Gay Guide to Cologne
France annexed Cologne in the 1790s and brought the 1791 penal code with it, the first body of law in the Western world since antiquity to stop prosecuting sex between men outright. The Rhineland kept that arrangement even after Prussia took the territory in 1815, so Cologne spent close to sixty years legally free while most of Europe was not. Prussia shut it in 1851, and that statute was eventually reshaped into Paragraph 175, which outlived the Nazis who expanded it and was not cleared from German law until 1994. It is hard not to read the scale of the city's Pride as a comment on all of that.
Schaafenstrasse is the spine, one short street carrying Exile, Iron, Mumu, ExCorner and the Best Of shop, busy enough that the bars spill into the road in summer. A few minutes away, the Bermuda Triangle around Rudolfplatz covers the harder end: Station 2B on Stephanstrasse, with Deck 5 and Pullermanns on Mathiasstrasse.
The old town runs a second, older cluster that tourists routinely miss. Pipinstrasse and Vor St. Martin hold Amadeus, Barcelon, Baustelle 4U and Zur Kaiserin, with Zum Pitter over on the Alter Markt, and the crowd there skews local and considerably less polished. My Lord and the bear bar The 3B sit together on Mühlenbach, and the Badehaus Babylon and Phoenix cover the saunas.
Cologne Pride and its Christopher Street Day parade are among the largest anywhere in Europe. Karneval in the winter is the other one to plan around: the city shuts down for it, and the queer presence in it is neither small nor recent. Cologne also keeps a memorial to the homosexual men persecuted under the Nazis.
Cologne is cheaper and less self-serious than Berlin or Munich, and the scene reflects that. Nothing here is hard to get into.