At which point, I decide to go for broke and ask a question that sounds more controversial than it should be.
Let me explain: lots of people parrot the Nietzschean maxim that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger; Roman persecution, for instance, actually stoked the wildfire-growth of Christianity.
However, when you apply that same terrible irony to recent history and the groups that the Nazis tried to kill, well, people start to get uncomfortable: somehow it's not very politically correct.
But I've got to ask.
'In the long run,' I ask, 'do you think it was Nazi persecution that helped make Germany's gay movement as strong as it is today?'
Berlin's monument to the homosexual victims of the Nazi regime
Karl-Heinz is speechless for a second, struggling to find the right words. 'I—I—I'm not a fan of arguing like that,' he says, gazing out the window.
'Because that gives all these activities a kind of shadow. It means that you're always reacting against something and you don't have your own ideas. If you want to live with all the rights that other people have, you should always fight for your rights.'
He mentions that this struggle is continually evolving.
Karl-Heinz shows me around the museum's temporary exhibit entitled 'Paradise' and murmurs appreciatively: 'Here is a very interesting drawing.'
That's one word for it.
The artist was a German POW who swapped erotica for cigarettes with American guards.
The drawing shows a group of naked cuties in officers' caps putting the 'cock' into 'cocktail:' one is peeing into the proffered glass of another.
Mmm… fresh pee-tinis, anyone?
Images from the museum's 'Paradise' exhibit
Gad told me before coming here that Karl-Heinz 'used to be gorgeous.'
For the record, that seems ungenerous, because he's only fortysomething and still a good-looking guy, with white teeth gleaming against his tan and a salt-and-pepper goatee.
He's also fun to talk with because he engages difficult subjects head-on.
In fact, I like him so much, I've decide to burden him with a couple of questions I've been dying to ask:
'I know that places around the world celebrate Christopher Street Day—even in Istanbul,' I start off. 'But why do gays in Germany focus on commemorating an American event rather than their own, far more important achievement: the founding of the world's first gay-rights movement?'
Karl-Heinz pauses before giving me a diplomatic, respectful answer that amounts to 'it's the Nazis, stupid.'
'You shouldn't forget that the infrastructure that there had been in the Twenties wasn't established again until the Eighties. From 1933, within half a year after the Nazis came to power, this widespread network and infrastructure was totally wiped out and had to go underground or become invisible. What is especially important for all the more history-oriented groups—but even for restaurants or the organizers of fucking festivals—is the knowledge that a very good community can be destroyed in less than half a year. So in Germany and Berlin this is maybe more on the table, as we say, than in other countries.'
But then I went to see Karl-Heinz Steinle, the curator of the world's first Schwules Museum: the only 'Gay Museum' in the global village.
One of the museum's exhibits
'I would say that Berlin is actually more balanced than other cities,' he explains. 'Berlin has these dark-sex-triple-gangbang-fuck-rooms—'
—a word I would love to see written in German—
'—with all the drugs and stuff. And it has, let's say, new ideas, experimental gender-crisscrossed rooms and programs and quite a few historical groups.'
The Schwules Museum began in a flat before the fall of the Wall and now occupies an old industrial workshop; its neighbours are a gay café and a shop called 'Faster, Pussycat!'
'There is one part of gays' thinking that isn't so interested in history, but there is another part which is enormously interested to be able to say "I'm not the first one,"' Karl-Heinz says.
'The museum's development from a little special interest group to the institution that we are now also establishes gay history as a scientific study. It's not done by gays who want to say, "I will collect 2,000 photographs of cocks."'
That said, there's no famine of phalluses in the museum's exhibit on two centuries of gay history.
But amid the usual namechecks—nods to the Greeks and Romans, plus Dietrich, Wilde, Auden and Isherwood—it also displays plenty of curiosities: an anal diagram from a French medical text in 1878 showing 'Desordres que produit la pederastie' (it ain't pretty)… Gestapo photos of known homosexuals, taken in three poses (including with and without hats)… and kitsch Seventies copies of him: das magazine mit dem mann featuring weedy sex symbols with bush cuts and sideburns before the American gym-bunny aesthetic conquered the world.
