Los Angeles

The Los Angeles scene is huge and scattered, which is the opposite of what people expect when they arrive looking for one street with everything on it. Across the county there are more than fifty gay bars, but the densest cluster is in West Hollywood, an independent municipality with its own page here.

Inside the city of Los Angeles, the queer neighbourhood is Silver Lake, with Akbar as its anchor; next door in Los Feliz there's the gay sports bar Hi Tops. Downtown has both Precinct, big and full of themed nights, and The New Jalisco, a cheap spot with a local Latino crowd, a dance floor and drag. In North Hollywood there's The Bullet, leather and Levi's. And Long Beach, another city in the area, has a scene of its own.

The thing to plan around: it's a good half-hour drive between areas, so pick an area and a night rather than trying to see it all.

LA Pride is run by Christopher Street West, the body that in 1970 staged the world's first permitted Pride parade, a year after Stonewall. The parade runs along Hollywood Boulevard on the second Sunday of June, draws more than 100,000 spectators and around 140 contingents, and comes with the LA Pride Village, a free street festival with a stage, over a hundred stalls and food trucks.

Watch out for a common mix-up: WeHo Pride is a different event, run by the city of West Hollywood, on different dates a few kilometres away. They usually fall within days of each other, so if you travel in June you can do both.

Silver Lake was the heart of gay life in Los Angeles before the scene moved to West Hollywood in the seventies, and it remains the queer neighbourhood of the city proper. It's home to the Black Cat, the bar of the 1967 protest, now a historic-cultural monument, and to Akbar, its anchor venue. It's an area of low houses, cafés and shops, with neighbourhood life rather than a circuit.

Los Feliz, right next door at the foot of Griffith Park, rounds out the area. To sleep, Hollywood is the most practical —more hotels, the parade passes through— and Silver Lake or Los Feliz if you prefer a neighbourhood to tourism. And remember that West Hollywood is a separate city: if what you want is the densest cluster of bars, that's its page.

This is home to the Los Angeles LGBT Center, founded in 1969 by Don Kilhefner, Morris Kight and other activists. It was the first non-profit in the United States to carry the word "gay" in its name and today it is the largest LGBT service facility in the world: nearly 800 staff and programmes covering health, housing, social services, homeless youth, seniors, legal support and culture.

Health: the Center itself offers free or low-cost PrEP and PEP, insured or not, plus free HIV and STI testing, and it has its own pharmacy. It's the place to turn to if you need something while travelling. The United States has no universal public healthcare, so travel insurance with medical cover is not optional: an emergency is billed, and billed heavily. Emergency: 911.

And for the memory side: in 1959, trans and gay patrons of Cooper's Donuts on Main Street, downtown, stood up to police harassment, eight years before the Black Cat. USC's ONE Archives, founded in 1952, holds over two million items and is the world's largest LGBTQ archive. It can be consulted and runs exhibitions open to the public.