Christopher Street Day

It's Christopher Street Day and since we live around the corner from the local kind of Christopher Street the parade came by in full swing. It wasn't that much different than back in New York. Some of the floats still played the same kind of music like twenty years ago, mostly that slightly Eastern European sounding Schlager Disco like Marianne Rosenberg's anthem "Ich bin wie Du". But that has more to do with Munich, than with local gay culture. After all Munich radio plays the same music like twenty years ago. Mostly the slightly Eastern European sounding power ballad genre.

There was some local flavor though - a gay Trachtenverein with a whole contingent of Kraftlackeln decked out in Lederhosen and Janker leading the procession down the Munich streets. That subsubculture just opened their first own bar called Inside. A place where the tradition loving gay can go and have a cold malted beverage of choice. Despite the rabidly homophobic Bavarian Catholicism and the rustic macho posturing with all those massive moustaches and rough attire Bavarian cultural history has long been dominated by gay culture. It truly started with King Ludwig, followed by Bavaria's favorite TV actor Walter Sedlmayr (slain in a brutal murder that was made too look like a botched S&M orgy), Munich's couturier Rudolph Moshammer (slain by a gay hustler from Iraq - no, you can't make shit like that up), and the Prada shoe wearing Bavarian pope Benedict XVI. and his "private secretary" Georg Gänswein.