Can clubbing make you gay? – The Face
Drugs aside, the space also lends itself to sexual encounters, and not just from a practical perspective, given that it’s a maze of dark hidden corners. “If you go out with a group,” he says, “it’s quite possible to disappear from your friendship group for a while without worrying about being observed, so perhaps that encourages experimentation.” He added: “Of course, none of this is unique to Berghain.”
The strict photo ban is also important, particularly now that non-consensual filming in public has depressingly become a societal norm. People are obviously more comfortable without the threat of being filmed. Then there’s the perceived dress code. Berghain is a mixed club, but it can at times be hard to tell who’s queer when straight people use queer signals to help them get past the omnipotent doorpickers. “The assumption that it’s easier to get in if you dress up a little bit like a queer person makes it much more difficult to read the intention of the people on the dancefloor,” says Andersson. “It disrupts basic presumptions about who is potentially sexually available for whom.”
The cruising that takes place in Berghain is also technology-free meaning that, unlike on hook-up apps, participants don’t have to explicitly define and write down their sexual identity before they partake. This can leave more space to manoeuvre. Mixed sex-positive clubs can be “ideal spaces for encounters not predetermined by previous erotic trajectories and identifications”, Andersson notes. “The proximity to other bodies in confined spaces overflowing with surplus libido, tactile sounds, and empathy-enhancing drugs can create an environment in which sexual categorisation is temporarily transcended.”
Berghain is just used as an example in this research, but this social phenomenon can be observed every weekend in cities like Berlin, London, New York and more. In the study, he points to an interview Warbear, a founder of Gegen (one of the best queer sex-positive club nights in Berlin, held at KitKatClub and Revier Südost) did with Electronic Beats in 2015. “He suggests an almost literal correlation between space and desire,” Andersson writes. “The ‘enormous’ size of the club in which people ‘get lost’ and experience ‘identity crisis’ produces its own ‘microclimate’ where ‘queer is about being dialogical, not dialectical’ and the participants ‘take their identity off, like their clothes’.”
All this together can be seen as the antithesis of abusive techniques used in gay conversion therapy. “Instead of nausea-inducing drugs,” Andersson writes, “in combination with same-sex erotica – a popular technique in so-called ‘aversion therapy’ – this is a ‘gay conversion therapy’ in reverse whereby erotic horizons expand and multiply through the combination of chemicals and a multi-sensory overload of pleasurable stimuli.
“Rather than thinking of sexual orientation as located inside the body, I suggest we might think of it as located inside the building.”