Letter from Berlin: On Finding Queer Community
By Emma Toscani
Six days into my reporting trip to Berlin, I found myself standing outside a gate at Berlin’s Technical University campus with a negative COVID-19 test in hand. It was a little after 8 p.m. and I was going to a what Berliners call a “Soliparty” to raise money for trans medical care.
People were putting masking tape with Sharpie’d pronouns on their chests. The anglicized “Dey/Dem” was a favorite with the nonbinary people because the German language has no gender-neutral pronoun beyond the inanimate “Das.” Organizers of the event wore reflective vests, which designated them as safe people to talk to.
Inside the brick college building, I made my way into a room with a dance floor. Worn furniture was shoved in corners. To the right side there was a makeshift bar for beers and sodas. Colorful lights illuminated handmade signs on the walls expressing identity solidarity messages, some in German and some in English. “T.U. BERLIN-CAMPUS: IN TRANSITION,” said one. Young people, barely out of their teens, walked around waiting for the rap/techno/90s trash show to start at the punk time of whenever.
So, here I was in Berlin, the city where anything goes. This is surely where I should be able to find a quintessential queer experience even if I couldn’t find one in Seattle, despite many valiant attempts. I’d been looking for a moment when I would feel pride, as the queer rights movement says I should feel— pride in my bisexual identity.
The question for me, after arriving in the fabled city was: Where would this experience take place? Would it be in the park where I saw two femmes laugh and cuddle in the grass? Or was it to be on the dance floor of a crowded club?
When I first got to Berlin, I saw queer people everywhere. They signaled their identity with dyed hair, mullets or at least one rainbow pattern worn on their person. I saw same-sex couples walking close together and stealing kisses while waiting at a crosswalk.
Already, my excitement about becoming part of an imagined Berlin queer community wasn’t seeming too imagined.
While looking for the anarchist movement in Berlin, I had found myself in group chats on the Telegram app, reading about local protests and queer events happening in the city. Every day there was a message for a new protest — or a party — for alternative people in the area. I hadn’t found that level of engagement in Seattle, nor in my Washington college town, though it is known for its liberal politics.
This party was one such event, advertised on a scanned flyer passed through Telegram group chats. Now, I was interacting with German and international college students. When I got to the makeshift bar I hesitated. A gawky teenager manning the bar suggested, “Do you want the punk beer? It’s the cheapest.” No alcohol content was listed on the label.
Outside, a nonbinary person in their 30s was plucking eyebrows in one corner of the courtyard. I’d never had someone else pluck my eyebrows, but something about this whole experience made me agree this time. Never before had my eyebrows looked so defined.
After the eyebrow plucking, three people sitting nearby invited me to sit with them. They were from Holland, visiting for the week, and had been handed a flyer for the event by a stranger on the train. We talked about identity politics and laughed about cultural differences. I played foosball with three masculine people from Germany and Poland, and shouted along in what little German I knew.
I was an outsider, but that wasn’t a bad thing. I felt as if this was a place where I could fit in, if I got to know these people for longer than a night. Each person was so nice and ready to give me a smile. I didn’t feel exposed, as I had felt at my college town’s only gay bar, where the bar’s employees look down onto the dance floor with hawk-like intensity.
Even in so-called ‘liberal’ places, I hadn’t felt like I was in the right setting to simply exist as a queer person. I don’t know if a DIY event put on by young anarchists on a college campus across the world in Berlin is the queer experience I was looking for. But it certainly beat whatever I’d had before.
Emma Toscani is going into her final year at Western Washington University, pursing a double major in journalism and studio art, and a minor in professional writing. She is reporting from Berlin this summer.
