Phrases after Berlin

Here’s a little taste of Berlin, already fading (watch my wrist sweep up to my forehead in despair!). We had a lot of fun.

 I listened to Panda Bear upon our return to our pad after the big night out. It brought out tears that needed to be shed. Though there was no sobbing. I stayed pretty much on their edge. And that, on a sunny Easter morning that was supposed to be rainy, was lovely, especially because there were singular people that I miss who were in the mix, too.

It wasn’t all fantastic, though. Last year’s Friday night Perverts party was much better than was this year’s. There was no map to it, though it was far off the registers of any of our guidebooks and city maps. Except for some minimal hysterics on my part handled with a certain amount of grace by Titi de Paris, we got there in plenty of time. But the space was disappointing: when we arrived, everyone was in this kinda home-made movie theater watching a new Cazzo flic that didn’t do much for me and Titi. I was all gussied up in my new gear, which was sorta fun, but it wasn’t my idea that we were going to the movies. There was a kinda cool space, for dancing and sex, that was sorta hidden behind the coat check. People didn’t find it until way into the night. We left early – I think around 4 o’clock, and it would have been earlier if we didn’t have to stand in line 45 minutes to collect our belongings.

But the big night out made up for whatever Friday night was lacking. Saturday night was a party called Snaxx (love that flyer!!), at the Berghain, a reinvested factory in the ex-east in the midst of big socialist project-like, white-walled blocks of buildings. It's the party we went to last year where I spent most of the time running around in a panic trying to find the drugs that would allow me to get into it. This time around, I had the drugs, and was therefore, as predicted, able to enjoy its, oh, I don't know, maybe, like, fifteen different partying spaces in varying degrees of dark and light? Sex and dancing were in the mix, as predicted, with two main dance floors. I remember bopping around on the edge of the smaller dance floor to Prince's "Erotic City." Fucking until dawn is exactly what we did. It was 6 or 6:15 when we finally collected our stuff to hop into a cab. They had been doing great things with strobe lights on the main dance floor. I'm still surprised by the faces and postures I'm finding burned into the retina of my mind by the bright white, violet, and yellow flashes.

There were actually a lot of Frenchies around that we knew. one of whom has recently sero-converted and is all into his new "carefree" status. (Incidentally, I grant the barebackers that those quotes might be jealousy, in part, but I do know for sure that that’s not all that they signal). He tended to make us uncomfortable, for obvious reasons, especially when we ended up seeing him at another party closer to our digs in Prinzlauerberg that he qualified as a barebacking one, tho it hadn't been advertized as such. We ended up not staying very long, ditching it for a subway ride and then more beer at the bar in Isherwood's old neighborhood that was some kind of a neuralgic center for further wandering, and where we ran into more Frenchies of the condom-toting kind who we chatted with more than we ever do in Paris. Titi also ran into the man who sold him his chaps at Mr. S in SF. He ended up fucking him later on that lovely San Francisco day a couple of summers ago, and it's been nice to run into him at these big Euro affairs. This time around, I got to watch them make out - which was a pleasure for me, mainly because Titi has this way that he makes out the whole leather thing to be the result of my proclivities and neuroses. So it was nice to watch him take pleasure from kissing the man who sold him his chaps. Plus, it turns out that this guy is also the friend of one of my most important sex buddies in SF. Someone who awakened me to all kinds of zones of my body, including my wonderful asshole (later nicknamed Principessa, which we know later metonymed into one of my very own selves). Titi doesn’t like this fuckbuddy much, for obvious reasons and less clear ones, too. But I like it that he finds pleasure with someone who is also of this man's universe. After however little sleep and whatever drugs, but still, the man formerly of Mr. S  told us we'd be welcome to stay in the house he shares with his boyfriend in the Castro.

The above account of going out for a beer around Nollendorfplatz hints at the overall mood. Chatting, much more so than in past years, with other Frenchies, but also just Titi and me chatting away in various more or less dark corners. Amidst lots of fucking around that of course nourished the conversations. I've been writing away about the events and realizations it helped pop out of incubation. This little bit is the first bit I've done in English so far (which makes me find Kiki in my mind from the Carnegie Hall concert, where she so delightfully enjoins the audience to sing along with her to Dominique, "but this time, in french!") "In French!" is where those "phrases après berlin" have mostly been coming. Or going. At any rate getting written down. I've never given myself permission to think that French would be my writing language. It's a little strange and unsettling and interesting, too, as far as possibilities go.

It's also the language where, the other night, I articulated a fantasy that I hadn't realized had crystalized over the course of our Berlin adventures. The conversation at a delightful dinner party full of heavy topics turned towards barebacking, as conversations among politically inclined, sexually active fags will sometimes do. One of us is active at Act-Up-Paris, one of the few groups in the world to have maintained a resolutely all-condoms, all-the-time policy for which I admitted I was somewhat grateful. There was a kind of civil war because of this stance, with a recently deceased writer named Guillaume Dustan, in the words of another of the guests, pushed into a no-condoms none-of-the-time position whereas he had begun by articulating the fact that poz's were fucking among themselves without condoms. Act-Up now, like many people and groups, judging from the little I know and the dinner conversation, seems to be considering sero-sorting as a possible way forward, but given the radicality of their previous position, and the lag in mobilization around AIDS-issues, they're having trouble doing it whole-heartedly -- which is a considerable problem for them given how they tend to do things. Anyway, I realized that one of the things that I would have liked to have participated in, a fantasy that had nested in my mind while in Berlin, would have been to be fucking or being fucked away with my traditional condom, while, next to me, in my line of sight and subject to my recognition, would have been a couple of poz's banging away at each other. I want to have been able to smile at them. And I want them to be able to smile at me. And I want all of us in this scene to know that we're taking care of ourselves and each other. That's my fantasy. It implies a relation to what seems more and more to be a globalized civil war that is open to interstices capable of allowing its forces to shatter. And to allow us to be dazzled by the light its shattering sheds.