In the mid-20th century the gay hub moved to Saint-Germain-des-Pres in the sixth arrondissement, and by the 1960s it had shifted again to Rue Saint Anne in the first.Īlthough this street has now been taken over by Japanese restaurants, you can still find a few of these historical venues, the last remainders of some of the best gay nightclubs of the 60s and 70s. “In the first part of the 20th century, the visibility of such well-known figures as Natalie Barney or André Gide, as well as the flamboyance of meeting places in Montmartre or Pigalle, helped to construct the image of Paris as a ‘queer’ capital,” wrote Florence Tamagne in the 2014 book Queer Cities, Queer Cultures: Europe since 1945. Long before that in the early 1900s, gay people gathered in Montmartre and Pigalle. You might know the Marais as the beating heart of the queer capital, but it only became the gay centre of Paris relatively recently in the 1980s. Indeed, Paris has been seen as a bit of a gay haven since the early 20th century.
