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The 50 Greatest Gay Bars in the World*

From Boise to Bangkok, we travel the globe to give you the most complete guide ever. (*Nearly all gay, but what homo doesn't like a fabulous hotel bar?)

There’s a first time for everything, but the first visit to a gay bar occupies an entire place of its own. For many of us, it’s hard to describe that strange, stomach-churning combination of trepidation and expectation, a sense that here is a place where you can drop any pretense, study the go-go boys with abandon, shimmy to Cher, and blow kisses at the drag queen vamping on the stage. We talk a lot about how times have changed, but the gay bar remains a staple of gay life—a lifeline for many of us, an old friend for the rest. There’s no such thing as a definitive list of anything, but that hasn’t stopped us from scouring the world to find 50 bars with all the right qualities to make you feel at home.

UNITED KINGDOM

LONDON

ROYAL VAUXHALL TAVERN

There has been a pub on the site of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern since 1893. It was erected on the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, one of the most decadent cruising grounds in the Victorian era. Even then it was a focus for performance, camp, and drag—which remain central to the pub to this day. From its cabaret and comedy nights through its bingo and live-music evenings to its legendary Saturday night event Duckie to the last defiant gasp of the weekend on Sunday, the RVT is an institution attracting a wide range of gay locals and visitors from across London and beyond.