Frankfurt

Frankfurt am Main is Germany's fifth-largest city, with more than 750,000 residents and over 2 million in the wider metropolitan area. Its history stretches back more than 1200 years, yet today it is known internationally above all as one of the world's leading financial centers. Sights include the historic city hall known as the Römer, the Kaiserdom St. Bartholomäus (the coronation church of Holy Roman emperors), the Goethe House in the Old Town and the Palmengarten botanical garden in the Westend.

For many years most of Frankfurt's gay venues have clustered in the city center around Schäfergasse and Alte Gasse. The small square where the two streets meet has been named after the gay writer Klaus Mann since 1995. The queer calendar includes Frankfurt Gay Pride (CSD Frankfurt) in July, the Frankfurt Book Fair in October and the international LGBT sports tournament FVV Xmas in December.

The city also has a darker chapter in its queer past: in the early 1950s the Frankfurt Homosexual Trials saw around a hundred gay men arrested, many of them prosecuted and sentenced and some driven to suicide, with at least one judge who had been zealous in persecuting homosexuals under the Nazis. In remembrance of Nazi persecution, the Frankfurter Engel (Angel of Frankfurt) memorial was unveiled on Klaus-Mann-Platz in 1994, the first monument of its kind in Germany.