Even though Exberliner is still much too gay, we used to get letters about it a few years back. Of course, Maurice von Ritz was on it to rectify our over-homo-saturation. From issue #43, October 2006.
‘Having now read a number of your publications I have noticed what professionals in your industry may term “a stream of consciousness”. A disproportionate amount of your magazine is given over to gay articles. The last issue was a culmination of this. Is there any chance this situation could be partially reversed?’ were one reader’s thoughts in a letter to the editor in last month’s issue.
I couldn’t agree more. Those pesky queers. You grant them liberation and before you know it the bastards are everywhere. And believe me, anon from Berlin, it’s not just in our magazine that this is the case. You might think yourself safe in some trendy bar in Mitte, but you know what? The buggers no longer even have the decency to restrict themselves to Motzstrasse and the ghetto of gay bars. And what’s even worse: it gets harder all the time to tell a homosexual when you meet one. Who knows, you might have actually had a conversation with one without even realizing. No, you are absolutely right. Terrible state of affairs. But what’s to be done? You request that the ‘situation be partially reversed’. I’m afraid as far as society goes, that might be tricky. One suggestion might be to push for gay sex to be made illegal. It’s been done before, so I don’t know why it can’t be done again. If a short man with a funny moustache can do it, I don’t see why an eloquent-sounding person like yourself who is able to drop ‘stream of consciousness’ into a sentence (albeit with the wrong definition, but good on you for trying), can’t pull it off. All we can do here is, in our modest way, purify our magazine.
So I decided to check out the issue you refer to. I presume one of the articles which bothered you most was the article on Christopher Isherwood [ed. note: check back soon for this interview] who, unfortunately for your sensibilities, was actually a gay writer. We included this piece because this year is the 20th anniversary of his death, and his books are in part responsible for the mythology of Berlin which brought many of us to the city in the first place. However I have talked to the editor and we have decided to edit all mention of the writer’s sexuality out of the interview (which makes the piece quite short, but never mind) and Don Bachardy will from now on be referred to as Isherwood’s live-in secretary. The headline of the feature on ice cream was written in pink, so I suppose we could have made that a more manly blue. And depending what you imagine lesbian sex to compose of, entitling our review of sushi as ‘Berlin Bites’ might have been a bit risqué. For that we apologize. There was also a short piece on gay sex in Berghain, but that is something you will have to take up with the management of the club, as that remains an undeniable fact. Which just leaves this column. We had considered renaming it ‘The Berliner’, but then we realized that Berlin, with its huge gay population, has for many people quite a homosexual connotation. So from now on, it will be entitled ‘The’.
