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 what Reuters calls East Asia's largest Pride. The organisers, the Taiwan Rainbow Civil Action Association, counted more than 180,000 people in 2024. The 23rd edition, on 25 October 2025, drew around 150,000 per the CNA news agency and around 130,000 per Taiwan News. The 24th is on 31 October 2026, under the theme "Our Voices, Our Journey".

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.

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.

On 3 October 2026 Wanhua precinct police searched a gay bar in the neighbourhood under a court warrant, over a complaint of suspected breaches of public morals, and took 51 people to the station. Ten LGBT organisations signed a joint statement alleging that officers refused to show the warrant, ordered people to squat and barred them from talking or using their phones, as well as degrading remarks towards people with disabilities. Around 500 people protested by the Red House the next day. Taipei police disciplined six officers, four of them over the language used, and Mayor Chiang Wan-an apologised to those affected.

Taipei holds an LGBT infrastructure that is dense for the region, helped by one of the most advanced legal frameworks on the continent. Among the organisations are the Taiwan Rainbow Civil Action Association, which organises Pride, 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, legal gender change is still governed by a 2008 administrative directive requiring surgery, which the courts have declined to apply case by case since 2021, 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.