Berlin

Berlin is Germany's capital, a city whose origins reach back more than 780 years. It became the capital of the kingdom of Prussia in 1701 and of the German Empire in 1871. Although Prussia was ruled by a gay king, Frederick II, from 1740 to 1786, the city's own gay story only began about a hundred years later. After World War II and the start of the Cold War it was split into West Berlin, held by the Western Allies, and East Berlin, held by the Soviet Union.

In the 1920s, the so-called Golden Twenties, Berlin was regarded as having the liveliest and most advanced gay subculture in Europe. That ended in 1933 when the Nazis took power, and a memorial to gay people persecuted by the Nazi regime finally opened in 2008, more than 60 years later. During the division, West Berlin, an island within communist East Germany, became the gay capital of Germany again. Its population of around 3 million helped, and so did the fact that West Germany's compulsory military service did not apply to men there, which drew many young men to move in. After homosexual contacts were legalised in 1969, the scene and the gay movement grew fast through the 1970s and 1980s.

In East Germany the legal situation for gay men was the best in the Eastern Bloc, and even better than in some Western countries. Yet in an authoritarian state, gays and lesbians could not organise a civil rights movement, and there were few chances to build a scene. Things improved toward the end of the 1980s, peaking with the premiere of the film Coming Out, ironically on the night the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. In 2001 Berlin elected an openly gay mayor, Klaus Wowereit of the Social Democrats, who outed himself at a party congress to pre-empt opponents with the words: 'Ich bin schwul, und das ist auch gut so' (I'm gay and that's just fine).