Whereas buggery had been legal in France since the Enlightenment, gay sex was still very much against the law in Germany.
An effeminate lawyer from Hannover was possibly the first man to 'come out' in the modern sense of the term.
In 1862, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published The Riddle of Male-Male Love, expounding his theory that homosexuals belonged to a congenitally different 'third sex' that deserved the same rights as the other two.
Ulrichs argued that the male homosexual had the disposition of a woman in a man's body—a precursor of the modern 'gay gene' theory, in the sense that he believed sexual 'inverts' didn't choose to be 'perverts;' they were born that way.
But it's not that simple...
In retrospect, the major problem with the third-sex argument was that it was based on false assumptions.
At the time, even the most forward-thinking scientists believed that men were naturally promiscuous and women passive; that was the only way to hold civilization together.
'If a woman is normally developed mentally and well-bred, her sexual desire is small,' Krafft-Ebing wrote. 'If this were not so, the whole world would become a brothel, and marriage and a family impossible.'
Hmm…
Confronted with the Rigid-v.-Frigid division, you can see why many men (and women) must have felt like misfits, simply because they didn't conform to either stereotype.
With his third-sex theory, Ulrichs tried to win the public over by contending that homosexuality was entirely natural.
Unfortunately, after Darwin, the claim that homosexuals were biologically distinct could also be used to justify their extermination.
Depending on your fancy, you can find different theme parties every night of the week: 'Naked & Underwear Sex Parties,' Turkish/Oriental 'Gayhanes,' Slave Markets and 'Candlelight Fuck,' transvestite shows and queer ballroom dancing and one-off spectacles like 'Gay Night at the Zoo' in Berlin's Tiergarten and the 'German Mr. Leather' Contest held on Easter Sunday.
The tourist info also directs you to the most popular public toilets for cottaging and hotspots for naked sunbathing, as well as a gay B&B service, numerous porn emporia with cruising areas and private cabins, and saunas and massage parlors offering male-to-male 'anal and prostate massage and fisting.'
There's even a Café PositHIV serving up tea and sympathy and a rainbow-flagged stand selling curried-bratwurst outside Berlin's landmark KaDeWe department store.
An anti-Putin rally in Berlin in 2013
In short, Berlin seems to prove the envious theory of many a straight man that when it comes to sex, gay men have it easy: without any women involved to say 'no,' the boys must be at it morning, noon and night.
Or, to quote my bilingual gay guidebook, 'Ficken klappt die ganze Woche'—'Fucking works all week.'
Now, I like to think I'm as gay-friendly as the next guy—my best man was…—but one immediate revelation in the home of homosexuality is just how little I know about the scene.
I had no idea, for instance, of the ubiquity of der Darkroom.
The idea of a purpose-built, darkened room for guy-n-gal orgies has yet to catch on in most straight clubs—no doubt for fear that the authorities would shut them down before they could say 'pass the lube.'
In many gay clubs, though, sex rooms are standard, according to Berlin From Behind (certainly a novel way of taking in a city for me): 'Darkrooms have almost become part of the basic equipment for gay bars in Berlin.'
It's also become clear that I know nothing about darkroom etiquette.
It was while I was over at MORE that I got some useful bondage-bar guidance from the author of Sextips für Schwule Männer, or Sex Tips for Gay Men.
Stephan Niederwieser had recommended the restaurant, which is on the main drag in the gay district, right around the corner from where Christopher Isherwood wrote the stories that became Cabaret, which in turn spawned its own gay icon: Liza Minnelli, daughter of Judy 'Dorothy' Garland.
Stephan had given me good advice when I told him I wanted to see a darkroom.
'You shouldn't go in there with those shoes,' he said, glancing under the table at my feet.
