![black gay fucking techno music black gay fucking techno music](https://mixmag.net/assets/uploads/images/_fullX2/Honey_x_Ash-Layout-Artboard-2.jpg)
Typically, he’d dance and then go to the dark room. He had a Teutonic bluntness with regard to sex. He didn’t seem to see it in transcendental terms. Perhaps it was for this reason that he had a more prosaic affection for the place. “It’s like pot, except it doesn’t make you stupid,” he said. He drank alcohol and occasionally smoked damiana, a mild herbal stimulant that is thought to have some aphrodisiac effects. “The sex clubs have bad music,” he explained. He said he preferred it to, say, the KitKatClub. The boar hunter had been going to Berghain for years, mainly for the music and the sex. “It’s dystopian and utopian,” a third said. “It’s a social-political-economic achievement,” another friend said. To pilgrims and many expats, it is a temple of techno, a consecrated space, a source of enchantment and wonder. For some Berliners, Berghain is an elemental part of their weekly existence, a perfectly pitched and carefully conceived apotheosis of Berlin’s post-Wall club culture. The people I’d talked to who had been to Berghain-and there were many-conjured ecstatic evenings, Boschian contortions, and a dusky Arcadia that an American hockey dad like me had never even imagined wanting to experience.īerghain’s renown rests on many attributes: the quality of the music, and of the d.j.s who present it the power and clarity of the sound system the eyeball-bending decadence of the weekend parties, which often spill into Monday morning the stringent and mysterious door policy, and the menacing head doorman, with a tattoo on his face the majesty and complexity of the interior and the tolerant and indulgent atmosphere, most infamously in its so-called dark rooms, where patrons, gay and straight, can get it on with friends or strangers in an anonymous murk. It is the most famous techno club in the world-to Berlin what Fenway is to Boston-and yet still kind of underground and, as such, a microcosm of Berlin.
![black gay fucking techno music black gay fucking techno music](https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5debe781cade48000818ecce/2:1/w_2560%2Cc_limit/2019_songs.jpg)
The name is a mashup of the last syllable of its neighborhood, Friedrichshain, and the one across the Spree, Kreuzberg, on what was once the other side of the Wall. (“He gave her fake tits-Thank you, Mister!”) He described his plans for the following weekend: a day hunting wild boar in a forest on the city’s outskirts, then a “sex party” (which should never be said without a German accent) at an acquaintance’s apartment, where he’d arrive with one woman but pair up with others (“It’s a seedy thing”), and, finally, perhaps, just before Sunday dawn, Berghain.īerghain is a night club that opened in 2004 in an abandoned power plant in what used to be East Berlin. There were other women in his life, among them a physician’s wife, whom he’d met online. He’d recently returned from a four-week surfing trip to the Basque coast, where he and a girlfriend-two, actually: one for the first half of the trip, and one for the second-had lived out of a VW bus. He was a philosopher by training (his business card had him as a “Dr.”) but an industrialist by trade: he’d inherited a manufacturing firm from his father, and had done well enough with it to pursue a life of pleasure and ease, though without ostentation, in keeping with the ethos of Berlin. He had moved to Berlin from Düsseldorf in 1993. “You should write instead about black rhinos.” He’d recently bought fifteen thousand acres in Namibia, in a rhinoceros preserve, to help support a conservation program. He was a veteran of the city’s after-hours party scene, but he seemed weary of it. The boar hunter stirred an espresso at arm’s length and regarded me with martial skepticism. But this bar, an early post-Wall pioneer, had a gruff, local air. Transplants often describe Berlin’s neighborhoods as analogues of New York’s, to assess where they fit along the gentrification continuum. We were at a bar in Mitte, the formerly bombed-out and abandoned East Berlin district that was reclaimed by squatters, clubbers, and artists after the Wall came down and is now agleam with fancy restaurants, galleries, and shops. It was a Sunday night in the dregs of December, sleety and dark.
Preconceptions can be hard to shake when you’re fresh in town. He had on worn jeans, biker boots, a loose faded black T-shirt, and a scarf, and yet I’ll confess I found myself picturing him trim and tidy in Heidelberg duelling garb. He was in his early forties, six and a half feet tall, muscular, lean, and fair, with shaggy reddish-brown hair, some stubble, and a great deal of self-confidence. The first person I met in Berlin was a boar-hunting friend of a friend, who agreed to talk to me only if I didn’t print his name.