Report from Berlin CSD 2010

June 20th, 2010, 14:21 | 1 comment

CDU.

Die Linke.

Die Lesben.

Die Tunten.

Was meint er eigentlich?

The most kinky participant I could find.

Familie ist, wo Kinder sind!

There were few teenagers around, and these were only onlookers.

Where’s the party? At GMF!

Heil Super-Zandy!

They looked so happy! Afterwards I realized why: They’re getting married in July, according to the text on their t-shirts.

Another happy gay couple.

And a third one – notice their matching underwear.

That’s the sticker he smacked on my chest!

The sticker from Die Piraten ended up on my t-shirt as well.

Hawt!

Several people had Swedish flags despite they were German. Apparently there was some kind of royal wedding going on in Sweden.

Pump up the Jam!

PS: Judith Butler got a prize for moral courage, but declined it in a speech she held in German.

Category: Culture, English
Tags: Berlin, CSD, gay

A street for Karl

June 16th, 2010, 11:24 | 1 comment

In the project Eine Straße für Karl (A street for Karl), two lawyers want to change the name of a street in Berlin from Einemstraße to Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Straße. The background:

Karl von Einem (1853-1934), whom the street is named after today, was a Prussian commander who hailed the Nazis and demanded homosexuals be exterminated.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) on the other hand was a sort of pioneer of the gay movement and is sometimes dubbed “the first homosexual”.

573 persons so far have signed the petition to change the street’s name from the bad Karl to the good Karl.

Category: English, Politics
Tags: Berlin, gay

Imma be creative

June 14th, 2010, 15:19 | Comments Off

Entering the BOOM BOOM POW phase of a project. Every time I’ve cleaned my desk and put the speakers in place, I thank god for this life and pity those who never get to experience this feeling. The rush! The flow! THE BLAST!

And I tell you: There’s no place in my apartment for a pair of plastic Logitech usb speakers. These are Yamaha, but more than that: They’re teenage speakers. Got them when I was 16 and quite soon pimped them with a second bass unit. There have been times that I regret the EXTREME bass that this tuning resulted in, not the least since they already burned a pair of amplifiers. But then again, there are times, like now, when I realise that the second bass unit is… ME. At these times I realise I’m still that teen, and that my body needs that teenage bass. I like it when we go to extremes. Let it rock!

Category: English, Personal

72 vintage gay magazine logotypes

June 13th, 2010, 15:24 | 12 comments

Boy, have I been scanning! Here are the first 72 vintage gay magazine logotypes that can be printed on my Vintage Pride t-shirts – click to zoom. A few titles occur more than once since they changed their logotypes.

To be frank, many of the logotypes aren’t that impressive, just like many of the magazines weren’t. But they are welcome in the mix anyway, since they contribute to the vastness and diversity of it.

So, once again, which one’s your favourite? I think I’m leaning towards MM and Superboy.

Category: Culture, English, Fun
Tags: gay, Vintage Pride

Repost: Why I avoid bike paths

June 11th, 2010, 11:00 | 5 comments

Bike paths and bike lanes aren’t evil by definition. Broken glass, natural speedbumps, forced bends, parked cars, turning cars, walking people, roadworks, gravel and traffic lights activated by a button (instead of a sensor) make them evil. All these things make it impossible to have a smooth and fast ride.

By trial and error I now know what to expect from the bike paths in Stockholm. I therefore always choose the road and bike among the cars.

There is a main problem with this though. The existence of bike paths has made car drivers think the road is for cars alone. If a cyclist shows up in “their” lane, the drivers act hobby-cops and honk. I often want to tell them “hey, why don’t you borrow my bike for a few hundred meters on this bikepath and then reconsider your opinion?” But the communication is oneway, like always when it comes to cars.

The other problem is that bike paths can lull less experienced cyclists into a false sense of security. What do these cyclists do when there is no bike path? They haven’t learned the basic traffic rules, since the bike paths always protected them.

If cars and bikes always used the same roads, there would be more reciprocal respect in traffic. No driver would get mad at a cyclist for momentarily blocking his or her way and all cyclists would have to learn some basic rules to bike safe.

The benefits for the cyclists are obvious: We would no more be second class road-users. We wouldn’t have to cope with the kind of bumpy symbolic bike path that is only a piece in the political jigsaw-puzzle. For the first time, the best way to bike would also be the legal way.

A parked car. Since the bike lanes on Hornsgatan always look like this, wouldn’t it be safer to bike among the cars the whole time instead of having to confront the car lane every 30 meters?

Another parked car. It’s gonna be hard to pass this one without crossing the line.

And yet another one. This time on the heightened bike lane of Sveavägen, which means you can’t just bike around it. Also notice the sand and the water drain near the bottom of the picture. A speedbump every ten meters.

Delivery. The sandy, bumpy, windy (at every crossing) bike lanes on Götgatan are separated from the cars, but not from delivery or …

… people! How could anyone consider this kind of bike lane safe? These pedestrians are waiting for the walk sign to turn green. The cyclists and cars still have a green light.