In truth, I'd expected as much—I may be in the ancestral land of Dr. Scholl, but comfy, Velcro-strapped sandals probably aren't the footwear of choice in gay clubs, even on a hot night in Berlin.
'Is that because there's a dress code?'
'Well, that—and you might step in something. Sometimes there are pissing games down there.'
Ohhhh.
My immersion into gay culture has just begun.
In recent years, Berlin has recouped its reputation as a polysexual party capital.
The city's first openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit, outed himself in 2001 (before the press could) and has since been re-elected, appearing in public with his partner at events like Pride Week and shocking the tabloids by going out of his way to welcome a hardcore S&M festival to the German capital.
The city boasts not one but two monthly queer-listings magazines, including one named after the Victory Column, or Siegessäule, erected to celebrate Prussian military conquests but now an adopted symbol of triumphant gays.
While Germany's overall birth rate has hit rock bottom—like many European nations, the Germans are effectively dying out—some estimates claim that one in four adult Berliners is homosexual.
An entire queer infrastructure caters to this affluent minority, concentrated in two main districts on both the western and eastern sides of the city.
Berlin's central tourist office offers advice for gay visitors, but the city also has two designated information centers—one for men, the other for lesbians.
Listings advertise bars, shops and dance clubs for cocktails or 'beer-fueled male raunch,' with monikers like 'Le Moustache,' 'ABBA, hallo?!,' 'Boyz 'R' Us' and Ficken3000—Fucking3000—as well as a gimp-mask establishment flogging videos called Cum Hungry and Fist Pigs alongside tins of Crisco, an American-as-apple-pie product that apparently has a whole range of lubricious applications outside the kitchen.
--the sister of gay-rights pioneer Karl Ulrichs, when he publicly 'came out' around 1862
It's one a.m. on a sticky summer night in Berlin, and the annual Gay and Lesbian Street Festival is still going strong, marking the first night of Pride Week in the gay capital of Europe.
Over in the postcard part of town, between the Victory Column and Brandenburg Gate, the mainstream 'Love Parade' has long since come and gone, a techno-bacchanalia full of whistle-tweeting kids.
The Prussians erected the Victory Column, or Siegessaule, to celebrate their military conquests; it's now an adopted symbol of Berlin's triumphant gay community
But here in the leafy bits of Schöneberg, or 'Beauty Hill,' the party vibe is much more relaxed—grown-up, even.
Men, women and those in between are cavorting under the streetlights to salsa, disco and allsorts.
And if you venture into one of the many bars radiating off Nollendorfplatz, the atmosphere suddenly becomes very adult indeed.
In one hardcore hole-in-the-wall, the de facto dress code is rubber and leatherwear.
Guys with shaved heads and facial hair slug beer and eye each other up, surrounded by black bondage gear strung across the walls.
Handcuffs adorn the wood-beamed bar, along with a plastic statue of a man wearing a dog collar and an erection.
And if you tire of admiring that, a screen above the liquor is showing a cartoon of a clean-cut blonde playing with himself on a sofa while a couple of hard-bodied uniforms deliver a new PC.
The blonde guy climaxes just as they're walking by, and a splodge of ejaculate happens to hit one of the deliverymen in the face.
Rather than beat their customer to a pulp, he and his black co-worker start beating each other off.
The blonde begins taking it in turns to fellate the black guy and the brunette, and the trio end up humping in a daisy chain, with cartoon cum rocketing across the screen.
And if you turn your head—or, in my case, avert your eyes—another TV shows a live-action film of a woman slicing off a man's ear.
Being slapped around entertained him for a bit, but Sacher-Masoch eventually tired of the doctor's wife, deeming her too common to be a despotic sultana or tsarina.
So he started trying to offload her onto some other sod, thinking the jealousy might spice up their adultery.
Sacher-Masoch had shown Anna a draft of what would be his most famous work—Venus in Furs—but she never really got what he wanted.
What she did get, though, was syphilis from a 'Polish Count' who'd been encouraged by Sacher-Masoch to seduce her.
