Gay Guide to Vienna
Austria lifted its total ban on homosexuality in 1971, then replaced it with narrower laws that outlasted it by decades: an age of consent of 18 for men, a prohibition on positive information about homosexuality, and a ban on gay and lesbian organizations existing at all. HOSI Wien was founded in 1979 in defiance of that last one and only managed to register in January 1980, after the ministries conceded the law could be read more narrowly. The information and association bans fell in March 1997, the Constitutional Court struck down the unequal age of consent in 2002, and marriage equality arrived on the first day of 2019.
The scene sits in Mariahilf, the 6th district, in the streets running back from the Naschmarkt. Gumpendorfer Strasse, Linke Wienzeile and the lanes around Stiegengasse hold most of the bars, among them Village, Mango Bar, Kisss, Marea Alta and Raymond's, with Eagle Vienna covering the leather end. The Türkis Rosa Lila Villa anchors the district. Squatted in 1982 to stop the building being knocked down for a parking garage, it has been a community house ever since, and its ground-floor cafe, Villa Vida, has run as a queer cafe and event space since 2019.
The 1st district holds the outlier everyone visits anyway. Kaiserbründl is a men's sauna inside the Central-Bad, an 1889 bathhouse with a Moorish interior whose regulars once included Archduke Ludwig Viktor, the openly homosexual brother of Emperor Franz Joseph. City Bar and Why Not sit a few streets away on Tiefer Graben. South of the Naschmarkt, in the 4th and 5th, Heaven Gay Club takes the late nights and Sling, Hard On and Römersauna cover the cruising end.
The Regenbogenparade has circled the Ringstrasse every June since 1996, running counterclockwise against the traffic, and now draws well over 100,000 people; when Vienna hosted EuroPride in 2019 it pulled roughly half a million. Winter gets its own entry: the Regenbogenball, run by HOSI Wien, is a full Viennese ball with an orchestra, a dress code and a queer crowd. The Life Ball, the vast AIDS charity gala staged in front of City Hall, ran from 1993 to 2019 and has not returned.
Vienna is small enough to walk and the U-Bahn runs through the night on Fridays, Saturdays and before public holidays, so the districts stitch together easily. Bars here stay bar-shaped for most of the week, which suits a city that does coffeehouse first and late night second.