Amsterdam

Amsterdam has a compact LGBTQI+ scene you can walk end to end, with more than forty venues spread across three axes that sit very close together. Reguliersdwarsstraat, the classic gay one, is 200 metres from the Amstel and Rembrandtplein, where the mixed and lesbian scenes meet, and 600 from Warmoesstraat, the leather one, inside the red light district. The whole gay core can be covered in a quarter of an hour.

The mix runs from the long-standing brown cafés, the bruin cafés, to Café 't Mandje, the city's oldest gay bar, opened in 1927, along with classic bars, clubs such as NYX and leather bars. The scene dipped between 2005 and 2014, but it revived with the refurbishment of Reguliersdwarsstraat and the return of Soho and Taboo.

Pride Amsterdam runs for nine days, in the first week of August. The central event is the Canal Parade on the first Saturday, when some eighty decorated boats sail the Prinsengracht and the Amstel, something no other city does. The organisers speak of around 500,000 people, and the crowd packs the bridges and the canal edges.

Unlike other European Prides, Amsterdam's was born in 1996 as a celebration rather than a protest march, because by then the rights were already secured. The nine-day programme includes the Pride Walk, which is political, the Drag Olympics, concerts on Rembrandtplein and in Westerpark and exhibitions at the Homomonument. Around it sit the Milkshake Festival in July, queer and inclusive, with around 30,000 people, and King's Day, on 27 April, which without being LGBT has a strong queer presence.

Reguliersdwarsstraat has been Amsterdam's historic gay axis since the eighties, one block south of Rembrandtplein. The street is tiny, 250 metres end to end, but it concentrates the classic bars: Soho, once a club and now a bar, Taboo and NYX. It revived after the 2014 refurbishment.

The complementary axis is on the Amstel and Halvemaansteeg, with the lesbian and mixed scene. Café 't Mandje, on Zeedijk beside Nieuwmarkt, opened in 1927 and is the city's oldest gay bar: it closed in 1982 and reopened, restored, in 2008. Warmoesstraat, inside the red light district, is the leather axis. Here the gay neighbourhood is not a district but several streets a few minutes' walk from one another inside the Centrum.

Amsterdam holds the longest-running LGBT infrastructure in the world. The Dutch COC, founded in 1946, is the oldest continuously operating LGBT organisation in the world and is headquartered here. And Pink Point, on Westermarkt beside the Homomonument, has offered LGBT information, maps and souvenirs since 1998.

On health, the Amsterdam GGD, the public service, does free rapid HIV and STI testing and runs the national PrEP programme, with free consultation and follow-up for those at high risk, though the pills are paid for at the pharmacy. The OLVG hospital has the national reference unit for sexually transmitted infections and HIV. And the Homomonument is still an active meeting point and place of memory.