Even worse, the 'Count' turned out to be an impostor, and when Anna tearfully confessed her infidelity—and contagious disease—to Sacher-Masoch, he pretended to be offended… and neatly cut her dead in the process.
THE FANNY OF HIS DREAMS
Leopold then flirted with a manly Baroness from Munich who turned out to be a lesbian before he finally found the Fanny of his dreams.
In 1869, Sacher-Masoch received a fan letter from a would-be authoress who signed herself as 'Baroness Bogdanoff' but in reality was just plain ol' Fanny Pistor.
Nevertheless, they soon embarked on the original Mistress-Slave relationship, complete with a six-month written contract giving her the right to punish 'Gregor' at will.
In return, she promised to wear furs as often as possible: 'especially when she is in a cruel mood.'
Sacher-Masoch and Fanny: Mistress and Slave
Mistress and Slave immediately left boring old Graz to live out their fantasies in Venice, where Sacher-Masoch encouraged Fanny to have an affair with an Italian actor he insisted on calling 'the Greek' (because it sounded more exotic).
That year, the writer also published Venus in Furs, basing the title on his nickname for a painting by Titian (which is actually called Venus with a Mirror).
As with the Venus of Urbino, Sacher-Masoch's fixation features a hefty goddess in the buff, but Titian painted her dripping in jewels and fur.
The saucy detail is in the trim: her fur cloak cunningly overlays her mons veneris.
With dirt-dishing like that, 'Sexual Psychopathy' soon became a medical bestseller, despite many opinionmakers frowning on its populist appeal.
Here was a top psychiatrist and society doctor, a stout, patrician Catholic in the staid university town of Graz (aka Pension-opolis)—a devoted husband and father of three—who had made it his life's work to catalogue perversity in 'the minutest and the most nauseous detail.'
As The British Medical Journal remarked: 'Better if it had been written entirely in Latin, and thus veiled in the decent obscurity of a dead language.'
Like Aretino's Positions, The Kama Sutra, and the rediscovered erotica of Pompeii, Krafft-Ebing's work introduced more than a few readers to practices they'd never thought of before: ironically, his Psychopathia Sexualis popularized some of the 'psychopathic' behavior it sought to cure.
At the same time, though, the book provided solace to sexual outsiders.
'By publishing his patients' letters and autobiographies, Krafft-Ebing enabled voices to be heard that were usually silenced,' writes his Dutch biographer, who recently uncovered the doctor's archive in Graz.
Professor Harry Oosterhuis cites a lesbian novel from Austria in 1901, in which one of the lovers yearns to tell a couple of male scoffers that 'We also belong to these "Krafft-Ebing people"! I think that they would have fainted!'
ENTER THE MASOCHISTS
Krafft-Ebing was intrigued by one group of 'perverts' in particular: men who yearned to be whipped and humiliated by women.
But the fantasies of Krafft-Ebing's correspondents represented something different: the flip side of sadism.
A thirty-five-year-old recounted how he'd always been excited by the idea of slavery: as a teenager, he'd had erections while reading Uncle Tom's Cabin (not the effect Harriet Beecher Stowe had in mind).
A German count confessed to paying prostitutes to kick him and make him lick their feet.
And another correspondent traced the worship of imperious women back to the troubadours.
What these gluttons for punishment had in common, though, was their praise for the pervy oeuvre of a contemporary novelist who happened to live in the same Austrian city as Krafft-Ebing.
I should point out that all this is taking place to a surreal, disco-riffic soundtrack of ABBA, Barry White and the Bee Gees.
Next door, a greyheaded man has lashed his partner to the X-shaped cross of St. Andrew.
She's pantyless and facing the wall, the taut skin on her face contrasting suspiciously with the flaccidity of her backside—if only they did Botox for buttocks.
As the old boy flails her with twirls and whirlybirds and other tricks of the whip, she gasps 'Oui! Oui!' and even 'Encore! Encore!' while the 'Walrus of Love' croons 'Let the Music Play.'
