Our Insiders Guide to Gay Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires has a well-deserved reputation as a hot spot for gay travellers and is consistently described as one of the most gay-friendly in South America. The city has long been on the list of the top gay destinations because it doesn’t follow the ghetto model. Quite the opposite; it encourages integration. Gays and lesbians are estimated as being as high as 15% to 20% among international tourists, and many mainstream places stress their gay-friendliness. If you want to go dancing, you don’t need to go to the gay disco. You can go to any disco and you will find gay people there!
Leaving behind the repressed, conservative mores that prevailed under military rule, Argentina was the first Latin American country to recognize homosexual civil unions.
Many people refer to the city as the Paris of South America, but for us its more like Madrid, beautiful but with a rustic edge. Buenos Aires combines the elegance of Europe and the soul of Latin America in a cosmopolitan metropolis, rich in architecture, history, film, theatre, arts, dance and music. Combine this with the city’s enormous collection of bars, dance clubs, restaurants, and tango halls catering to the community, no other city in Latin America rivals what Buenos Aires has to offer for visiting gays and lesbians.
Buenos Aires southern summer spans November to March, especially amidst humidity which bubbles up frequent refreshing thunder storms.
Porteños (Buenos Aires-born people) are open, warm and friendly, which adds to the city’s appeal. The 3 million inhabitants of central BA bustle about its American-style grid street system with wide avenues and tall Deco thirties scrapers. The people themselves, and much of the colonial architecture, are unmistakably European: essentially a heady mix of Spanish and indigenous, with a large scoop of Italian thrown in – as you’ll tell from the local district names, mamma-mia cadences and sizzling pizzerias. They also famously like their meat – with or without a pulse. Dinner for two with mouth-watering beef (the country is justifiably famous for its meat), cocktails and some of the best wine on earth
BA can be described as a small-scale version of New York. There is a “Fifth Avenue” (Av. Santa Fe), a “Seventh Avenue” (Arenales street) full of designer shops, a “Broadway” (Av. Corrientes.) that’s full of theaters such as Sky-Opera, Gran Rex, Lola Membrives, Teatro General San Martín and the famous Luna Park area, a Greenwich Village-like neighborhood (Barrio Norte), and a mini “Central Park” (Bosques de Palermo).
