Another person I spoke to, Kristen – who identified as ‘lesbian dyke whatever’ – told me: ‘If you go to the main CSD Pride parade tomorrow and you saw Dyke March today you would know the difference, it’s simple: one is a march, one is a parade.’ For Kristen, who was Canadian, Pride had lost its way with police presence and sponsors: ‘I don’t think of Pride and think of being proud,’ she said. ‘I think we should have a shame march. Because when you see Pride sponsored by whatever corporation, it’s nothing to be proud of. We have a power to disrupt shit and to present a different way of living in this shitty fucking world, and all of a sudden that suddenly gets absorbed. It’s like we’re made to think we belong, until something happens to remind us that we don’t.’
Kristen told me about Pride in her hometown, Toronto, to illustrate this. They have a huge, all-encompassing event that’s a testament to Canada’s inclusivity, she said, but it’s still not good enough. In 2016, Black Lives Matter protesters created a blockade to demonstrate against the police presence. Queer people of colour who suffer police brutality should not have to celebrate Pride under the watchful eye of their oppressors, they argued. ‘I thought, this is intersectionality, this is people coming together,’ remembered Kristen. ‘Black Lives Matter did the most important political thing, shutting down this corporate police march.’
For Kristen, this sort of thing justified why, sometimes, one Pride simply doesn’t fit all, and explained why Berlin has so many. She told me that Kreuzberg Pride was cancelled that year due to infighting – the radical queers behind it just couldn’t seem to agree on what it should look like. ‘That’s a shame,’ I said, having planned to go to it, and feeling slightly nervous that I would now be missing that as well as Dyke March.
‘There’s a queer picnic set to take place at the same time as the big commercial CSD parade was planned, at Hasenheide Park. You could go to that,’ she offered.
Dyke March Berlin didn’t spring up in opposition to Pride, but as an alternative. Its organizer Manuela Kay set it up in 2013 in the image of other Dyke Marches that had taken place in major cities like Washington DC (the original, dating back to 1993), San Francisco and Chicago. Manuela was the publisher and editor-in-chief of L-MAG, Germany’s biggest lesbian magazine, and the company wanted to do something to mark its tenth anniversary but also to serve the community. ‘Berlin didn’t have one and we thought about how, at the time, lesbian invisibility is increasing,’ she explained. ‘Everyone at the magazine had been to Dyke Marches over the world at some point, so we took that idea of reclaiming the streets, and created something suitable for Berlin. A protest not with a distinct political message or a new model every year or any concrete demands, but a general message of visibility.’
Each year, Dyke March takes a different route to Südblock, and according to Manuela, the crowd has grown every year, from 1,500 in the beginning to 4,000 today. They keep L-MAG branding minimal, despite the fact that the magazine’s staff pretty much organize the march on their lunch breaks. It has inspired four other Dyke Marches around Germany: in Cologne, Hamburg, Heidelberg and Oldenburg. Everyone is welcome, as long as they are respectful.
When Manuela and I spoke over the phone after Dyke March, I quickly learned that she was an out and proud lesbian raised in Kreuzberg, in the former West Berlin, and, at fifty-one years old, had been going to Prides every year since 1992. She knew about all the fighting over what Berlin’s Pride should look like because she’d witnessed it from the wings. When I asked why there was so much conflict, she laughed at me.
‘I’m afraid that’s unexplainable to foreigners,’ she said. ‘The way the political discussion here is going is beyond belief. The more left they are the more they fight each other, so there were years when we had three different Prides happening at the same time. The people organizing it think of course it’s a political statement which one you go to, but the people who are going to these events are totally overwhelmed with the decision. A lot of people I know would like to go to all three of them – they like the radical messages as well as the big commercial Gay Pride.’
‘So you can’t say the political people go to one and the apolitical people go to the other one?’
‘It’s not as simple as that. It’s a challenge for the LGBT community to have all these Prides, but that’s what Berlin is – a melting pot. It almost seems like people come here to fight over these issues. Sometimes I wonder why we don’t have twenty Prides in Berlin.’
