It has been a gay magnet since the hedonistic Cabaret Thirties and for the tragic day that’s in it we say Ich bin Queen Berliner.
And reflect on making the pilgrimage to the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism in Berlin.
Not because I’m gay, because I’m not, but rather that is not the point but because hate crime comes for us all.
As best expressed by Pastor Martin Niemoller in his testament They First Came.
Inscribed on a wall in the Hall of Witness at the New aEngland Holocaust Memorial in Boston.
Outside my old Faneuil Hall stomping ground.
And the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC.
A cloak of honesty
That points to the Nazi vilification, victimisation and evisceration of homosexuals and lesbians.
Berlin wears its history in its memorials and museums but not as a hair shirt but as a cloak of honesty.
The German capital is, of course, a great learning city and a great walking one.
And you can stumble upon the memorial to the gay victims of the Third Reich.
While on your way through the city to your digs.
In the shadows
Learn how 50,000 were convicted and thousands sent to their deaths in concentration camps.
And were still criminalised after the War and that it was not until the Millennium that there sacrifice began to be acknowledged.
And 18 years ago that a lasting memorial was erected.
The kiss-off
In a concrete tribute with a film depicting a same sex couple kissing inside.
Which is the Berliners’ calling card to the world.
With their satirical merchandising of the Brezhnev and Honecker kiss on every stand.
Anyone can, and does kiss each other at the big Berliner Pride party at the Brandenburg Gate.
Or Christopher Street Day on July 15 and 25 over these past 47 years in commemoration of the Greenwich Village protests from 1969.
The most enabling resistance day
Christopher Day 2026 will forever be remembered for the victims of homophobia.
But the near million and maybe more, and many straights among them, will be back next year.
For the most enabling resistance day in its history.