Tiergarten gay
This story originally appeared on i-D Germany.
For his photo venture Hain – German for grove or a small cluster of trees – photographer Lukas Städler spent more than two years visiting Berlin’s most well-liked cruising spots to take snapshots of men having widespread sex in parks and local woodlands. Whether hours-long amusing deep in the bushes or a barely-hidden quickie during a lunch crack, what was once a necessity for many at some point turned into a kink. “Cruising began at a time when you couldn’t come out as a homosexual man,” says Lukas about the history behind it. “For a long moment, it was a punishable offence to be gay, so there were hardly any public spaces to get to know each other without being in danger.”
Places like Tiergarten, a huge park in the west of Berlin, thus provided people with the opportunity to meet like-minded people and live out their sexuality freely – even if just for a short time. “For those people who remain in the closet, it’s still a reality,” Lukas says. Though of course these days it’s not simply a necessity, with out and satisfied people willingly getting inv
Roaming Revenant
My previous experience cruising in Tiergarten has left me completely blown away and I was only happy to return again. After making sure I had a small bottle of lube and poppers safely zipped up in my pockets I left my hotel room and headed out in a general direction of the Park. By this hour it was already shadowy and the city streets were busy with people returning home from work.
Although it only takes about 40 minutes to earn to the cruising area, I was getting quite restless. After seeing dozens of scooters scattered about I decided to accept one and zip my way over instead. Once I got to Tiergarten, it was actually almost completely deserted. It was a rather nice to ride without all the people around. After going around the Victory Column I hopped off my scooter near a lane crossing along Straße des Juni.
Immediately I could view some people loitering about by the paths that lead away in to the dark. I made my way south towards the Bremer Weg lake, quickly falling in to a lazy and steady pace of a cruiser. You own to be not too slow or too fas
Roaming Revenant
In the evening of my very first day in Berlin my legs took me to the Tiergarten park &#; it looked like a looming huge green space on the chart in contrast to the active city life all around me. I was slowly walking from the east to west, navigating the meandering pathways throughout the park and crossing many bridges over lakes and waterways.
Eventually I got to the clearing where there were gay man sunbathing, some couples & some singles. I coudn’t help but stare , trying to not make it too obvious. Still I pressed on, there were not a lot of people here and it looked just like a normal sunbathing spot albeit with mainly man around, but nothing extra going on that I can see or sense.
I crossed Hofjägerallee, one of the main roads radiating from the Victory Column monument and walked west for a bit. I knew there is a gay cruising area somewhere here near the Bremer Weg lake but I didn&#;t need to check the map to realise where I was. For the trees grew thicker, the people around where all men, walking at a curiously different pace compared
During my time here in Germany, I’d been hearing stories of cruising in the famous Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest inner-city park. In many ways it was their Central Park: hectares of land (85 more hectares than London’s Hyde Park). I’d been speaking to some native Berliners for a few weeks about the potential cruising spot, but they informed me the city had trimmed the brushes in the park so that gay men could no longer cruise there. I found this municipal gesture offensive — to travel to such lengths to assault this part of queer culture. I now imagined the park organism full of families and heterosexual couples, spraying their normative agenda all over the grass like foul pesticide. No, I couldn’t accept that this would happen in a urban area like Berlin. Not Berlin!
There were some outdated posts online about where the cruising occured. According to a forum, you procure off at the Tiergarten S-Bahn station and stroll down the main avenue, Straße des 17 Juni, toward the Victory Column. About halfway down you go south into the park to a lake which is the sup