A Walking Tour of Paris with the TTG LGBTQ+ Ambassadors of 2026
LGBTQ+ travel tends to get sold as bars and a weekend you need a week to recover from. Sometimes that's exactly the brief, but there's a quieter version made of addresses and dates, and Le Marais in Paris is a very good place to find it. I walked it on 31 July with a guide from Intrepid Travel, as part of TTG's LGBTQ+ Travel Ambassador Programme. TTG hosted the trip, and Intrepid Travel and Eurostar sponsored it. What stuck wasn't the buildings. It was how tightly packed the history is: four different decades of queer Paris within a handful of streets.
Where it starts...
This walk begins at the Stravinsky Fountain, the colourful mechanical one next to Centre Pompidou. It doesn't have any LGBTQ+ history, but it's worth looking at. It was built in 1983 on the strip of ground between Centre Pompidou and Saint-Merri church, as part of the wider district rebuild after the old Les Halles market was demolished. Jean Tinguely designed it first: dark mechanical pieces with moving parts. He then asked for his wife, the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, to be brought in on the project too. Sixteen sculptures made up the final piece, each named after a different Stravinsky composition. It was the first major fountain built in Paris since 1937.
The walls around the square are also worth a look, not just the fountain. Invader put up his largest mosaic in Paris here in December 2019, nine metres tall and made of roughly 447 tiles. Jef Aérosol's stencil piece, a hooded figure with a finger to its lips, is named Chuuuttt!!! has been on another wall since 2012. Shepard Fairley added his own mural, Knowledge + Action = Power, in June 2019.
The LGBTQ+ history starts nearby on Rue du Plâtre. No. 12 is a lesbian bar now, called Elles. In the 1970s, it was Le Village, widely regarded as the first openly gay bar in the Marais. The detail we were told on the walk is that it didn't have a buzzer or a hidden entrance like every gay venue before it. Those places, you knocked, someone looked you over, and maybe you got in. Le Village just had a door.
Elles opened in 2021 on the same site. That wasn't an accident.
The bit tourists walk past
Further on is the Jardin Anne-Frank, tucked down an alley called Impasse Berthaud, easy to miss because it doesn't announce itself as a monument. A chestnut tree grows there from a cutting of the one Anne Frank could see from her hiding place in Amsterdam, planted in 2007. Anne Frank never came to Paris. The tree is there because this garden sits right against the edge of the old Jewish quarter. Persecution of Jewish Parisians under Vichy and the deportation of gay men in the same period aren't separate stories being told next to each other for convenience; they're the reason this whole pocket of the city became known later as somewhere people who needed to disappear could do so safely.
Where the bars actually were
Keep walking toward Rue Vieille du Temple and Rue Sainte-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie, and you're in what was the commercial heart of the gay scene in the early 1980s through the 2000s. A bar called Le Central opened on Vielle du Temple in 1980 and was run by a former Royal Navy sailor named Maurice McGrath. Most historians credit him with pulling the surrounding streets into the gay district properly.
Round the corner, a bar called Le Duplex opened in 1980, and it's where AIDES, one of France's major HIV and AIDS support organisations, was founded in 1984.
Cox, at 15 Rue des Archives opened in 1995 and is still running daily and is still the sort of place people end up on the terrace with a drink before deciding where the rest of the night goes. Le Ju at number 16, with rainbow umbrellas over the terrace, is openly LGBTQ+ friendly, and Les Marronniers, two doors along, is a mixed gay bar and restaurant known for having the busiest terrace on the street.
A house older than any of this
At 11 and 13 Rue François-Miron, are two of the last true medieval houses left in central Paris, à l'Enseigne du Faucheur and à l'Enseigne du Mouton. The exact dating is disputed, but the construction is textbook medieval: oak timber frames filled with brick or plaster, each upper floor jutting out further than the one below it.
Over on Rue de Temple there's a small bit of very on-the-moment history. La Raidd, a real gay bar, appears as itself in a season two episode of Emily in Paris. Small detail, but worth knowing for any set-jetters walking by.
The square at the end
Place des Vosges is Paris's oldest planned square, built between 1605 and 1612 under Henri IV, and originally called Place Royale. The bronze statue on horseback in the centre is Louis XIII, put there by Cardinal Richelieu.
Francis Bacon, openly gay for most of his career, which carried professional risk, kept his Paris studio at 14 Rue de Birague, the street that runs straight into the square, from 1974 until 1987. Some accounts of the Marais also allegedly list the square itself as a known cruising spot by the late 1800s.
Another Emily in Paris reference: a Mindy and Benoit picnic scene in season two was filmed here, and L'Ambroisie, a Michelin-star restaurant under the arcades in the square, appears in season four.
I could arrange this walk as a private tour through Intrepid Travel as part of a wider Paris/Europe itinerary.
Walks like this are why I'm doing the TTG LGBTQ+ Travel Ambassador training. Most of what made Le Marais worth walking came from a guide who knew the local history and could point at an address and say what happened there. Planning LGBTQ+ travel is similar. The details that matter, like whether a country's laws change how you'd travel, or whether a hotel's idea of inclusive goes further than a flag in the lobby, are hard to pin down from a quick search. Checking them properly before you book is what I do.
