When Kink Comes to The Times
BY ED SIKOV
“BERLIN — A hush fell over
the hundreds of kinksters
gathered in the
pews of the Twelve Apostles
Church in Berlin when the cellist, clad in
head-to-toe black leather, took a seat in front
of the altar and began to play Rachmaninoff.
At the back of the room, ushers from the nunthemed
drag troupe the Sisters of Perpetual
Indulgence watched him, rapt. When the cellist
was done, a leather-clad organist played Johann
Sebastian Bach’s Prelude in C major. He
was followed by a quartet in chest harnesses
and leather pants who performed Vivaldi’s Sonata
in A minor. Then a towering baritone in
skintight leather sang the hymn ‘Panis Angelicus’
to cheers from the crowd.”
This was the opening of Liam Stack’s peculiar
coverage of Folsom Europe, “a fi ve-day festival
of street parties, cultural events, and bacchanalian
club nights that draws thousands
of tourists to what organizers describe as the
fetish capital of Europe.”
I say “peculiar” not because the article was
especially bizarre in and of itself, but because it
appeared in The New York Times, which is not
normally on the cutting edge of anything, let
alone the gay leather fetish scene in Berlin.
“There are Folsom events each year in San
Francisco,” Stack reports, “whose Folsom Street
gave the festival its name and fi rst location in
1984, and in New York. Public nudity and sexon
the-sidewalk during the festival are not unheard
of at the San Francisco event, but New
York tends to be a tamer affair. Neither of the
American versions, however, has the over-thetop
reputation of Folsom Europe, which gets its
carnal and cultural cachet from Berlin, a city
whose vibrant year-round night-life draws everyone
from gay sex tourists to British bachelorette
parties.”
Actually, I suspect that gay sex tourists have
much more in common with British bachelorette
parties than Stack suggests; after all, both
groups produce a lot of bodily fl uids (cum and
vomit, respectively) in their pursuit of a wild
➤ KINGS BAY PLOWSHARES 7, from p.22
we become lost in the exciting saga of whether
or not he’ll be impeached?
I wonder how I even heard about this Kings
Bay Plowshares 7 story in the fi rst place. Oh
right — it was on “Democracy Now!” Which,
along with Counterpunch, Truthout , The Nation
, The Ithaca Voic e, and Gay City News , is
one of a tiny handful of “alternative” news outlets
that think outside the cashbox.
These countercultural media tend to be biased
FOLSOMEUROPE.INFO
The recent Folsom Europe fetish festival in Berlin attracted the
attention of The New York Times.
time in the German capital.
“‘Berlin has always been a very special city,’
said Alexander Cabot, the fi rst transgender
man to win the title of Mr. Leather Berlin 2019.
‘Back in the 1920s, Berlin was called the city
of sin. That is very appealing because you can
experience a variety of things here — so many
different things — and people like that. It is
very free.’
“‘We are actually less scandalous than in
San Francisco, I think,’ said Daniel Ruester, a
bursar for Lufthansa who co-founded the festival
in 2003. He described it as ‘sexy but not
sexual. Tourists always think in Berlin you can
do anything, but that is not true,’ he added. ‘We
do have laws here.’”
Stack continues, “Organizers remind visitors
that the festival is governed by rules, which are
toward pinko political activism, which
isn’t making anybody any money. As such, they
are highly unprofessional. Unlike you, Mainstream
News, they do not strive to get all the
points of view. For instance, when Plowshares
defendant Liz McAlister explained to “Democracy
Now” host Amy Goodman how she and
her codefendants took full responsibility for
committing all of those three felonies and that
one misdemeanor, McAlister quipped, “We don’t
have the right to destroy God’s creation.” Amy
just let that slide.
P E R S P E C T I V E : M e d i a C i r c u s
displayed on posters across the neighborhood.
Three of the most important: no public nudity,
no public sex, and no Nazi symbols, the display
of which is strictly forbidden under German
law. ‘In the beginning, especially, sometimes
Americans would come in SS uniforms, and it
was always a big, big problem,’” explained Alain
Rappsilber, a Folsom Europe board member.
Stupid Americans. What else can one say?
I suspect they weren’t Jewish. But if being out
for more than 40 years has taught me nothing
else, it’s that there probably is some schnook
somewhere with a Holocaust fetish.
The article was illustrated by some arresting
imagery. One photo featured a bald leather slave
in chains and a black leather mask kneeling
in submission before a rather stone-faced older
leather daddy. Another showed a tree-lined
street graced by an obese shirtless man seen
from the rear with a thin leather strap around
his chest being mock-arrested by a uniformed
fetish-cop. The pictures looked like a bar rag ad
for the Eagle NYC. That they appeared in the
pages of the Gray Lady is extraordinary.
It is in the following paragraph that
Stack commits an utterly unforgiveable sin:
“Schöneberg was a playground for luminaries
like the bisexual singer Marlene Dietrich,” he
announces before moving quickly on to “the
painter Otto Dix and the author Christopher
Isherwood, who lived there when he wrote the
novel that inspired the musical ‘Cabaret.’”
Bisexual singer?!?!?! Marlene Dietrich was
one of the greatest superstars the cinema has
ever produced! She starred in “The Fucking
Blue Angel,” damn it!
I’ve been wondering why this particular article
stuck out for me. I called it “peculiar” above,
but I didn’t fi nd the article at all objectionable,
and the illustrations were notable only for their
being situated in The New York Times. I guess
my problem is with the normalization of gayness
(gaiety?). Our culture and its various subcultures
used to be liberating by virtue of their
transgressive quality, their capacity to shock.
Now we’ve got leather boys in full fetish gear sitting
in church playing classical music, and it’s
lavishly covered in The Times. Ho hum.
Right there, Amy could have called up just
about anybody in the Trump administration,
who, in a robust ratings-boost for alternative
media, would have aggressively demolished
McAlister’s cornball argument. See, Amy’s
problem here is one shared by all rad-lib news
outlets. In informing us on such issues as racial
injustice, prison abolition, or climate change,
they assume that, in order for their work — as
journalists or as activists — to matter, everyone
has got to remain alive on Earth.
And that is so very unprofessional .
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