Is Savannah LGBTQ-friendly?

For a couple, Savannah suits a slow, romantic trip better than a big night out. The Historic District has 22 surviving squares, and holding hands under the live oaks of Forsyth Park at 9am is about as easy as public affection gets in the Deep South, the fountain hissing and Spanish moss brushing your shoulders. SCAD students in paint-crusted jeans set the tone along Bull Street from Forsyth Park down to the Starland District around 40th Street. This is still Georgia, though. The easy acceptance thins out south of Victory Drive, where the suburbs begin.

If the history-buff half of your couple wants a queer thread to follow, Savannah has one. John Berendt's book made the Mercer Williams House on Monterey Square famous, and the guided tours still lean on the 1981 Jim Williams shooting and the court case that followed. The Bird Girl statue from the book's cover now stands inside the Telfair Museums, a 10-minute walk north. First City Network, founded in Savannah in 1985, is the oldest LGBTQ organisation in Georgia. Ask at the Mercer house about Williams's own life; the tours cover it more openly now than they did in the 1990s.

The foodie half can eat well without a cookie-cutter anniversary dinner. The Grey, Mashama Bailey's restaurant in a converted 1938 Greyhound bus terminal on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, is the dinner to book about four weeks ahead, and when you go, ask for a booth in the old waiting room rather than a seat at the diner bar. Skip The Olde Pink House on Reynolds Square for a special night: it is loud, full of tour groups, and the tables upstairs sit shoulder to shoulder. For something casual, work through the smoky food-truck lot at Starland Yard on Bull Street, then get a cone of tutti-frutti at Leopold's Ice Cream on Broughton Street, where the queue moves faster after 9pm.

Mid-to-late October is probably the best time to visit. On 19 October the afternoon was 17.8°C under a clear sky, so bring a jacket for an evening walk through Chippewa Square. The Savannah Ghost Pirates play hockey at Enmarket Arena on Friday 23 and Saturday 24 October, and hockey fans will fill the bars around City Market afterwards. On those nights, book dinner east of Bull Street, around Lafayette Square.