: The Vauxhall Tavern, Halfway to Heaven, Eagle London Berlin: Möbel Olfe, Berghain, SchwuZ Amsterdam: Café 't Mandje, Taboo Bar Paris: Open Café, Cox Bar, Raidd Bar Barcelona: Arena Madre, Punto BCN Mykonos: Pierro's, Babylon Puerto Vallarta: CC Slaughters, La Noche Tel Aviv: Shpagat, Evita Tokyo: Advocates Bar / Shinjuku Ni-chome Sydney: The Oxford Hotel

The Last Thing

I want to end where I always end when I write about gay bars, which is with the thing that all of these places have in common beneath the differences of city and culture and character and history.

They all exist because someone decided we needed somewhere to be.

Not somewhere to be tolerated. Not somewhere to be managed or monitored or permitted in controlled quantities. Somewhere to be fully, unreservedly, loudly and quietly and in every register of human experience, ourselves. Someone built the first gay bar in every city on this list at a time when building it required courage, and the people who came to those first bars came with a need so fundamental that they came despite the risk, and what accumulated in those rooms over decades of people needing them is something that you can feel in the walls when the walls are old enough to have held it.

We are the inheritors of all of that.

When you walk into any bar on this list and you feel the thing — the key turning in the lock, the glass wall dissolving, the particular relief of arriving somewhere that was built for you — you are feeling the accumulated intention of everyone who built these places and everyone who needed them and everyone who fought, in ways large and small, for the right to have them.

That is what I want you to carry when you travel. Not just the list. The understanding of what the list represents. The rooms and the history and the people and the courage that made them possible.

Now go find your bar.

I'll help you get there.

Be nice to Fluffy. Love Fluffy. Let Fluffy plan the trip that ends in the bar where you finally exhale.

Fluffy is a Manhattan-based luxury gay travel specialist, professional field researcher in gay bars across four continents, and the self-appointed historian of every room that ever made a gay man feel like he belonged. Luxury gay travel, planned by someone who actually goes — and who always stays until last call.