Café Video

About this place Café Video

Café Video has been serving Ghent's LGBTQ+ community since the 1970s, making it one of the oldest gay bars in Belgium and certainly the oldest in Ghent. The bar is an institution in the most literal sense: it has survived AIDS, the closure of Belgium's older gay commercial infrastructure, and the general consolidation of the scene that has affected every European city over the past two decades — and it has survived by being genuinely necessary to its community. The interior has the character of a bar that has been in the same place for fifty years: nothing is designed, everything is authentic, and the accumulated history is present in every corner. The crowd is Ghent's gay community across generations: people who have been coming since the 1980s alongside students who are visiting for the first time, with the particular social ease that comes from a community that actually knows each other. For any visitor to Ghent's gay scene, Café Video is not optional — it is where you start, and often where you end up.