Seattle

What makes Seattle special is the concentration: fourteen queer venues in Capitol Hill, between Pike, Pine and Broadway, all within a stroll. At a time when gay neighbourhoods are emptying out across much of North America, here they're still open and busy.

Neighbours is the city's oldest operating gay club, from 1983, with several rooms, themed nights and weekend drag. The Wildrose, on Pike, has been the go-to lesbian bar since 1984 and is one of barely three dozen surviving in the entire United States, with DJs on Fridays and Saturdays, karaoke and drag bingo. Queer/Bar serves as drag headquarters, with shows several nights a week. Rounding out the map: R Place, spread over floors, Pony, more of an alternative dive, Diesel, a bear hangout, and The Cuff, leather.

Seattle Pride takes place on the last Sunday of June and ranks among the country's biggest: the parade comes down 4th Avenue downtown, between Pike Street and Denny Way, through the morning, drawing more than 300,000 spectators.

That same day, at Seattle Center —the World's Fair grounds, with the Space Needle above— comes PrideFest: free entry, three stages and hundreds of stalls. Organisers present it as the largest free Pride festival in the United States. They're two separate events on the same Sunday, so you can do both.

Capitol Hill is one of the most established gay neighbourhoods in the United States, and the remarkable thing is that it still is: it hasn't emptied out or turned into a postcard. The Pike-Pine corridor holds the bars, and around them sit cafés, bookshops, record stores and restaurants, with Broadway as the commercial spine. It's all walkable.

To sleep, Capitol Hill if you want to be in the scene and Downtown if you'd rather have big hotels and the airport light rail at the door; they're a couple of stops apart. And if the history interests you, Pioneer Square is where the Double Header stood, open from 1934 until December 2015: for years it was credited as the country's oldest operating gay bar, though New Orleans' Café Lafitte in Exile, from 1933 and still open, disputed the title.

The go-to is Gay City, Seattle's LGBTQ+ centre, in Capitol Hill (400 E Pine St). It offers HIV and STI testing and, above all, PrEP navigation: help understanding the treatment, getting insurance to cover it and, if you're uninsured, applying to the assistance programmes that cover the cost. In the United States that guidance is worth as much as the prescription.

A serious warning for Europeans: there is no universal public healthcare and an emergency is billed at very high rates, so travel with medical insurance, no exceptions. Emergency: 911.

And the city's memory deserves a paragraph: on 7 November 1978, Seattle became the first US city to reject at the ballot box —Initiative 13— a measure seeking to repeal its protections for gay and lesbian people in housing and employment and to close the Office of Women's Rights. The 'no' won two to one. The state kept going: in 2012 it approved marriage equality at the ballot box —Referendum 74, 53.7% of the vote— one of the first three in the country to do so by popular vote rather than by court ruling.