Gay Guide to Taipei
On 24 May 2017 Taiwan's Constitutional Court ruled that excluding same-sex couples from the Civil Code was unconstitutional, and gave the government two years to fix it. In November 2018 a national referendum went the other way, with around two thirds voting against putting marriage in the Civil Code at all. The legislature threaded the gap with a separate enforcement act, passed on 17 May 2019 with tens of thousands of people massed outside parliament, and brought into force on 24 May 2019, the final day of the court's deadline. Taiwan became the first place in Asia with legal same-sex marriage, and the gaps left in that first version, adoption among them, were closed in the years after.
Ximending is the scene, and it is unusually public about it. The plaza behind the Red House, a 1908 market building, is ringed with open-air bars where people drink outdoors in full view of a busy shopping district, which is not how this normally works in Asia. Lane 10 off Chengdu Road holds Café Dalida and G-Paradise, with Commander D, Hunt, Locker Room, Wonder Bar and Cosma within a few streets, and the area is signposted as a rainbow district rather than left to be inferred.
The bigger rooms sit east in Da'an, along Zhongxiao East Road: OMNI, Fairy Taipei and Pawnshop take the club nights, with G Star over in Zhongshan. The saunas are Hans and Soi 13, the latter a few minutes from Shuanglian MRT in Zhongshan.
GinGin, which opened in 1999 as the first LGBTQ bookstore in the Chinese-speaking world, closed at the end of 2024 after twenty-six years. The Taiwan Tongzhi Hotline Association is the long-standing advocacy organization, having spent years on exactly the fight described above, and Fembooks covers the feminist side.
Taiwan LGBT Pride takes over the city each October and is the largest Pride in East Asia, drawing people from across the region, including from places where marching at home is not possible. The Taiwan International Queer Film Festival runs alongside it.