Looking for a Gay Korean Husband? Start in Jongno, Says This Seoul Local

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 successfu