The fighting started right after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, explained Manuela. Some people thought they should start in the former East; others thought the event needed to stick to the Ku’damm, one of the busiest and most famous streets in Berlin. The fights were over which location would get the best visibility; some wanted the walk to be where more tourists would see it and others said the walk needed to be where actual Berliners were living. As the CSD Pride grew in size over the years, people argued over that, too; something that also bothered Manuela:
‘I don’t think it’s necessary to have it as big as it is. I think it should just end with a party but not a huge stage. All these drinks stalls and food, it’s like a carnival. Most LGBTQ+ people I know just go home after the parade, and the after party is for tourists and people who don’t even know where they are. Over the last fifteen years, they forced it to be bigger and bigger without a clear vision of what they wanted it to be. Of course we can’t turn back time to when CSD had five thousand people and everyone knew each other and it was like a class reunion. We fought for it to be big so we can’t complain. But people at Dyke March tell me they miss that family feeling, and that’s why they come to Dyke March. The more intimate an event is, the more you feel like a family.’
Kreuzberg Pride was tiny, according to Manuela. With its ‘Queer Liberation March’ it was the small, intimate affair that CSD wasn’t, where friends could meet and soak up an atmosphere devoid of big trucks and company names. She wasn’t sure why it was cancelled, precisely, but pointed out that CSD had taken note of Kreuzberg Pride’s more political messaging: ‘There was a break a few years ago where the old people stepped back from CSD and new people came, trying to re-politicize it – but it’s not as easy as they thought.’ She thought they needed to get rid of brand sponsorships from big banks and car companies and insurance brokers. ‘Of course these businesses have more money to present themselves at Gay Pride than your local gay cafe or lesbian self-help group, but there’s a big imbalance in that. It’s a problem for all the big Prides all over the world.’
Towards the end of my night at Südblock, I met two gay guys called Joseph and Nick, PhD students from the USA living in Berlin. I asked them what they were doing at Dyke March. ‘A friend of mine was marching and I wanted to express support and solidarity,’ said Joseph. ‘Attending an event that focuses on non-cis, white male people feels like a prerogative during a Pride weekend which puts those types of men above all else. And I say that speaking as one.’ Joseph was indeed a skinny, white cis male.
‘Are you going to Pride tomorrow?’ I asked him.
‘I’m not going to main Pride – it valorizes a body culture of very muscular white hyper-masculinized men that I don’t feel that I belong to or want to be a part of,’ he said.
I looked at Nick, a tall, handsome and built gay man in a snapback cap and vest. ‘What about you?’ I said.
‘I think the body culture is totally fucked up; we end up subscribing to it,’ he said, obviously noting his own complicity. ‘As Joseph said, it’s important not to valorize these body types or normative genders that are so hegemonic, but really centre the experience of the most marginalized queer people.’
I agreed. And we all hit the dance floor.
The next day, I woke up, got dressed and walked to the Berlin Victory Column, a huge, gold-topped monument on a roundabout in the Tiergarten, the city’s biggest park. I knew the tail end of the CSD Pride parade was going to pass through here and felt that it was a good spot to intercept
it. The people I met waiting didn’t seem to fit the concerns Joseph and Nick had voiced the night before. There was Marianne, for example, an attractive blonde woman in her forties who was wearing a leather dress, sipping a Caipirinha at a cocktail stand that had evidently been erected in the name of the parade, just as cigarette vendors and people selling rainbow flags were targeting the slowly building crowd. Marianne was with her husband and a gay friend. She told me she was also writing a book – about the adventures she had with her slaves. A bisexual dominatrix, she felt that Berlin CSD represented the BDSM community well, and also pointed out that she might feel more reticent about wearing her fetish gear in the middle of the day in Miami, where she was from, compared to Berlin.
