Today, Berlin sits as the gay capital of Europe. The breadth of its gay nightlife, the strength of its culture, and the ever tested and changing community norms have easily eclipsed the city’s continental urban neighbors.

Since 2001, the city has been led by its gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, a man who announced early in his first campaign, “Ich bin schwul und das ist auch gut so,” which translates to “I am gay and that is a good thing.” Berliners agreed, and elected him. Two years ago, Passport magazine recognized his contributions to the tolerance that is the hallmark of Berlin life. In that article Tim Pinckney wrote, “When Wowereit welcomed an international gay sadomasochist fetish party to his city in 2005, the distributed program for the event included a letter from the mayor stating, ‘Berlin is a tolerant and open metropolis. We are proud that people from different backgrounds and with different preferences feel comfortable here and party together.’ Not surprisingly, conservatives did not embrace this warm mayoral reception and the Mayor’s judgment was called into question. Wowereit stood firm, stating, ‘There’s no question it is a flamboyant scene, but that is also Berlin…and as long as there is nothing forbidden happening, I expect tolerance.’”

This tone, emanating from the very top of the city’s government, continues to be an important aspect of Wowereit’s administration. “Berlin is open, tolerant, creative, and international,” he said “Those are attributes that are important to others, too, but especially to LGBT visitors from all over the world. We have a huge LGBT community here and a huge range of services and attractions targeting this group.”

A visitor finds more on the sexual and cultural menu than can possibly be taken in during one visit. It can all seem overwhelming. The city has over 100 gay bars, clubs, and entertainment venues located in three distinctly queer neighborhoods. On any given night, choices can include comfortable cafés, fabulous queer restaurants, entertaining cabaret acts, queer comedy, cocktail bars, cruise bars, gay saunas, clubs that can accommodate 2,000 sexy, sweaty dancers, and fetish parties that meet desires and tastes from across the spectrum.

If you visit Berlin in June, you’ll find yourself in the midst of the annual Christopher Street celebration that includes a march that has grown to encompass all the city’s queer enclaves. A gay street fair kicks off the week-long celebration that includes over-the-top parties, cultural events, and exhibitions.

For those who grew up in East Berlin there is an abundance of riches almost too amazing to take in. For those from the West, all this represents a logical continuation and expansion of what had already been established.

Life in Berlin, however, was not always this way. From the end of World War II until formal German reunification in 1991, Berlin sat as an island city in the middle of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), what we know more familiarly as East Germany. For 28 years, the Berlin Wall divided the city into two vastly different zones.

In the West, where capitalism flourished and democracy was restored following Hitler’s rule, a gay culture and community developed along lines very similar to those in other western cities. Sadly, however, West Germany kept the stringent Paragraph 175 in its criminal code. The law, passed in 1879 and broadened by the Nazis in 1935, criminalized all acts of sex between men. It wasn’t until 1969 that the law was amended to allow consensual sex between all people 21 years and older. By the mid 1970s, gay rights demonstrations in the West were both demanding broader equal rights for gays and lesbians, and putting a more public face on the community. A lively bar scene sprang up, cruising areas increased, and gay saunas opened. West Berlin’s gay life emerged as one of Europe’s liveliest.

Across the wall, gay life, while not completely stagnant, certainly appeared moribund compared to its “so near and yet so far” neighbor. Beginning in the late 1950s, East German courts, which kept the 19th-century form of Paragraph 175, decided that homosexual acts between consenting adults would cease to be punished, due to the insignificance of the acts. Nevertheless, under the strict rule of Soviet socialism, this did not provide any support for a more organized gay community. In the eyes of socialism, any organized community represented a potential threat to the established order. Discretion was urged upon all. There was “no social necessity for any association of persons with a certain inclination,” according to the official doctrine. Conformity was the desired end, and the East German Secret Police, known as the Stasi, were omnipresent to instill fear and ensure orthodoxy in all corners of life.

There were some attempts in the 1970s to overcome the social inertia and create a means of advocacy for greater openness in the East. The Homosexuelleninitiative Berlin (HIB), the first gay and lesbian group in all of Eastern Europe, was formed in East Berlin in 1973. The group met at the museum/home of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who, by the time she died in 2002, had become a world-famous transvestite and gay activist. By 1978, the group had grown large enough to be of concern to the authorities who stepped in and ordered it to disband. In the coming years, other groups were formed and were given meeting space by Protestant church congregations in the East. In the mid-1980s the Sonntags Club (Sunday Club) was formed, with Charlotte von Mahlsdorf once again playing a key role.

In 1987, Alec Mclure, a 24-year-old American student studying in Germany, took a week-long winter trip to Berlin and ventured into the East, where Westerners were welcomed as long as they forked over the hard currency of 25 West German marks, and brought no printed material. He crossed at the famous Checkpoint Charlie. Having thoughtfully copied out the names and addresses of two gay bars, he set out by foot and by U-Train to explore. He managed to find one of the bars on his list. “It was more like a run down café, really,” he said. “Not like a typical gay bar we were used to at that time. I can still see the flocked wallpaper and lacy café curtains. It was all very plain, not crowded, and had a mostly older clientele.” He sat down at a table and ordered a beer. “Eventually I was approached by a guy in his mid-forties. We chatted. He was very flattering, very polite. We had a nice chat. Nothing made me uncomfortable. It was all just drab, the way I always imagined the 1950s were at home.”

