Paris

Paris holds one of the densest LGBTQI+ scenes in Europe. A 2004 count documented some 140 LGBT businesses among bars, clubs, hotels, restaurants and shops, and Le Marais takes most of them: three or four streets with more than forty venues you can cover in five minutes. Long-standing bars are still there, such as the Open Café, the Cox and the Duplex, along with the bookshop Les Mots à la Bouche, now in the 11th.

Outside the Marais there are secondary poles on the rise: Pigalle and SoPi, with a young queer crowd, Bastille and the 11th, with the fashionable nightlife, and Belleville, with the multicultural queer end.

The Marche des Fiertés de Paris has been held on the last weekend of June since 1977, and the first was on 25 June that year. It is coordinated by Inter-LGBT, a federation of more than eighty associations. In 1995 it drew 80,000 people and by 1996 it was already 120,000. In 1997 the city hosted EuroPride, with around 300,000. Recent editions have taken place in a tense political context because of the rise of the far right, with heavy mobilisation.

Outside June there is Sidaction, the annual anti-HIV campaign, and a cultural calendar of cabaret and queer arts that does not stop all year.

Le Marais has been Paris's LGBTQI+ neighbourhood since the eighties, spread across the 3rd and 4th arrondissements, on the Right Bank. The core is tightly packed, between rue des Archives, rue Vieille du Temple, rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie and rue du Temple, and it all fits into a five- to ten-minute walk.

Before the Marais, Paris's LGBT scene lived in Montmartre and Pigalle, in the early twentieth century, then in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the fifties, and on rue Sainte-Anne, between the sixties and the seventies. Le Marais is also the historic Jewish quarter. The métro stops are Hôtel de Ville, Saint-Paul, Rambuteau and Chemin Vert. The Centre Pompidou, Notre-Dame and the Place des Vosges are five to ten minutes away on foot.

Paris concentrates France's densest LGBTQI+ infrastructure. Inter-LGBT is the federation that organises the Marche, SOS Homophobie runs the anti-LGBT-phobia helpline and publishes an annual report, ACT UP Paris, founded in 1989, does HIV activism, and the Centre LGBT Paris Île-de-France provides a welcome and psychological and legal support. The tradition runs deep: the FHAR, the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire, was born in 1971 in the wake of May 68 and was the country's first major gay liberation movement.

Among health services, Le 190, the community sexual health centre in the 14th, runs PrEP and rapid testing, and the Saint-Louis and Bichat hospitals have reference HIV units. Checkpoint Paris, at 190 rue de Tolbiac, does rapid testing and PrEP. Post-exposure prophylaxis is available in hospital emergency departments, within a 48- to 72-hour window. And in the Jardin du Luxembourg stands the memorial to homosexual people deported by the Nazis.