Patricia resembles anyone but the towering bodybuilder-in-suit type who tends to guard the door at “mainstream” straight club venues across Europe. A woman, lesbian, Afro-German, she works on the door at a Berlin club night that is itself unusual among contemporary clubbing scenes in European cities.
Intended as a space where lesbians and gays with immigrant backgrounds can feel at home, it achieves a greater degree of “diversity” than many another Berlin party night: “when the Halay (Oriental circle dance) is played, drag queens, lesbians and ‘Brunhild Özdemir’ are in each other’s arms, the floor boiling and boiling...until the early morning... ” (translated from German). But what sounds like a cultural crossover paradise where homophobia, racism and sexism are temporarily suspended is in fact a precarious balancing-act performed by Gayhane organisers, and particularly by Patricia and her colleagues working at the door.
The success of any club night in contemporary metropolitan spaces around the world depends upon the right mix of music, and DJs take centre-stage as artists and stars in charge of crowd entertainment. Turntable-selectas have iconic status where mixing, crossover and hybridity have become the trend in taste. Clubs exploit such systems of aesthetic value to be cool, desirable and marketable.
The flipside of the hip mix is that selectas at the door have a considerably less glamorous job to do. The right mix of people is usually selected at the doors to maintain the particular profile the club night is aiming for. At Gayhane, the task is to maintain a scene, where people are free to meet as strangers. Judgment and discrimination are essential for a safe, let alone desirable, social mix. At best seen as a minor inconvenience when queuing in front of club venues, bouncers face anything from disgruntlement to verbal and physical abuse when barring people from entrance.
To deny people entrance at a venue known for its left-progressive politics and stance against exclusion is a particularly difficult undertaking. SO36 is run by a large non-profit collective that wants to support non-commercial minority cultural scenes in the city. Different team groups organise a range of regular events and concerts in close contact with non-mainstream scenes and subcultural groups in the city. Once the primary location for punk-music concerts in Berlin, queer parties, feminist and immigrant events have expanded the SO36 repertoire and bring together a variety of audiences which share a distance from the mainstream, but whose distance is in each case very differently constituted. For the Gayhane party night at SO36, the main challenge is to protect the queer character of the event.
Patricia: “You have to sieve. Well, that is your job actually, and it is a pretty shitty job. Because, you are the one who is dealing with the problem that is part of the organiser’s conception – because he says, I want a queer event, and preferably only for queers. There are agreements with people from the neighbourhood, who run businesses, from the cafes and the like, that they get in as well...but apart from that, it is open to queers. Because it is so crowded at times nobody usually gets in after 1:30 am, nothing moves. And then of course it is not nice when somehow half of the crowd is straight, and three hundred, four hundred queers have to be sent home – that is not the idea behind the event. And you get heated discussions, of course. So we are told we are sexist. That at least is partly, well, not true, but along the right lines. But then apparently we are fascist, and who knows what else, because we say, tonight is for gays and lesbians, there is a sign outside... ”
Unlike the majority of club nights in the city which employ door policies as a strategy of distinction in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term, to establish and retain a certain exclusivity for its target audience, Gayhane’s door policy is about creating and protecting a social space which is highly vulnerable and marginalised in the everyday public life of Berlin, a city which despite its public image of “world-openness” and tolerance is marked by racism and homophobia in complex ways. Reading signals and guarding the boundaries is an ongoing process that can be hard to set down in rules.
Patricia: “Well, I have known the scene since the early 1990s, and I’ve developed an eye for it because I work at different events. I’ve seen him before and her before, and you kind of know each other to a large extent, you know the regulars in any case... And then I tell them, you’ve read this, tonight is for gays and lesbians only, and they say, ‘Yes, we know.’ ‘Yes we know’? – eh, now that is not a sufficient answer, because tonight only gays and lesbians get in. ‘Yes, that is no problem.’ And I say, ‘That’s not the right answer either, so I am really sorry’ –”
Kira: “Meaning, ‘I am tolerant’, that won’t do the trick –”
Patricia: “Yes, just go to some other venue. ‘Oh, but why.’ They want to know how I come to single them out. Whether it’s written on their foreheads that they’re not queer... They come across in such a way, and I have to say, sorry, it was your answer which told me that you aren’t. So first you test it, a couple of questions. If you are not sure, start a conversation.”
“It gets incredibly difficult. But you can partly tell from their entire act. We are positioned pretty far outside, on the upper staircase. We look down the street and check out how people move about. Some of them show up, a heterosexual couple, smooching, get in the queue and then claim that they are gay and lesbian when they get to the door. And then I say, right, I can see that. Go to some other club. Or how someone behaves more generally, the way they gesture, how they walk, join in conversations and such. With guys, you can easily find out this way, in my opinion, by seeing how they interact with each other. With women it can be more difficult, but whoever comes along hyper-tussig (hyper-made-up), well, I’m sorry!”
Kira: “If somebody doesn’t say right away, I am lesbian, I am gay, or –”
Patricia: “Well, the problem is that lots of people are not out here, and they still have a hard time naming it.”
Kira: “Particularly at Gayhane?”
Patricia: “Definitely! Because many can’t live openly queer, but they come to a place where they can move freely. Without the constraints, but still within their cultural background. Because there is that connection – culturally I can’t be out, but I do love my culture and feel good within it. I believe that it has to do with that. ”
About 90% of apparently straight people turned away at the door have a migrant background, Patricia estimates, since the party is popular mainly among immigrants. There is no special emphasis on keeping a particular balance between people with and without immigrant background, though she thinks that up to 70% inside the club tend to have “oriental” (meaning here Turkish, Kurdish, Persian and Arabic) roots.
More on the diversities, inequalities and hidden meanings of urban life in openDemocracy’s Multiculturalism debate:
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Kira: “Do you think that one can speak of a kind of sheltered space in that context? I mean a space that you have to protect somehow, for people who are excluded elsewhere, socially and in mainstream clubs? ”
Patricia: “Yes, absolutely! Because I think, especially for those who are not out, they have hardly any other opportunities elsewhere. Most people have so many relatives here that they can hardly walk into a neighbourhood, or down the street, without meeting someone who is at least from the same village, or who knows what else. And in that respect it is very important for them to have that space, and to claim it for themselves and make use of it. I would definitely say that, even though more and more people live openly, at least among the Turks.”
Gayhane club nights involve conscious political effort and constant negotiation, the success of which is not guaranteed. Thus, at the last party night in September there were complaints among my lesbian friends (immigrant, postmigrant and non-immigrant) that the queer factor was now truly in danger of disappearing. Even the most cautious door policies can only shape, not completely create the audience that bring about Gayhane as a queer “oriental” scene.
