Gay Guide to Hamburg
In one night in 1937 Hamburg police arrested more than 230 men. They were working from the pink lists that local forces had been compiling on anyone merely suspected of being homosexual, and the first transport of prisoners marked with the pink triangle went to Fuhlsbüttel, on the edge of the city. Paragraph 175 survived the war in the expanded form the Nazis gave it, stayed in the West German code until the 1969 reform, and was not cleared entirely until 1994. Hamburg has a specific, documented record here and does not paper over it.
St. Georg is among the oldest continuously running gay districts in Germany, with bars on and around Lange Reihe since the 1950s. Café Gnosa is the institution, a coffee-and-cake fixture that has outlasted most of its neighbors, with Café Uhrlaub, M&V Bar and Kyti Voo along the same street and Daniel's, Kunterbunt, Extratour, Bellini and Schatziii filling the side streets.
A few blocks over, Pulverteich and Steindamm hold the harder end: Toms, the S.L.U.T. Club on Rostocker Straße, and the Dragon and Men's Heaven saunas. The two halves of St. Georg sit within a ten-minute walk of each other and the district absorbs both without fuss.
St. Pauli, across the city around the Reeperbahn, is the other pole. Daddys Bar and WunderBar on Talstraße, the Piccadilly and Toom Peerstall run into the general nightlife of the area rather than sitting apart from it, which suits people who would rather not spend a whole evening inside the scene.
Hamburg Pride and its Christopher Street Day parade have run since 1980, starting from Lange Reihe, and it is one of the largest in Germany. The Magnus-Hirschfeld-Centrum, founded in 1982 and named for the sexologist whose Berlin institute the Nazis destroyed, remains the community anchor, and the queer film festival runs each autumn.