Günter, a gay man in his late fifties, told me that he was there to take up space, and believed that all lesbians and gays and trans people had a duty to go out and show themselves, to say ‘this is who we are’. Just as Manuela had suggested, Günter was the type of gay who liked CSD and Kreuzberg Pride, and had been to both. But he was convinced that there should be one Pride to cater to everyone; ‘Why should we be separate? We’re the same people. Every person is an individual but we are all a community,’ he told me in broken English, sounding forlorn.
‘Do you think it could ever happen?’ I asked.
‘I have no hope that it will,’ he responded.
When the parade itself approached the monument, I could hear it before I could see it. Gay Europop anthems and Katy Perry hits carried on the wind. I waited and soon discovered that a bus led the procession, blasting the music, with feathered drag queens dancing lazily on top of it while the audience cheered from the sides of the road. I immediately noticed that the parade wasn’t shut off from the crowd with cordons or tape, but anyone was welcome to join. Taking advantage of this, I circled behind the bus and merged into the procession alongside a group of pups – men wearing leather dog-style masks for the purpose of puppy-play fetish. I overheard British accents coming from two of the masked boys closest to me who, other than their studded dog masks, were just wearing nondescript jeans and T-shirts. They were called Chris and James, and were also from London.
‘What’s the biggest difference you’ve noticed between this Pride and Pride in London?’ I asked them, curious.
‘Everyone seems much more relaxed about fetish and it’s more in the open, whereas in London it tends to happen behind closed doors,’ said James.
‘It’s a bit quieter than London – the crowd seems more chilled. In London everyone’s screaming and dancing,’ said Chris.
‘I like the fact anyone can join in though,’ said James. ‘It’s an open invitation to the march – you have to get a wristband in London, and if you haven’t got one you’re not marching with your friends. It seems much more democratic here.’
Another bus passed, emblazoned with a big banner that said: ‘Skittles, taste the rainbow’. I cringed at how well the sponsor’s tagline fitted in with the cause. Then my phone rang; finally, Amrou had made it to the parade. But just as I started looking for them, it began to rain – a terrible, biblical rain that felt as if it had been sent to drown us all for our buggery. I momentarily wondered what that meant for the queer picnic I’d planned to go to in Hasenheide, and then found myself preoccupied with trying to locate some shelter. Amrou was nowhere to be seen, and I spent forty-five minutes in an underpass with hundreds of other soaked, grumpy Pride-goers. People were smoking and drinking in the tunnels, drag queens with make-up running.
Eventually a dripping-wet Amrou appeared. ‘God, this is miserable,’ they said, cowering and shivering in the tunnel with me. We resolved to make a dash for it, and walked through the rain and the sad sight that was the outdoor Pride after party – a series of stages blasting music, and stalls selling overpriced cocktails. Marianne had warned me that her stand was the cheapest.
There were a few hardcore party animals dancing in anoraks, and Amrou and I joined them for a bit, or long enough to get drunk, before retreating to a nearby shopping centre to buy shoes that weren’t saturated. Then we decided to do what felt like the only option left to us: go to Berghain, the club I had traumatically been ejected from six years before and which judges whether people are worthy of entry on the basis of how cool they look. ‘This is the least queer thing we could be doing on Pride,’ Amrou pointed out while we waited in line.
‘I agree. It’s so gross that a club that claims to be queer will reject people based on their appearance,’ I said, internally praying that we would get in. After an hour in the queue, we still had a way to go, but the sunk-cost fallacy of the time we’d already invested made it too hard to give up. When we got to the front, we were, miraculously, admitted. The rest is forgotten, but what I do know is that Berghain – with its attractive crowd, expensive cover charge and elevated sense of importance – reflected all of the criticisms people had made about CSD, and none of them, at least in my opinion, had applied to CSD at all. What I had discovered in Berlin was that the confusion around what Pride should look like had led to nothing but infighting. It was kind of a mess.
Amsterdam’s Pride happens on the first weekend of August, two weeks after Berlin’s. It’s different from other Prides because it’s structured around a boat parade along the city’s canals, with people riding vessels packed far beyond what health and safety regulations ought to allow. I decided to visit it because it’s supposed to be Europe’s biggest and best, the website claiming it has over half a million spectators.
