Gay Guide to Zurich
Between 1932 and 1967 a magazine came out of Zurich that had no equivalent anywhere. Der Kreis started as a lesbian paper called Freundschaftsbanner, went male-only in 1942, ran trilingual in German, French and English, and reached roughly 2,000 subscribers, 700 of them outside Switzerland. It was the only queer periodical published anywhere in Europe through the Second World War, everything comparable in Germany having already been destroyed. Switzerland itself took considerably longer: marriage passed by referendum on 26 September 2021, with 64 percent in favor and a majority in every one of the 26 cantons.
The scene sits in the Old Town, mostly around Niederdorf, and it is small enough that it takes an evening. Barfüsser opened in the 1950s and is among the oldest gay bars in Europe, still trading as a bar and restaurant. Predigerhof, the Rathaus Café, Cranberry, Heaven, Kweer and Petra's Tip Top fill in around it, and Gleis handles the daytime end.
The later hours run through Heldenbar, with Glorias Lusthölle and Ninos covering cruising. There are five saunas for a city of this size, which says something: Apollo, Mr. Stop, Renos, Mylord and Paragonya. Zurich also keeps three queer bookshops going, Antinous, Arcados and Queerbooks, which is more than cities ten times its size manage.
Zurich Pride Festival takes a weekend in June and is the largest in Switzerland, though the whole event is noticeably more orderly than its equivalents elsewhere, which is entirely in character.
Zurich is expensive, even by Swiss standards, and the scene is compact rather than sprawling. Treat it as two or three good nights rather than a week, and it delivers.