Gay Guide to Frankfurt
In the summer of 1950 Frankfurt police picked up a seventeen-year-old rent boy named Otto Blankenstein and found a notebook listing his clients. What followed was the sharpest wave of Paragraph 175 prosecutions in the young Federal Republic: around 240 men investigated across 1950 and 1951, a hundred arrested, seventy-five charged, most of them convicted. Several killed themselves. This happened five years after the war, under a democratic government, using a law the Nazis had written and West Germany had chosen to keep. Paragraph 175 was not cleared from German law until June 1994, and the Frankfurter Engel memorial went up that December.
Alte Gasse is the gay street, a short run in the Innenstadt where Comeback, PINK and Switchboard sit at consecutive numbers, which tells you how compressed this scene is. Around the corner are Zum Schwejk and Lucky's Manhattan on Schäfergasse, Central and Tangerine on Elefantengasse, Stall on Stiftstraße and Lucky's on Große Friedberger Straße. You can walk the whole thing in fifteen minutes.
Across the river in Sachsenhausen, Twist on Klappergasse and the RUFF shop serve the crowd that would rather not be in the banking district. The saunas are spread wider: Metropol, Apollo City, Amsterdam, Saunawerk and Splash.
Frankfurt Pride takes the Mainkai along the river each summer. KUSS41 handles the youth and community side, and the scene here also quietly serves Mainz and Wiesbaden, which are close enough that people cross over for a night rather than stay home.
Frankfurt is a working city rather than a destination, and its scene reflects that: small, dense, unpretentious, and busier midweek than you would expect, because half the people in it are here for work.