Letter from Berlin

Beautiful Berlin! Great wide boulevards, trees, parks, lakes, the airport in the middle of the city, friendly people including taxi drivers who all seem to love to speak English and wursts. And a gay museum! Fabled city in gay history, for good and ill. Now perhaps it is the capitol of the Gay World. The city is unique in its early efforts at gay liberation (think of Magnus Hirschfeld), efforts crushed by the Nazis. Now Berlin is capitol of the unified post-war Germany whose unaddressed shame is its refusal to acknowledge or indemnify its gay Holocaust victims, while continuing to pay pensions, damages, etc., to all other victims. Even the city's huge new Holocaust memorial park refuses to admit gay-friendly nostalgia.

But the good news is that Paragraph 175, which in the late nineteenth century criminalized gay sex, enforced by both Nazis and the post-war ruling Christian-Democratic party, was finally revoked. And the age of consent has been put in line with European Union law, at 16 years of age. Hello America! And the. Mayor of Berlin is gay and proud of it.

A jewel in gay Berlin's sparkling tiara is the Schwules (Gay) Museum, like The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation modest in size and financial resources but of tremendous cultural, social and intellectual achievement, and potential-a repository of gay history which otherwise would be lost forever, and a source of inspiration for new generation of gay people.

Patrick Angus: Los Angeles Drawings has just been published as a joint project of The Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation and the Schwules Museum. The book coincided with the retrospective of Angus work at LLGAF earlier this year (see The Archive, Number 11) and an exhibition of the Los Angeles drawings currently on exhibit in the Schwules Museum's new galleries, on view until October 2004. These 42 drawings from 1979 are a visual journal of a young gay man who went to Los Angeles expecting to find the good gay life as depicted by David Hockney, but who faced a grittier reality before moving to ever grittier New York City.

The book was published thanks to effort of Andreas Sternweiler, director of the Schwules Museum, and thanks to the financial support of Charles Leslie, whom you know. Many other people generously contributed their services including the translators Jean-Marie Jouaret and Jorg Leidig. Thanks to its designer Detlef Pusch, who struggled with his printer until the effect of pencil on paper was achieved, the book does justice to Angus' genius as a draftsman and is itself a work of art.

The Angus show was organized as the last of four exhibits of individual artists chosen by Andreas Sternweiler, to illustrate parameters of gay life during four postwar decades. Hans-Ulrich Buchwald (b.1925). Jurgen Wittdort (b.1932), and Detlef aus dem Kahmen (b.1943) were the other. Angus (b.1953) represents the 80s as the period when gay life could finally be graphically illustrated without fear or shame. At the opening of the Angus exhibit I thought how very happy Patrick would be to have been to be there and to know that his works survives and is appreciated. Simultaneously I felt a horrible distress to remember that there would soon be a convention in New York City of the ruling political party in the USA which hopes to consolidate its power by tacitly promising to tattoo and then turn gay people into soap. Does Halliburton already have the contracts? The nightmare never stops.

Back to the bright side: the felicitous co-publication of Patrick Angus: Los Angeles Drawings was the first step to establish closer relations between our two pioneering institutions. One hopes for more collaborations in the future. How about a LLGAF tour to Berlin!

— Love from Douglas Turnbaugh