Berlin Dispatch: January
Translated by Alexander Wells
Hungry, horny, tired—this is what I say when anybody asks me how I am. These days, you can add cold to that list. From October to May, I get cold. It must be from aging, or some kind of general weakness, but in any case: the much-too-cold subway, the unheated library reading room, my drafty apartment. And then there’s the overall darkness, which is what really makes the Berlin winter so awful. Don’t think the sun came up at all today, I write to a friend in Paris, who gets one more hour of daylight than me but is nevertheless freezing.
If I want to know when Berlin winter is coming, I do not need a weather report—I simply open Grindr. No sooner have the first leaves fallen, and the Landwehrkanal nights become a little less comfortable, than a sudden romantic longing appears on the dating app otherwise best known for spontaneous connections. LTR, everyone wants LTR, which stands for long-term relationship, but above all means something that lasts throughout the winter, that season when it simply isn’t fun to go all the way to Friedrichshain for a date.
Friends don’t ghost you on account of having found better-looking friends, or because this friendship has just become a little too much for them, because they’re not really looking for a friendship, more like something casual instead.
I find this reassuring. The bourgeois nuclear family lives on, even if just for a couple of months. Brat summer is over, looking for someone to cuddle, I read, and already I can smell a cinnamon-scented candle in the living room, a fleece blanket lain across shoulders, a computer on a lap playing The Sopranos or The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, and I pour a little more rum than necessary into my hot chocolate. We can put domestic life on like a costume, or rather, like an especially fluffy set of pajamas.
I’ll admit that I have not yet participated in this dating hibernation. I myself am the concerned observer on the sidelines, or indeed under the covers, right up close to the radiator. In this capacity, I do not wish to offer any tips, but instead to offer up praise—to sing the praises of friendship. Friends are terrific. If you’re sick, they’ll drive all the way across town for you, even as far as Friedrichshain; they’ll bring you chicken soup and make you tea, and you don’t even have to sleep with them. Friends don’t ghost you on account of having found better-looking friends, or because this friendship has just become a little too much for them, because they’re not really looking for a friendship, more like something casual instead. Friends are simply there.
One friend who has accompanied me for many years is a six-page-long text in a Suhrkamp volume. It is an interview with Michel Foucault, which first appeared in the magazine Gai pied and has the German title “Freundschaft als Lebensform” (“Friendship as a Way of Life” in English). I think every queer person has certain texts that help them with understanding their so-called “identity,” and that for me—alongside Bette Midler’s My Knight in Black Leather—is this little interview. Here, Foucault poses the not-so-simple question of how gay men can really live together. It is as friends, he suggests, that they generate the real scandal of homosexuality: “To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another—there’s the problem.”
I’m a big believer in disturbance. Perhaps, to get through the Berlin winter, we are going to need more than self-care and individual desire. And perhaps we can manage to keep our friendships alive when it’s bright and warm outside, too. Perhaps caring for others will make us even hotter than we already are. This winter—for sure. So how are you really, I write to my friend in Paris, and I am looking forward to his reply.