Brighton

St James's Street, in Kemptown, is Brighton's queer artery: LGBTQI+ bars and pubs that fill every night and spill onto the pavements on sunny weekends, with a density of venues that rivals anywhere in Europe. The offer balances a relaxed pub culture with clubs, cabaret and drag.

The reference names are Revenge, one of the biggest gay clubs in southern England, where stars of RuPaul's Drag Race pass through, Legends, a bar with a seafront terrace and a gay hotel above it, The Bulldog, a gay pub since 1979, and The Queens Arms, for cabaret.

Brighton & Hove Pride is the biggest Pride in the UK: from a march in 1973 to today's festival, it brings around 500,000 people into the city in the first week of August, with a community parade from the seafront up to Preston Park, where the festival has been held since 1996, and with St James's Street closed off for the village party.

There is also Trans Pride Brighton, in July, founded in 2013 as the UK's first specifically trans Pride and today the largest of its kind in Europe. Recent Pride line-ups have featured names such as Mariah Carey and the Sugababes.

Kemptown isn't just nightlife: it's a real resident community. The Kemptown census area, which in the 2021 census takes in neither the Kemp Town Estate nor the run of bars on St James’s Street, has 20.1% LGB+ residents, the highest share of any area in the country. The city as a whole sits at 10.7%, the highest in England and Wales. St James's Street lines bars, cafés, specialist shops and gay hotels; around it, 10–15 min on foot from the centre, the whole neighbourhood breathes LGBTQI+ year-round.

Brighton has a very strong LGBTQI+ community fabric: Switchboard (helpline since 1975), MindOut (LGBT mental health), Allsorts (youth), The Clare Project (trans). For sexual health, the NHS Brighton Sexual Health (SHAC) and the Claude Nicol Centre offer HIV/STI testing, PrEP and PEP free without referral; Terrence Higgins Trust runs testing in the city. The «Tay» AIDS memorial, Romany Mark Bruce's sculpture installed in New Steine Gardens in 2009, is living memory.