Loewie's World

My original domain for this blog was hosted with GoDaddy. But in the meantime I had to realize GoDaddy really is evil. I wasn’t able to renew my domain name and when it expired, CABOOM, it was snapped away by someone else - a total LOOSER!

Well, I though, it ain’t so tragic because really who would be reading this blog anyway? I was wrong. Indeed I had more readers than I thought. 

So this is why Loewie is back at http://english.loewie.net.

Same procedure as last year, Miss Sophy? 

Of course, my German language site is back online, too, again. Find it at http://loewie.net.

Want men?

Of course you do: access my Back Room here!

As much as I love living in Munich, it can be a pretty dreary place if you stroll through its gay neighborhood. And this time, I believe the gays themselves are to blame. 

Munich had its dark times for a gay man. Back in the 80ies and into the very early 90ies, politics in this town where extremely anti-gay. Dr. Peter Gauweiler, city councilman and head of Munich’s City Administration Department from 1982 to 1986 was an outspoken homophobic and has caused quite some outrage with him trying to pull all HIV positiv people under a Federal Anti-Epedemic Law in 1987. Gladly the law never came into action, however the bitterness remained. During his times, he has closed down all gay saunas in Munich and police raids in gay bars were commonplace. I still remember that periode. The result was that many gay people in those days preferred not to live a live outside the closset. 

The gay scene today still shows some traces of this dark period with some of the older bars still having either a completely darkened window or just a door and no window at all to the outside world. 

That also had its fair effect on the people who frequented these bars. They became more and more cautious and even obdurate as an immediate effect of this hostile environment

This has - gladly - long changed by now. You don’t need to ring a bell any longer to get in, many of the old bars have closed anyway and made room for new bars and cafés that openly are gay, don’t obfuscate the view from outside in any longer and gay life has actually started to move out on the streets, too. 

While this is all fine, there are more changes in Munich’s gay quarter that heat the discussion today. In the past decade, the Glockenbach Area where most of Munich’s gay bars and venues are located has changed tremendously. More and more rich (and straight) people have moved in in the first decade of the 21st century. Houses were renovated and sold as luxury departments. And of course, that changed the clientele of the gay district sustainably. 

It wasn’t for long that gay people started crying out loud that their gay neighborhood was more and more becoming a straight place. 

Fair enough. But: there are some factors people seem to forget. First of all: gay people are to blame themselves for these changes.

We are no longer in 1986, Munich has become a very tolerant and loving place. Most straight people I know have absolutely no problem whatsoever with gay people. However, many gays are still behaving as it were 1986: they seem to avert anything that is straight. But then: many houses in Hans-Sachs-Straße, one of the main roads of interest in gay town Munich, are owned by rich gay guys. They have fundamentally driven the development of the area from a working class area to an upmarket place. It was them who contracted builders and architects on the premium estates of the area and sold them to rich, straight people.

Nobody however seems any need to blame them for the change in people in the area.

With the new neighborhood came new bars and clubs. Straight bars and clubs. In the past 10 years, nearly no new gay bar has opened in Munich (apart from maybe theSelig Café). However a good hand full of straight bars have opened up in the area - and really good ones, too. The old Ksar Club got a face-lift, the Bank is a fab place, just to name two of at least 5 new straight venues.

Walk down Müllerstraße on any given night: the straight clubs and bars are packed with a “gay” crowd, just no gay guys in sight. Walk in Selig, Bau or the dreadful Glockenbach (they don’t even have a web site!) and you experience pure dreariness. Just the weekends, gay places are more crowded. But what an atmosphere. Either people only speak to those they have known for ages or they stand around, beer in hand, not talking to anybody. Just looking for their prince to come. Of course he doesn’t come along and by 3 in the night, when everything else fails, people gather in Ochsengarten and lash over each other in one of Munich’s dirtiest of dark rooms. 

Great, breave gay world. Where has thou come to. 

Hey everybody! How are y’all?! So this is my initial post on Loewie’s World. I had only been blogging in German for quite a while but I realized I had so many English speaking friends around the world who also wanted to know what is going on where I am, I decided to start a mirror site that, however, won’t exactly translate posts I write in German on my main page. Rather I will post individual stories here in English, and others on my main page in German. 

Both languages have their own world and own ways of expressing things. Ever since childhood I found myself into a constant trap between cultures, languages and mentalities. So some stories will make more sense if I write them up in German, others will make more sense in English. Hope you won’t mind to much.

Oh and yes! Do start following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/loewie71 - this Twitter account will combine both the English and the German posts so you can pick at random.