My experience of Portugal is limited so far, so take this for what it’s worth. My husband and I are planning to move to Portugal in August to get our residency permit and will be settling in Lisbon. We traveled to Portugal together 2 years ago to investigate, spending time in Tavira, Lisbon, Coimbra, Porto, Evora and a beautiful former monastery converted to a hotel in the country not too far from Evora. We are in our late fifties and while we don’t go around wearing rainbow flags, we’re completely open about being gay and you’d have to be clueless to not realize we’re a gay couple. I can say in all honesty that we never felt the least bit uncomfortable in any way anywhere we went in Portugal. And if anything, I’m on the paranoid side about being safe as a gay man in the world. My sense is that Portugal is still a somewhat religious and traditional country compared to other places in Western Europe, but that even if somebody didn’t 100% approve of gay people or same-sex marriage, it would be pretty rare for them to let you know it. We studied at a language school in Lisbon and asked some of our teachers about the issue and they all said basically that in the larger cities it’s pretty much a complete non-issue and that if we decided to go live in some small town, people might talk about us behind our backs a bit but even there we’d be treated OK.
Although it’s a bit of a cliche at this point, I found Portuguese people, almost without exception, to be some of the kindest, most polite, most welcoming people I’ve encountered anywhere in the world.
If you’re looking for a gay mecca like New York, San Francisco, etc, there’s nothing like that in Portugal as far as I can tell (although of course there are gay bars and clubs in the bigger cities), but otherwise, I don’t think any gay person should hesitate to travel to or move to Portugal.