Gay Bars and Beaches in Mykonos

Gay Mykonos and a few other sights

In our last blog we talked about how difficult it is to visit this island on a budget. We decided not long after arrival that we would throw caution to the wind and ease open our purse strings for a fun packed time here instead of trying to eek out our two night stay on our limited flashpacking budget.

While we were happy to eat as cheaply as possible we decided that a visit to Mykonos for two gay men would be incomplete unless we had sampled some of the gay nightlife on offer and there was no way we could do that cheaply.

Gay Bars and clubs on Mykonos

There are plenty of online resources that detail the choice of bars and clubs on Mykonos so we are not going to repeat a listing here.

Instead do what we did and have a look at comments in trip advisor and in the gay travel guides and find a selection that meet your needs and tastes. We ended up sampling three which gave us a flavour of the atmosphere and the range of the gay nightlife here on the island. You can also pick up the gay guide magazine from the bars when you get there, but we found that the guides missed off some of the places we visited and the map is not as comprehensive as it could be.

We decided our gay evening was going to run like this…

Start with a couple of cocktails to get the early evening off to a tasty start, then move on to a piano or cabaret bar to ease us into the evening before finding one of the dance bars to round the night off and see how late us old timers could stay up until.

We started at Kastro Bar which balances on the edge of Little Venice overlooking the sea and a perfect spot to watch the sun go down while sipping your preferred cocktail. The bar staff were absolutely lovely, recommending cocktails and doing so with a rather beautiful smile. The cocktails were not cheap, but neither was the alcohol quality or the taste, they went down very well. So much that after our first we decided to sample another from the menu to make sure the quality was not a one off.

From here we decided we wanted an hour or so of relaxing cabaret, so we headed next to the Montparnasse Piano Bar. The bar promised drinks washed down with a relaxing sound of live cabaret from an American chanteuse who has been singing here for years. She is accompanied on the piano by the resident musician. It will come as no surprise that the songs range from show tunes to torch songs and after the first set you will be invited to make requests. Most of them they can accommodate, but a request for a specific Shirley Bassey number had them routing unsuccessfully in their score files.

The singer could belt out a tune, was better on her more familiar numbers and managed to camp up the rest to make for an entertaining couple of hours to help the wine go down. The cocktails here would have stretched our budget to breaking point so we settled for the red wine, which was served by our Irish host who was chatty and helpful.

It was beyond midnight now so we made our way to our final destination of the evening, Jackie O’s bar which is just by the Panagia Paraportiani church on the harbour front. This has become something of an institution on the island now. We stuck to the red wine and for the first hour enjoy the coolness of the night air on the outside tables until the DJ had warmed himself up and the place got a little more lively.

The place had a good mixed crowd and while we were certainly not the oldest in there, we were sitting in the top quartile. We had drank enough to be unembarrassed by our dancing and enjoyed our final few hours of gayness on the island listening to some good music and even managed an occasional boogie.

Gay Beaches

Our bodies at our age are not the type to be go for unabashed nude bathing, but if you have the body or confidence to do so you will find gay (and nude) beaches across the island. Here are Wikitravel’s top tips:-

The most popular beaches with gay visitors are Super Paradise and Elia. These are not gay beaches, but they have parts where gay men and women congregate. The only gay beach deserving of the title is the small beach between Elia and Agrari.

We really enjoyed our two days on Mykonos, and could probably have enjoyed a couple more on the island. The towns are charming and the nightlife really does have something for everyone whether you simply want to sit with a cocktail watching the sunset or keep going all night and watch the sun rise the next day .

We did meet some gay couples who had been here for a week or two and they were a little bored with the limited bars, nightlife and gay beaches, maybe true if you are here for an extended stay but for us this rounded off our Greek Island experience beautifully.