This essay is part of Going Out, a series of stories celebrating LGBTQIA+ travel.
One fateful night in 2012, I stepped into Friends, a gay bar in Seoul’s Jongno neighborhood, and rolled my eyes when I heard someone speaking English. Of the two major gay neighborhoods in Seoul, tourists usually went to flashy, clubby Itaewon. Gay locals like me went to the more chill, homier bars of shabbier Jongno nearby, where one might only occasionally encounter, say, a Japanese bear couple looking perplexed as they searched for our more discreet watering holes. To hear some American infiltrate my favorite dive was just too much. But then I sat down at the bar, looked over at the offending voice, and was promptly dazzled by the speaker.
Reader, he and I celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary this July.
What’s gay life like in Seoul? The easiest way to find out is to read Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park, which I translated from Korean into English, for its candid portrayal of the glory and despair of loving and being loved as a young queer in South Korea’s capital. During the tour for this book, an audience member in Bristol, England, asked us about the secret to a long and successful queer relationship. Going against my own experience, I answered, “Don’t marry a Korean man.” Sang Young agreed with me—we’re just too neurotic and very entitled. But if you insist on at least rubbing elbows with gay Seoulites when you visit our fair city, you have to step out of the Itaewon tourist bubble and make your way to Jongno 3-ga station (Lines 1, 3, and 5) on a weekend night.
Smack in the center of the city and within walking distance of the old palaces like Gyeongbokgung and Changgyeonggung, Jongno has a decades long history as a gay nightlife hub (Friends is one of South Korea’s oldest gay bars, established in 2004, according to its Instagram). In the 2000s and early 2010s, before the advent of gay dating apps, all of Donhwamunro 11-gil, the street that runs along the southern edge of Jongno’s Ikseondong Hanok Village, would have been lined with “pocha” soju vendors—food hawkers sheltered under plastic tarps selling tteokbokki and tempura, an urban mainstay in Seoul nightlife since the Korean War. The clientele would have been overwhelmingly gay on Jongno Pocha Street, the entire neighborhood turned into one giant gay outdoor block party where cheap soju, grilled seafood, and playful banter with the aunties who ran the pochas would ring through the night.
