Taipei

The Ximending Red House is the heart: some twenty gay bars on the plaza around the century-old theatre, with the terraces blending into a shared courtyard, a format that exists in no other city in Asia. The best known are the Café Dalida, the classic one with a mixed crowd, and the Bear Bar. They open in the late evening and keep going until two or three in the morning at weekends.

Da'an supplies the club pole and the occasional circuit parties, Xinyi adds sophisticated cocktail bars and events in international hotels, and Songshan and Minsheng form the alternative queer circuit, more daytime than night. Taipei mixes the tourist scene of Ximen with a very open local LGBT culture, in large part thanks to the legal and symbolic weight of marriage equality since 2019.

Taiwan Pride (台灣同志遊行) is the biggest Pride in East Asia: the October 2019 edition drew more than 200,000 participants, and the 2024 edition (26 Oct) gathered 180,000 people. It is held on the last Saturday of October, organised by the Taiwan LGBT Pride Community.

The first march took place on 1 November 2003, coinciding with the fourth Taipei Fun Festival, walking from Hengyang Road to the Red House in Ximending. The 2005 march set off from the Eslite bookshop on Dunhua South Road. Pride shares its symbolism with 24 May 2019, the day Taiwan became the first country in Asia with marriage equality. Supporting calendar: LGBT events at the Red House all year round.

Ximending, in the Wanhua district, is Taipei's historic LGBT area. The core is the plaza of the Red House Theater, an octagonal 1908 building turned cultural centre whose rear plaza holds some twenty gay bars with their terraces running together. It is the most singular open-plaza format in Asia.

The area appears in every edition of Taiwan Pride, and the first march, in 2003, ended right here. You get there by metro, at Ximen station, on the Bannan and Songshan-Xindian lines, two minutes' walk from the Red House. Ximending combines the gay scene with the region's youth culture, between street food, Taiwanese fashion and pedestrian alleys, and that coexistence defines the neighbourhood's character and makes it comfortable by day and by night.

Taipei holds an LGBT infrastructure that is dense for the region, helped by the most advanced legal framework on the continent. Among the organisations are the Taiwan LGBT Pride Community, which has organised Pride since 2003, the Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association, with social services and a helpline, and GagaOOLala, the LGBT streaming platform headquartered here.

Legally, marriage equality arrived on 24 May 2019, the first in Asia, joint adoption by same-sex couples in 2023, gender change without surgery has been recognised by the courts since 2021 although it remains unregulated by law, and anti-discrimination protection in education has existed nationally since 2004. Among health services, the Taipei City Hospital Renai branch has a friendly clinic and PrEP, there are private clinics in Da'an and Ximen, and the Taiwan Lourdes Association runs free HIV testing.