Welcome back from queer summer, dear reader. This one was certainly lively and full. On the international cultural front, there were brats and Midwest princesses, Adele took over Bavaria and drag queens at the Olympics upset middle America. On the more local front, there were a whole lot of festivals and heaps of different pride events. After all this summer buzz maybe some autumn hibernation is in order, especially after some of the things that happened on Christopher Street Day across the country.
At many pride events, it wasn’t all a bag of rainbows
While there was the general worthwhile political activism and expected revelry, at many of these pride events, it wasn’t all a bag of rainbows. Let’s start with the most recent CSDebacle. In Bautzen, Saxony, the unthinkable happened: at the city’s second-ever CSD on August 10, queers were greeted by 700 neo-Nazis from all over Germany holding a “counter-demo”. For a pride march of about 1000 people, those numbers are scary. It got even scarier when videos surfaced online the next day of white men in black burning rainbow flags and pumping their fists in the air. The neo-Nazis marched a few hundred metres behind the pride demo, with the police keeping the right-wing radical shits at bay.
You may say that this is one anomaly for Germany in 2024, but on August 17, neo-Nazis held another counter-demo during the Leipzig CSD. This time, however, the police were prepared and nipped the protest in the bud.
Germany needs to decide whether it wants to protect us or arrest us
Meanwhile, back in Berlin, the men in black are the police. The day after two different demos on Pride weekend, videos of police violence flooded my Instagram feed. During both the Dyke March Berlin on July 26 and the Internationalist Queer Pride on July 27, multiple images of police infiltrating the demos and grabbing, hitting and manhandling queers protesting the genocide in Gaza were recorded. What is the reasoning behind attacking queers protesting for one of the most burning topics of the day? On top of that: “What good is it going after a bunch of baby dykes and twinks?” a colleague of mine at Dyke March asked afterward. Exactly.
German media reports on the police violence – sorry, er, intervention – at the marches as caused by bottle-throwing incidents (which I did not witness at International Queer Pride) but also people chanting certain criminalised slogans which Germany says amounts to hate speech. At the same time, what the neo-Nazis in Bautzen were shouting didn’t warrant any more action than forcing them to march a few hundred metres behind. Okay… To this, I can only repeat the quote doing rounds on social media at the moment: “A Nazi protest against queer people is freedom of opinion. A protest against war crimes and genocide is a criminal act.”
Palestine is and has been a huge international queer cause in Berlin. Right-wingers will always want to persecute us. Going forward, Germany needs to decide whether it wants to protect us or arrest us.