One voyeur starts grooving in unison—before stopping self-consciously.
Steve and Fanny have disappeared from the bar, and I wander upstairs to see if they're still here.
I turn the corner to have a look in the bedroom and—whoa!—see more of Sex Action Man than I ever wanted.
Steve is naked, kneeling with his butt to the doorway, while Fanny whips him between the legs… and gazes over his shoulder at me.
I shrink away.
TOO MUCH HEAVEN?
By now, the air in the club is the usual Metro stew of alcohol, sweat, smoke and garlic, plus a queasy soupcon of bodily secretions.
Over in the ob-gyn clinic, the bulbous woman with the trussed tits—she of the hot-waxed nipples—is lying on the examination table, her feet in the stirrups.
'Le Marquis Noir' guides a rotund blonde into the room and positions her between the patient's legs.
She begins administering cunnilingus, while the black woman's fat, ponytailed boyfriend kisses and fondles her and the usual crowd gathers round.
One of them starts humming along with the lush melody winding its way up the stairs.
(To answer that timeless question posed by the Bee Gees, I'm guessing the lickee's love is about six inches deep.)
Out in the hall, I've been cornered by a little guy with porthole glasses and a tubby sidekick wearing a toupee that wouldn't fool a blind man.
The elderly fellow in specs pauses to put on a tight leather glove, as if preparing for a rectal probe.
'What's that for?' I ask.
He blinks at me obviously and nods toward the blonde.
'For ze lay-dee.'
Ohhhhh.
Back in his shiny fetishwear, Sex Action Man materializes out of the funk, ready and more than willing to assist in Operation Ecstasy.
Steve's standing behind the kneeling woman with his arms at the ready, and at some mysterious signal—maybe it's a nod from the Marquis, maybe it's the beginning of 'Too Much Heaven (Nobody Gets Too Much Love Anymore)'—Steve sticks his fingers up the latex expanse of the fat woman's skirt.
She doesn't balk—then again, her tongue's otherwise engaged—so he enlists another guy to lift up her skirt with a plastic snap! and Steve's hand disappears up her bottom.
Despite the black woman's moans of ecstasy, after many minutes of lap licking, it becomes clear she can't muster up a crowd-pleasing climax.
Her boyfriend asks the blonde to stop.
'I'm doing my best,' she protests.
'Thank you, but I think she's had enough.'
And with that, the Terribly Nice Sadists disperse.
So sodomy among men was 'the abominable sin'—classed with bestiality.
Spank me! In this cartoon by Bosch, birds fly out of a sodomite's bum while a buffoon spanks him with a lute -- a symbol of lust (University of Seville website)
Girl-on-girl action was sinful but largely overlooked because no sperm was wasted—unless, of course, the rubbing got out of hand and the women 'wanted to be more masculine than nature permitted.'
In one case in Seville, two lovers were sentenced to 200 lashes and exile for using a strap-on dildo made of sheepskin.
ONCE YOU HAVE BACK...
In the main, though, male sodomites caught the worst of it because the authorities believed that once you got a taste for anal sex, only the flames could cure you: once you had back, you never went back.
A Jesuit confessor in Seville's prison documented 114 prosecutions for sodomy over thirty-eight years, including the tragic case of two mule drivers who were passing through the city when one of them fell ill.
His co-worker found him in bed in the tavern and asked him what was wrong.
'Close the door,' the man replied, explaining that that he'd taken a dodgy purgative that left him with 'abrasions on his secret bits.'
So his friend sat down on the bed to inspect his sores.
'For God's sake, don't hurt me!' the patient yelped.
Unfortunately, a maid had been snooping on them through the keyhole.
And when she saw the one man sit on the bed between the other's naked legs—'Don't hurt me!'—she ran to inform the authorities.
The men were tortured until they confessed and were burnt to death for a crime they hadn't committed.
