Boston

Boston has fewer gay bars than its size would suggest, and you are better off knowing that before you arrive. The veteran is Club Café (209 Columbus Avenue), open since 1983, working at once as a restaurant, a cabaret room and a dance floor. Cathedral Station (1222 Washington Street) is a gay sports bar that filled the hole left by Fritz when it closed and took on part of its staff. And dbar (1236 Dorchester Avenue) serves dinner until nine, half nine on Fridays and Saturdays, and then turns into a nightspot.

Then there is the clock, which in Boston matters more than you would think. Bars normally shut around two, so the night begins and ends earlier than in New York. If you are coming from southern Europe, move your evening forward a couple of hours.

Boston's first Pride march set off on 26 June 1971 with around 300 people and stopped at four points in the city. Half a century later, in 2021, the organisation behind it, Boston Pride, dissolved after years of internal disagreement and the city was left without a parade.

In September 2022 a new committee formed, Boston Pride for the People, and the parade returned in June 2023. It leaves Copley Square at eleven in the morning, crosses the South End and finishes on Boston Common, about three kilometres. The 2026 edition was on 6 June, a week earlier than usual to avoid clashing with the World Cup, under the theme «Pride as Protest: Since 1776».

The reason is material and not at all romantic. After the Second World War the South End was full of single-sex rooming houses, cheap places where an unmarried man could live without anyone asking why he had not married. The neighbourhood turned into a refuge that way, without anyone declaring it one.

What remains today is over 300 acres of Victorian row houses, the largest intact stretch in the country, with the small garden squares in the middle of the streets copied from 18th-century English models. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1973 and is still the neighbourhood with the strongest LGBTQI+ presence in the city.

In 1971 two Northeastern University students, David Scondras and Linda Beane, opened a drop-in centre in the basement of a senior centre. They called it the Fenway Community Health Center. In 1981 it made the first AIDS diagnosis in New England, and in 1994 it was one of eight sites chosen to recruit participants for the first clinical trial of an HIV vaccine.

Today it is the largest LGBTQI+ health and research facility in the United States, with more than 600 staff. It provides medical care, behavioural health, dental, eye care and a pharmacy, runs HIV prevention and its own counselling, testing and referral programme, and houses the National LGBTQIA+ Health Education Center within the Fenway Institute. For a visitor that means there is somewhere to go without relying on stumbling across a sympathetic doctor.