Gay Guide to Brussels
Belgium stopped criminalizing homosexuality in the 1790s, under the French penal code, and never put the ban back. What lingered instead was a higher age of consent for same-sex couples, which survived until 1985. After that the country moved quickly: Belgium became the second in the world to open marriage to same-sex couples, in 2003, and in 2011 it made Elio Di Rupo prime minister, an openly gay man running a European government at a point when that was still close to unheard of.
Almost the entire scene sits in Saint-Jacques, a few blocks below the Grand-Place, and most of it sits on one street. Rue du Marché au Charbon, Kolenmarkt on the other half of the bilingual sign, runs from Le Belgica and Dolores past BB, Castro, Stammbar, Station Bxl and Cabaret Mademoiselle, with Café Le Fontainas at the corner doing double duty as the daytime terrace everyone ends up on. The side streets fill in the rest: Chez Maman on Rue des Grands Carmes for drag, Jungle Bar on Rue des Pierres, and La Réserve, the city's oldest gay bar, tucked off the Grand-Place. It is compact to the point of comedy, and it means a night out here is walked rather than planned.
The counterweight to all that intimacy is La Démence, the monthly mega-party at Fuse in the Marolles, one of the longest-running gay parties in Europe and a genuine continental draw: people fly in for it, and the organizers now run a cruise under the same name. Rainbow House, on the same Marché au Charbon, is the community end of things, housing dozens of associations under one roof.
Belgian Pride takes over the city in May. The first unified march, in 1996, drew about 4,500 people; it now fills the center for a weekend. Pink Screens, the queer film festival, lands in the autumn and is the better bet if you would rather sit down.
Brussels is a small city carrying a continent's institutions, so the crowd skews international and half of it is only here for three years. That churn shows up in the bars as an unusual openness to strangers.