take me anywhere in Eastern Europe!  LOVE THE MEN THERE!
Poland, Hungary, Czech Rep., Romania, yum, yum, and yum!
I just found this new site GLOABL GAYZ which gives you great info about gay places all over the world!

Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, is an old modern city of cobblestone streets and ubiquitous cafes serving coffee frappes and cappuccino–and pizza for breakfast. There are electric trolley cars, cute T-shirted guys, gypsy beggars, orthodox prelates, cell phone addicts and newspaper kiosks displaying dozens of girlie magazines—but not a single gay rag. It’s a city of grand baronial architecture and recent communist facades, stylish boutiques and ancient orthodox churches.

Homosexuals in Sofia, Bulgaria are not part of the accepted social order yet there are countless legions of them/us participating in the pulse of everyday life in the post communist order of things. Behind the nice clothes, calm talk and tasty food that evening, each of those gay and lesbian citizens had stories to tell that belie the calm of modern Sofia–stories of rejection, confusion, alienation, discrimination, hiding and fear.



 “Bulgaria’s capital city, Sofia, continues to attract people from the gay community, not only because it is the biggest city, offering anonymity and distance from relatives, but also because of the strong commercial gay scene (bars, clubs, discos, cruising areas). People are more ‘out of the closet’ and it is easier to find a partner.”

This description of gay Sofia is from the Bulgarian LGBT Gemini web site (http://www.bgogemini.org/bg/index.php). Not unlike any major metropolitan capital city LGBT citizens pervade the entire spectrum of the culture. From the velvet closets of wealthy elite families to the impoverished unemployed migrant worker family, queer men and women seek out contacts and mates using the sophistication of the Internet or the furtive shadows of a cruise park or the colorful late night discos.




Also, it’s an interesting cultural footnote that Sofia (population 900,000) has so many gay venues while Bucharest, the capital of Romania that we also visited on this trip, with a much larger population (2.2 million), only has one gay venue. One observer thought the Bulgarians were more daring and defiant of authority than the Romanians and willing to take more risks. There may be some truth to this as Romania was cowed by an evil and brutal dictator from 1965-1989. As well, the homophobic Romanian Orthodox church seems to have more influence over the people than the Bulgarian Greek Orthodox church.

Also noted, “there are around 10 gay bars in Sofia at the moment, a place with gay porno and dark rooms, and hopefully, within the next year or so Sofia can have its own gay sauna. The actual problems of opening such places in Bulgaria come from, first, the fact that you may have to deal with the mafia structures which control most of the entertainment business (and more) in Bulgaria.”

So – it might be a nice place to visit, but wouldn’t want to spend a whole lot of time there! But if any of you Bulgarian or Romania boys are coming to Chicago….look me up!