How Berlin Annually "Goes Gay"
Jun 24th, 2007 by Paul Moor
The annual celebratory Gay Pride parade that meanwhile has become almost a world-wide event may have in fact originated in San Francisco (where for thirteen years I used to marvel at how that perhaps uniquely laid-back metropolis had long since turned it into a genuine family event, with kids brought along by straight parents to get the same kick everybody else did out of the unrestrained festive jubilation), but what’s meanwhile become known throughout Europe as Christopher Street Day - in Germany and elsewhere CSD for short - may well have attained its most exuberant manifestation here in Berlin. Of course Berlin’s having a popular openly gay mayor, Klaus (”Wowi”, pronounced Vovi) Wowereit, hasn’t exactly put a damper on things - but Paris also has a gay mayor, and I’ve seen no news account to indicate that any Parisian whoop-te-do even begins to compare with what virtually explodes here in the German capital.
To give you some idea of how importantly Berlin takes this, the regional Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, jointly domiciled in Berlin and the adjoining capital of the state of Brandenburg, Potsdam, yesterday devoted two entire hours of prime afternoon time to live coverage of the parade down the Kurfürstendamm, western Berlin’s equivalent of Manhattan’s Broadway plus Fifth Avenue, with a 45-minute summary of that last night, plus a rerun of the entire daytime coverage in the wee hours of this morning - a total of four hours and forty-five minutes. Can any other place in the world match that?
Here in Berlin the celebration began yesterday, and as I write this report it roars on into Sunday afternoon. Always the conscientious researcher, I turned to www.Google.de for a bit of historical documentation; no doubt similar videoclips from this present weekend will soon turn up on the Web as well, but today I excavated only this nine-minute audiovisual anthology from last year.
London’s always admirable weekly newspaper The Observer today has celebrated a similar but different British advance in the field of civil rights: the fortieth anniversary of Great Britain’s legal decriminalization of intimate acts between consenting adults of the same sex - and in a really big way, with an almost book-length three-part series about various aspects of that giant leap forward. Part 1 (”Coming Out of the Dark Ages”) summarizes the four decades of history involved, Part 2 (”What Liberation Did for Us”) presents a number of prominent Britons who’ve come out of the closet and here tell their own personal stories in print, and Part 3 (”We Saw the Light, but Too Late for Some”) presents a poignant panorama of personal triumphs and tragedies, ranging up to and including the suicides so many (only nominally) “gay” people had desperately concluded offered them the only way out of lives that had become too painful to bear.
The suicides of gay people somehow reminds me of the painful tales of people who died attempting to cross the Berlin wall in the last months of its existence. We should never stop trying to bring down all the walls that divide us, the apartheids of the isms.