Let me end with a disclaimer: These opinions are about bike lanes and bike paths made for commuting, when the cyclist wants to reach the goal as fast and smooth as possible. I haven’t discussed recreational cycling at all, when the cyclist wants to see a beautiful scenery far away from cars. For that activity there are lots of great bike paths.

This was a repost from April 2002, triggered by this post by Rasmus Fleischer (in Swedish but there are pictures). Some of the same thoughts are discussed by Viktualiebrodern (also in Swedish).

Category: English, Politics, Repost
Tags: Biking

Karl Andersson releases fashion line

June 10th, 2010, 9:30 | 5 comments

For immediate release:

Avid magazine collector and publisher Karl Andersson today announced the release of his fashion line Vintage Pride.

Vintage Pride is a collection of vintage gay magazine logotypes printed on t-shirts in various colours.

- I want to celebrate the diversity of early gay liberation by bringing the logotypes of its gay press back to life, Andersson says.

- The rainbow had more colours in the 1970s, he adds.

Vintage Pride is still in the haute couture phase, meaning each t-shirt is custom made and sells for 100 euro. At the moment, the customer can choose from a selection of 12 logotypes – see them all here.

- The logotypes are the soundtrack of a forgotten era, Andersson concludes.

- That’s why I love them.

Category: Culture, English, Personal
Tags: gay, Vintage Pride

Discussing a Donald Friend documentary

June 8th, 2010, 15:09 | 5 comments

I haven’t seen Kerry Negara’s documentary A Loving Friend, in which she deals with the Australian artist Donald Friend’s (1915-1989) supposed sex crimes against boys in Bali. However, I found this review and the discussion that follows it interesting. The reviewer Lauren Bliss shows that the film’s sensationalist approach might work against it:

My questioning of his guilt came from watching a film where Friend was painted to be completely evil and the art critics who supported him to be bumbling fools. [...] From this, I found it nearly impossible to digest any of the facts presented by Negara as truthful [...]

Most interesting though, isn’t the discussion about Friend’s guilt or the film’s aesthetics, but what the film’s script editor John Doggett-Williams writes:

If you have any pride in your work or want to gain some credibility withdraw your original review from publication.

Such demands from the filmmakers make me listen even more to the reviewer. In any case, I would like to see the film.

(The picture is a drawing by Donald Friend of Dolog, a ~~teenager~~ boy he met in 1967. From The Diaries of Donald Friend, Volume 4, page 26.)

Category: Culture, English
Tags: Donald Friend

Gay march protests in Budapest

June 2nd, 2010, 15:40 | 3 comments

Martin Passoli over at HungaryGay offers an explanation to why gay pride marches are met by protests in Budapest nowadays, whereas they were totally accepted in the first years. He writes (scroll down on his site for the post):

I attended my first gay march in 2001. Then there were no disruptions to the event, no protests against it, it was all peaceful and cheerful. At the time when gay organisations in other Eastern block countries were still fighting to be given the right to march, the Budapest march used to be an incredible parade. But jealousy is there in all of us. A straight community that sees thousands of happy, careless gays occupying the streets of the capital does get jealous.

I think he has a point, but one should also not forget that these protests started in countries which have more problems with homophobia than Hungary, and are now spreading as a sort of trend. And Hungary is, as Martin points out, “torn between East and West” in this respect. Not as poor and homophobic as the Eastern countries, but also not as rich and openminded as the Western ones.

I’ve attended a Budapest gay pride march too. It was in 2002 and it was a lovely event with lots of participants and lots of companies who wanted to be seen in this setting – I remember Fanta handing out free bottles from their float. No protesters were seen at all. In 2008, only six years later, The Guide reported on the clashes in Budapest and other Central European cities. I was asked for a comment in their article, which ended like this:

In Brno on June 28, the Czech Republic’s first-ever pride march faced an assault by dozens of neo-Nazis that left 20 of the 500 gay demonstrators injured. Police and the extremists clashed for some 45 minutes at the end of the parade route, and some 15 were arrested.

Does the greater tolerance evident in this year’s somewhat more peaceful prides in Moscow, Warsaw, and Bucharest meant that anti-gay sore spot is shifting Westward?

Not necessarily, says Karl Anderson, editor of the Prague-based gay magazine Destroyer, who contends this year’s violence in the Czech Republic and Hungary doesn’t have deep roots.

“Unlike what had happened in Poland and Russia, the parade wasn’t attacked by regular citizens, but by extremists,” Anderson says. “These countries have a tradition of being open-minded and secularized. The attacks don’t reflect attitudes at large.”

At least they didn’t. I think part of the positive atmosphere back in 2002 was due to the fact that Hungary still hadn’t joined the EU, but was on its way to do so. That gave people hope, and the early gay marches therefore became a symbol for the switch from East to West. They were an exotic and appreciated part of the new life – welcoming them was a way of shaping up for the awaiting EU entry. When things didn’t change for the better as radically as people maybe hoped, disappointment spread. That might be one reason why people object to gay pride marches today when they didn’t ten years ago.

Category: English, Politics
Tags: Budapest, gay