Gay Guide to Munich
In West Germany, Paragraph 175 survived the war in the expanded form the Nazis gave it, and Bavaria enforced it harder than anywhere else. It was not reformed until 1969, not relaxed again until 1973, and not struck from the criminal code entirely until 1994. Munich's answer to that history was unusually political. The Rosa Liste, a gay and lesbian electoral list founded in 1989, put Thomas Niederbühl into the city council in 1996, the first representative of a gay and lesbian voter initiative to take a seat on a European city council, and it has held that seat continuously ever since.
The scene lives in the Glockenbachviertel, a leafy district south of the old town. Hans-Sachs-Strasse holds Sax, Auroom and Drei Glöcklein; Müllerstrasse runs Sub, Rendezvous, SpeXter and the fetish bar Ochsengarten; Edelheiss and the cafe Eismeer sit around the corner on Pestalozzistrasse, with Café NiL, Café Glück and Kr@ftwerk filling in between. It is a small district and an easy one, dense enough to walk end to end in ten minutes.
The Deutsche Eiche on Reichenbachstrasse is the piece of it with real history. The building goes back to 1864 and became the city's main gay meeting point after 1945. From 1974 it was Rainer Werner Fassbinder's second home: he lived across the road, celebrated every finished film in the place, and shot parts of Satansbraten and Lola inside it. Today it is a hotel with a large sauna attached.
Christopher Street Day takes the city in July and is one of Germany's largest Prides. The stranger and more Munich event is Rosa Wiesn, the Gay Sunday at Oktoberfest: what began as a gathering of the Münchner Löwen Club in the 1970s now fills the Bräurosl tent on the festival's first Sunday with something like 8,000 people, with the Prosecco-Wiesn following at Fischer-Vroni on the second Monday.
Munich is orderly, expensive and green, and the queer part of it is compressed into a few very walkable blocks rather than spread across the city. Come for Oktoberfest and the scene is unrecognizably busy; come otherwise and it is calm.