In Andrew Holleran’s novel Grief, a character recalls life in New York as a gay man at the height of the Aids crisis. An enclave in the middle of East Germany surrounded by the Berlin Wall since 1961, West Berlin attracted young gay men from West Germany partly because they could avoid military service there. There were more than 50 gay bars in West Berlin, some with darkrooms for sex, three saunas and a number of porn cinemas with cruising areas. It was the late 1980s before people I knew started to die, often far from West Berlin in the towns and villages in West Germany from which they had come. Almost everyone I knew who died before then was in their 20s or early 30s and their short, unremembered lives ended in great anguish before they got going at all.

Source: The Irish Times June 05, 2021 04:52 UTC