Martin von Ostrowski, a German artist living in Berlin, also remembers crossing into the East in the 1980s. He too paid the required hard currency and crossed to visit the Eastern gay establishments. “I didn’t want too close of contact with Eastern people,” he said. “It was too complicated, too costly, and too difficult. These were old-fashioned bars, but certainly comfortable and sympathetic.”

The ever-present but unseen Stasi, engaged East Berliners in spying on their friends and neighbors. There is a good chance that the gay man who approached young Alec McLure was a Stasi operative who felt the need to check out this new stranger in the neighborhood.

On the night of November 9, 1989, The Berlin Wall was brought down by nothing less than the collective will of the people of East and West Berlin. Their time had come, and their action was a political earthquake felt around the globe. With the toppling of one cement panel, then another and another, the Soviet empire itself began its swift, irreversible collapse.

On both sides of the wall there was unbridled curiosity about life on the other side. This was perhaps strongest in the two gay populations. As it became clear that authorities in the East would not move to block people crossing in either direction, throngs of Berliners set out to meet their counterparts and explore foreign terrain.

It was the gay people from the East who experienced the most awe-inspiring, and greatest culture shock. “What they saw was completely amazing,” said Ostrowski. “All the street cruising, the fetish scene, the bars, all operating openly. Some were totally fascinated by it. Others were put off.” For Westerners there were new people in the gay scene, who were initially welcomed. There was also a Western chauvinism affirming that the unkempt and naïve East had little or nothing to offer the erudite Western gay establishment. Easterners often felt this disdain and resented it.

It is not surprising that the initial euphoria was short-lived. “The scenes stayed separated, by and large,” Ostrowski remembers. “It was all too much too quickly for everyone, I think. Certainly there was too much consumerism, too much commercialization of sex for those from the East,” he said. “They were used to the cozier, more social atmosphere of the gay culture that had grown up in East Berlin. That is what many of them preferred in those early times of reunification. And yes, the Western people did not see much value in socializing in the East.”

“Some Easterners said the Western gay scene was just ‘cold capitalism,’” added Karl-Heinz Steinle, the managing director of Berlin’s Schwules Museum (Gay Museum). “Eastern people took pride in the fact that they were not using their sex as a business.”

Unity was not immediately achieved in the queer world of Berlin. By the early 90s the blush was off the rose. Many Westerners remained openly disdainful of their Eastern relations, and some Easterners even went so far as to wear T-shirts with “Give me my wall back” emblazoned on the front. “There was a second kind of step,” said Steinle. “Everyone returned and looked more closely at their own places.”

All Berliners quickly learned that the fall of the wall meant the end to any semblance of status quo. The forces of change quickly took over. The wall was taken down. New construction projects were quickly planned for Potsdammer Platz and other border areas that would not only heal the linear wound through the city but would bring new life to all areas. Plans were made to bring the national government of a unified Germany back to the unified capital.

Money poured into the former East, especially into Prenzlauer Berg. Its 19th-century buildings, many in frightening disrepair, still held their essential beauty. This neighborhood continued to be home to artists, students, and gays, but as people were displaced from their homes to make way for sweeping renovations, they were replaced by young people seeking cheap rent in the newly fashionable neighborhood. Less than one third of Prenzlauer Berg’s pre-1989 residents still remain in the district today.

Cafés, restaurants, and small shops arrived with the neighborhood’s restoration, and with them came new gay establishments. Blackstyle Fetishmode brought its rubber clothing and fetish gear manufacturing to the area, drawing fetish men from across the city to its showroom and store. Schall und Rauch, which, for the last 15 years, has been a cornerstone of gay life in the district, became a comfortable addition to the streetscape. It has grown from a café into a business that includes off-premise catering, an award-winning bed and breakfast, and a cozy restaurant with a very popular weekend breakfast buffet. Bars opened, darkrooms were added to cruising bars, and a gay sauna appeared on the main thoroughfare. Professional drag queen Nina Queer arrived to preside over Zum Schmutzigen Hobby, one of the area’s most popular cabaret clubs. The Sonntags Club survived, even prospered, and set down roots in the neighborhood. Today it operates as a café, and provides information and counseling to the LGBT community. “It really is a place that still holds some of the old-fashioned social values here,” said one young gay man sitting in the café.

By the turn of the millennium, Prenzlauer Berg had established itself as the center of gay life and culture in the former East Berlin. While the atmospheres of its clubs and bars varied, there remained a sense of the old East and its social order.

