This is our list of the top 10 most gay friendly countries in the world. We based our research on the following 4 studies and combined this with our personal experience of having travelled to over 100 countries as a gay couple:
- Wikipedia: list of countries that have legalised gay marriage
- Spartacus: Gay Travel Index 2018 of the most gay friendly countries in the world
- ILGA Rainbow Europe: 2018 survey of the most gay friendly countries in Europe
- PewGlobal: 2013 study of 37 countries asking “should society accept homosexuality?”
To be clear, we are looking at countries overall, not cities or regions. So for example, whilst the US has some of the gayest destinations in the world (San Francisco, the Keys, Fire Island etc) it also has so much extreme homophobia, which makes it difficult to rank it in our top 10.
In our opinion, gay marriage for us is the first and most important marker to measure how gay friendly a country is because we think that a government making the proactive stance to go from having civil unions to the symbolic step of saying “we’re all equal and we’re going to call it marriage” is a big deal! The only exception we made for this is Thailand – a destination we’ve always felt extremely welcome in as a gay couple, despite it not having equal marriage laws.
Here are our top 10 gay friendliest countries in the world:
1. CANADA
There is a good reason why Spartacus places Canada as the number #1 gay friendly country in the world. In 2005, Canada became the 4th country to legalise gay marriage (after Holland, Belgium and Spain). It also scored high on the PewGlobal study. And from our experience, unlike any other country we’ve visited, Canada goes over and above to welcome gay travellers.
Where else in the world do you see the (straight white male) leader of a country leading a gay pride parade waving a transgender flag and crying out “Happy Pride”? We saw Justin Trudeau do this in person at the Fierte gay pride in Montreal. It made our hairs stand on end to see this.
Canada is also the only country we know that hosts its own national Pride event, called “Canada Pride”. The first one took place in Montreal in 2017. The next one will be in Winnipeg in 2020. Speaking of Prides, Toronto Pride is one of the largest in the world, attracting almost 1.5 million. Finally, every main city in Canada has a thriving gay scene, complete with rainbow crossings and numerous gay events taking place throughout the year. We loved the gay scene of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver in particular. Read more in our interview with Barry from Toronto about gay life in Canada.
Oh Canada Canada Canada, we applaud and salut you, and wave our big giant Nomadic Boys rainbow flag in your honour!