This is the article that earned Dr. Ernst Graefenberg his posthumous place in history as one of the first modern doctors to notice that many (if not all) women have a particularly pleasurable spot inside their vaginas.
Dr. G was also one of the first modern sexperts to describe female ejaculation (though a few early anatomists had noticed the phenomenon, too).
Here's his original text in full, though I've divided it into parts and added links and illustrations for your reading pleasure.
JR
The Role of the Urethra in Female Orgasm
by Dr. Ernest (Ernst) Graefenberg
The International Journal of Sexology, 1950
A rather high percentage of women do not reach the climax in sexual intercourse.
The frigidity figures of different authors vary from 10-80 per cent and come closer to the statistics of older sexologists. Adler (Berlin) came to the conclusion that 80 per cent of women did not reach the sexual climax. Elkan guessed that 50 per cent suffered from frigidity, while Kinsey found it to be 75 per cent. Hardenberg's figures have a very wide range from 10 to 75 per cent.
Many of these statistics cannot be compared, since the various authors use different criteria.
Edmund Bergler sees the condition of eupareunia only in vaginal orgasm and so his frigidity figures are naturally much higher than those based on any kind of sexual satisfaction.
The restriction to the vaginal orgasm, however, does not give the true picture of female sexuality. Lack of orgasm and frigidity are not identical. Frigid women can enjoy orgasm. The lesbian is frigid in her relations to a heterosexual partner, but is completely satisfied by homosexual loveplays.
A deficient orgasm need not always be associated with frigidity. Numerous women have satisfactory enjoyment in normal heterosexual intercourse, even if they do not reach the orgasm.
Genuine frigidity should be spoken of only if there is no response to any partner and in all situations. A woman with only clitoris orgasm is not frigid and sometimes is even more active sexually, because she is hunting for a male partner who would help her to achieve the fulfillment of her erotic dreams and desires.
'People with any sort of wealth bought their slaves and screwed them at home whenever they wanted. With one ass, I could buy a piece of bread, a glass of wine or a sexual favor. That was the minimum rate.
Graffiti in Pompeii: 'Fortunata, (slave of) Antonius, gives her favors for two asses' (source: Pompeii's Erotic Songbook)
'But—attenzione—if I want a woman who's dark and lovely and perhaps Greek, I have to spend sixteen asses.'
I ask him why Easterners were so prized.
'Why are Asian women in vogue in New York?' he laughs.
But the term 'Greek love' is still used today. I'm wondering if the Romans paid more because their Greek subjects would bend over to please them.
Dr. Varone rejects this out of hand, quoting Martial, who lived at the time of Pompeii's demise and penned what must be one of the great pederastic putdowns of all time.
'He writes of a wife who finds her husband penetrating a young male slave's ass, and she starts to scream in a really loud voice. And the man says, "Why do you scream and tell me that you, too, have a bottom? What you have is two vaginas; an ass is something completely different, and it's all male."'
This cracks up the two old boys sitting behind us.
Dr. Varone peers at me through his spectacles. 'That's what Martial said, eh—not me.'
Then he grins at Angela, who's blushing in mid-translation. 'You didn't think you'd be doing this today, did you? If you wanna talk about art, we could talk about art, but I don't think that's what this guy came here for.'
LESBIAN PROSTITUTION
As for the ins and outs of prostitution, Varone reckons the 'she wolves' prowled the streets rather than waiting for their prey to come to them.
'There were various kinds of prostitutes—females, children and males—and various sorts of homosexual prostitution going on. Including lesbian prostitution.'
'In the lupanar?' That's the first I've heard of it.
'And elsewhere.'
He laughs, explaining that the Romans used one verb to describe the masculine act of penetrating and another for being penetrated.
'Futuo is the giving end of it; nubo is the receiving end of it,' he says, and to make it absolutely clear to me, he rams his index finger in and out of the circle formed by his other hand.
'So when we see a reference to a prostitute who's called a fututrix, we know that she was a woman who would not engage in licking activities but would play the role of the man with a woman.'
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