All of this makes sense when you consider how progressive Holland is; although buying weed and buying sex are not entirely decriminalized, they are legal under regulation, and the Netherlands was the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, back in 2001. But as the head of the COC, the Netherlands’ foremost LGBTQ+ organization, would tell me when I met him at a Pride event, the country had lost its footing in global polls on LGBTQ+ equality in recent years precisely because it was so far ahead of the curve in the past; it recognized gay equality in the law so early on that there was a feeling that equality had been achieved. The government had become complacent.
Still, I was impressed at just how forthcoming the Dutch were when I reached out to speak to people. The organizers of Pride immediately introduced me to Hans Verhoeven, who I was told had been organizing Prides for over twenty years. Hans explained that I would need a bike – naturally – and that I could follow him for a day as he went about his various duties. As an ambassador for Pride, and one of the five people on the organizing committee, he needed to go between events to say hello, express his appreciation for the various societies and groups that held events under the overall Pride banner, and check that things were running smoothly.
Amsterdam Pride lasted a week, with the main events taking place on the weekends and a load of smaller events in between. Hans organized Pride Walk, which kicked things off on the first Saturday. It was an event designed to keep the protest in the proceedings, since it was ostensibly a march, followed by a bunch of political speeches. Then, once Pride Walk was over, Hans was free to breathe and focus on helping everyone else out with their events in the lead-up to the second weekend, which featured the big canal parade. I’d not heard about any splinter Pride or alternative Pride events in Amsterdam and I was beginning to see why: the main event was extremely comprehensive.
This was confirmed when Hans sent me the schedule. I was to meet him at a networking event for autistic LGBTQ+ people, before we moved on to an old people’s home, and then the Mayor of Amsterdam’s house for a drinks reception. The first was held in the leafy brick courtyard of the Amsterdam Museum, which was where I found Hans in a tight pink T-shirt with a leather body harness over the top, and butt-tight green jeans with army-surplus boots. He had a military-style short-back-and-sides haircut and was obviously a gym-goer. He sat me down, lit a Marlboro Red, and explained the basics.
‘This is the way we’ve set up our programme over the last years: the week is activities with the beefy c
ontent, activities that have subject or meaning. And the last weekend: all about the party. But even when we have partying to do, we remind people that Pride has not always been a party but it started as a riot, and there’s still lots of countries where Pride is not existing and where being homosexual is not fun at all, and we do that through power speeches.’
I would come to learn that moderating the party with the protest was Hans’s entire MO. ‘What’s a power speech?’ I asked.
‘Every stage gets an ambassador to give a speech at the main stages of the party. We ask for attention, remind people where we came from, that there’s a lot to do in the world, and we wish them fun in the meantime. I started it two years ago as a test: I took what I expected to be the most difficult of the stages, Amstelveld, where there’s most heterosexual people. I thought, “If it works there it’ll work on other stages as well.” People had drunk a couple of beers and this guy came on stage and cut the music, and I gave the speech. Responses were good; people listened. So the year after we decided to do it on all stages. This year we’re doing twenty-two speeches.’
‘Who else gives the speeches?’
‘Since 2013, Pride Amsterdam asks a new group of ambassadors who are community representatives each year. I was amongst the first group in 2013, and the year you’re appointed is the year you’re the face of Pride – you’re used in the media, you give speeches. We have trans ambassadors, two people from the senior community, a drag queen . . .’
‘So it’s not a democratic process?’
‘You see in Berlin where alternative Pride gets cancelled from infighting; it doesn’t work making this a democratic process. There’s a lot of money involved: €1.2 million. When you’re running a project like this, it’s all about big decisions. So we have five people on the board, an office staff of four, and then we have coordinators . . . I coordinate Pride Walk. The coordinators are very much on their own: you’re given a project, they say good luck. You find a group of volunteers you work with, and you go for it.’
Queer Intentions Page 11