Meanwhile, the game was afoot in other areas of the city. Peter Polzer was only 17 when the wall came down. The next day, he hitchhiked to Berlin from his home near Munich. “I wanted to be a part of what was happening there,” he recalled. Polzer settled in Berlin, and by the time he was 26, he was the chief editor of Berlin’s gay magazine, Siegessäule. It was a good vantage point from which to watch Berlin’s dramatic queer developments unfold. The gay and lesbian political agenda was stagnating in the late 80s and early 90s. After the wall, that agenda remained driven primarily by Western viewpoints and priorities. During the 90s, progress came more quickly. “This was really the most exciting decade,” Polzer said, looking back on those times. “We finally got a more liberal government and the things we were fighting for began to actually happen. Today, I can say, there is almost nothing left to achieve politically.”

As gays grew politically stronger, their visibility increased. The Schöneberg gay scene intensified, centering in Motzstrasse near Nollendorf Platz. It is definitely an area that is a must-see for gay visitors. Shops, fetish bars, cafés, and clubs to suit all tastes line the streets of this “Rainbow Village.” Here, Christopher Isherwood lived (Nollendorf Strasse 17) and collected material for his book Berlin Stories.

In Kreuzberg, another of the Western districts that bordered the East, gay life developed as well. In 1985, the Schwules Museum was established, and quickly became a cultural center for all Berlin’s gays and lesbians. Following the events of November, 1989, new gay establishments appeared in Kreuzberg. Café Anal was one popular Kreuzberg spot that seemed to blend East and West values successfully. The interior was decorated by its patrons, and the bartender stood beneath a giant seashell to dispense his wares. On hot afternoons, young gay men could gather and drink beer outside while soaking their feet in the cold water of a child’s wading pool. The young people it attracted were from all parts of the city, united by their piercings, brightly dyed hair, and dress-down clothing. They were the AIDS activists, the gay rights advocates, the transvestites, the radical lesbians, and those who simply needed a welcoming queer home bar. One writer said it was a place that was “open to anything and closed to no one.” Sadly, the bar closed several years ago, having outlived the needs of its patrons and the interests of its owner. Other bars and clubs opened in Kreuzberg, and a significant gay presence remains and grows in the district today.

Those who do remember the “old days” tend to still think in terms of East and West. “In the East we have seen the development of a creative and alternative parallel universe,” said Polzer. “The knitting together of East and West still continues. For those who have recently moved to Berlin, I think it looks all the same.”

“The city’s gay East and gay West have both come together and have not,” said Ostrowski. “The scene in the East is now certainly as strong as the West, but I think there is still a border in the minds of those who established themselves and their gay identity in one sector or the other. People in the East tend to go out in the East. And I would say the same for people in the West.”

Time, of course, has its own ways of blurring old distinctions and even creating new ones. Today, a generation has grown up with no real memory of living under the Soviet-controlled regime in the East. Another generation is coming right behind, and others after that. It is left for those under the age of 30 to make the final shifts that will further diminish and eradicate that social boundary. Already it is happening. Young people in their 20s seem completely unconcerned with whatever differences there may be. “If you go out in Prenzlauer Berg today, most of the young people are from the West,” says Polzer. Others, including Ostrowski, agree that the bars in the East today attract a younger crowd from throughout the city. The West seems to be gradually aging.

The sands are even shifting in Prenzlauer Berg. Gay establishments remain a strong presence, but the district is now known more for small, young families more than for edgy gays and students. Moms pushing prams dot the sidewalks on balmy afternoons. Younger gays are seeking residence in the cheaper Friedrichshain (former East), or in Kreuzberg (former West).

The frontiers of gay nightlife exist in areas of the former East Berlin. There are still areas that Berliners refer to as “uncontrolled,” meaning not yet zoned for different land uses. In these areas, clubs and parties can spring up and operate unfettered by concerns about law or neighborhood custom. Some of these parties are only announced by word of mouth, or on certain gay websites.

At the moment, the hottest attraction is located in an aging Stalinist era power station in Friedrichain. It has been named the Berghain (because of its location near the Kreuzberg border in Friedrichain). Here, huge dance parties attract over 2,000 people in an “anything goes” atmosphere where photography is strictly forbidden. Each Easter Eve there is a huge fetish party that draws people from across Europe. The basement houses, what many say is, the most hard-core fetish club on the continent.

There are few cities where gay culture pushes the boundaries so far. “It is impossible to make a scandal about anything in Berlin,” said Ostrowski. “Absolutely impossible. If you can imagine it, if you can do it, no one will be offended. Just do it.”

Karl-Heinz Steinle enjoys taking people through the Schwules Museum’s permanent exhibit on the history of homosexual life. He points to photographs from various periods during the past century: a picture from the pre-Nazi days when Magnus Hirschfeld first began advocacy on behalf of those attracted to the same sex; a picture from the 1950s showing men in very bad drag; a photograph of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf in her museum; a shot of 1970s gay rights demonstrators in West Berlin.

“It is so interesting to look to the past and see the beginnings and early efforts that brought us to be who we are today. They may have had horrible clothes and wigs, but these are my ancestors.”

In the years since the wall came down, the queer men and women of Berlin have propelled their community forward, consolidating gains and breaking new ground. Their daring, brazenness, courage, and determination have brought the city to a new understanding of the myriad ways in which we can all express ourselves and our sexuality. Those qualities, perhaps more than anything else, making Berlin Europe’s leader in the ongoing evolution of gay life.

[Published: February, 2010]