72 Whole Hours Of Fun

I’m at the wokest queer festival on earth; sleep feels futile and performative. Walking my way back towards the bus and away from the peninsula of 20th century deserted strip-mining facilities referred to as ‘Ferropolis’, I chat with a cheerful nudist who, unlike me, is a regular festival goer. She tells me about the heartfelt connection kindled during the Kundalini Yoga session in the Chillout Cove, and I suspect she’s still sober. “Festivals are for the daytime.”, she says, “I want to feel the sun burning, I want to see people dancing in the mud.” We all agree it’s better when the gloves are off. But does Berlin ever truly wear any?

People from other places fail to understand that partying here is more than an identity. It’s a full-time job. We literally carry for days. Berliners don’t party because of anything, they party in spite of everything: indulgent, excessive, fun. Standards are high (pun intended), and the way we trash ourselves into oblivion is sophisticated. It has a history, a queer history.

In Bad Gays. A Homosexual History, Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller remind us that historical outcasts, like Frederick the Great, were not only tolerated but instrumental in turning the shitty swamp of infertile sand that was the Brandenburg electorate, ruled by tasteless ‘cabbage-Junker nobility’ (citing Karl Marx), into the cosmopolitan melting pot that it is today.