Tiergarten gay
Roaming Revenant
In the evening of my very first night in Berlin my legs took me to the Tiergarten park it looked like a looming big green space on the map in contrast to the busy municipality life all around me. I was slowly walking from the east to west, navigating the meandering pathways throughout the park and crossing many bridges over lakes and waterways.
Eventually I got to the clearing where there were gay man sunbathing, some couples & some singles. I coudn’t help but look, trying to not make it too clear. Still I pressed on, there were not a lot of people here and it looked just like a normal sunbathing spot albeit with mainly man around, but nothing extra going on that I can see or sense.
I crossed Hofjägerallee, one of the main roads radiating from the Victory Column monument and walked west for a bit. I knew there is a gay cruising area somewhere here near the Bremer Weg lake but I didnt dependency to check the chart to realise where I was. For the trees grew thicker, the people around where all men, walking at a curiously different pace compared to everyone else in the park. Their steps were slow and measured, frequently turning the head to lo
During my time here in Germany, I’d been hearing stories of cruising in the famous Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest inner-city park. In many ways it was their Central Park: hectares of land (85 more hectares than London’s Hyde Park). I’d been speaking to some native Berliners for a few weeks about the potential cruising spot, but they informed me the city had trimmed the brushes in the park so that gay men could no longer cruise there. I found this municipal gesture offensive — to depart to such lengths to assault this part of queer culture. I now imagined the park creature full of families and heterosexual couples, spraying their normative agenda all over the grass like foul pesticide. No, I couldn’t accept that this would happen in a capital like Berlin. Not Berlin!
There were some outdated posts online about where the cruising occured. According to a forum, you gain off at the Tiergarten S-Bahn station and stroll down the main lane, Straße des 17 Juni, toward the Victory Column. About halfway down you go south into the park to a lake which is the supposed cruising area.
I decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon. I passed several men on thei
This story originally appeared on i-D Germany.
For his photo project Hain – German for grove or a small cluster of trees – photographer Lukas Städler spent more than two years visiting Berlin’s most popular cruising spots to take snapshots of men having public sex in parks and local woodlands. Whether hours-long fun thick in the bushes or a barely-hidden quickie during a lunch break, what was once a necessity for many at some point turned into a kink. “Cruising began at a time when you couldn’t come out as a gay man,” says Lukas about the history behind it. “For a long time, it was a punishable offence to be gay, so there were hardly any universal spaces to get to know each other without being in danger.”
Places prefer Tiergarten, a huge park in the west of Berlin, thus provided people with the opportunity to meet like-minded people and live out their sexuality freely – even if just for a brief time. “For those people who remain in the closet, it’s still a reality,” Lukas says. Though of course these days it’s not simply a necessity, with out and proud people willingly getting involved too.
i-D spoke with Lukas about his NSFW project, self-exploration, and how hook-up apps like
Roaming Revenant
My previous experience cruising in Tiergarten has left me completely blown away and I was only happy to return again. After making sure I had a small bottle of lube and poppers safely zipped up in my pockets I left my hotel room and headed out in a general direction of the Park. By this hour it was already gloomy and the city streets were busy with people returning home from work.
Although it only takes about 40 minutes to earn to the cruising area, I was getting quite restless. After seeing dozens of scooters scattered about I decided to hold one and zip my way over instead. Once I got to Tiergarten, it was actually almost completely deserted. It was a rather nice to ride without all the people around. After going around the Victory Column I hopped off my scooter near a avenue crossing along Straße des Juni.
Immediately I could observe some people loitering about by the paths that lead away in to the dark. I made my way south towards the Bremer Weg lake, quickly falling in to a sluggish and steady pace of a cruiser. You include to be not too slow or too swift, giving yourself enough second to make or evade eye contact. Yet at the same time you must not look
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