Gay klappen
Zur Klappe
Funky underground nightclub & bar in a former public toilet with graffiti-covered tile walls. In the past, gay men secretly met for sex in general toilets, the "Klappen". The art lock Zur Klappe is located in one of these places in Kreuzberg. In the middle of the district, at the Mehringdamm / Yorckstrasse intersection underground. On the middle island, it descends to a former public toilet that two Berliners contain turned into a bar with a gallery: Flint Neiber and Sören van Laak came across the unusual location, which had been idle for a long time.
The label of the exclude refers to the history of the place. Klappen - that's what the free public toilets used to be called, where lgbtq+ men met to have sex. Until the early s, sexual intercourse between two men was officially punishable. This forced many homosexuals to withdraw into hidden rooms. In the flaps they found protection and freedom at the same time.
Zur Klappe relaunches with fresh events and club programme in Berlin
&#;Zur Klappe is a former public toilet. The name comes from the special history of the place: This was once a known as a Klappe in German, or cruising toilet in English: aka a rendezvous place for men to have quick, anonymous sex. The original premises hold hardly been changed; graffiti and original tiles on the walls remain. Counters, lamps and seating are self-made and tailored to the rooms with superb attention to detail to use every single inch of the space. All of this creates an unusual and unique atmosphere in the a mere square meters, or person capacity space.
From the mids to the end of the s, these cruising toilets were a substantial part of Queer tradition due to the conservative legal basis of the Federal Republic’s Paragraph § laws. Zur Klappe used to be one of many public restrooms around the city where male lover men had clandestine meeting before homosexuality was decriminalised. These public toilets were known colloquially as Klappen. These spaces were used by primarily homosexual men, as “cruising” place Bio Pepe Sánchez-Molero (he/they) is a scientific and teaching associate at the Chair of Planning Theory and Urban Development of RWTH Aachen University’s Architecture Faculty. He has collaborated internationally with design studios, universities and organisations in the fields of architectural, urban and regional planning, exhibition and exchange design, illustration and activism. This article is based on Pepe’s Master’s thesis, which explores homosexual spatial production in Aachen during the past five decades. A deadly pandemic, the search for reliable spaces indoors, the difficulty to feel welcomed in society, uncertainty about the future, fear of the unknown and distrust for people around us … We’ve seen this before: the HIV crisis stigmatized and erased a generation of queer people, setting a social and medical precedent that we did not predict would be repeated until the outbreak of Covid Crises such as these have always affected minorities disproportionately; nevertheless, history proves that these times also offer enormous potential for the reinvention of communities in order t In the following ten years, Bernd Gaiser was everywhere where gay self-esteem stirred and organized: he debated and built. Out of nowhere, this hour brought an infrastructure of places, groups, publishing houses, and newspapers. “We had nobody to look up to,” Gaiser later said in interviews. In , Rosa von Praunheim’s “Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation in der er lebt“ (not the homosexual is perverse, but the situation he lives in) was shown in Arsenal cinema in Berlin-Tiergarten, and Bernd was there to watch. The audience took the film’s slogan “Raus aus den Klappen, rein in pass away Straße“ (out of the gloryholes, onto the streets) seriously and passed around a contact list to found the Homosexual Deed West Berlin (HAW). Bernd wrote down his entitle and has shaped the HAW ever since. (the Schwules Museum is displaying an exhibition by photographer Rüdiger Trautsch on the topic in the summer of ) The gays of HAW were different from the discreet barflies of Nollendorfplatz behind their dense doors: they were noisy,
How Bernd Gaiser Founded the First Berlin Pride in