Gay neukölln

Gay Neighbourhoods in Berlin

Berlin's core of queer activity is Nollendorfplatz in Schöneberg in the south west just beside the metropolis zoo. Every year, the lesbian and gay street festival takes place here, which marks the start of Pride Week. In the 1920s, the neighbourhood enjoys a well-deserved reputation for some of Berlin's leading nightlife, as adequately as restaurants, cafés and shops frequented by the LGBTQ+ community in particular.  Other rainbow neighbourhoods in Berlin not to be overlooked include its neighbour Kreuzberg, and the SchwuZ nightclub in Neukölln. There are also shops along the Bergmannstraße as well as reside music venues where LGBTQ+ citizens and visitors meet and have fun. The Mitte neighbourhood also has pockets of LGBTQ+ hotspots including Weinbergpark. Find more scene tips for queer places in Berlin.

Tonight, one of Berlin’s oldest gay clubs, Schwuz, moves from the long-gentrified Bergmannkiez in West Kreuzberg to the edgy Rollbergkiez in blue-collar Neukölln. Called ‘Gaytrifizierung’ (‘gay-ntrification’) by TIP-Berlin, this move is all the chatter in the gay rags. It certainly does represent a landmark adjust in the geography of Berlin’s gay scene.

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No one five years ago would ever have thought there would be a gay scene in Neukölln***, which is popularly described by many Berliners as traditional and immigrant-based, or the hood for Hartz-IV social assistance––a problem Bezirk with social tensions a-plenty. A comrade who lives near Karl-Marx Straße tells me that going shopping in the local Lidl is depressing: full of either adolescent hipsters, or people who look homeless, and nothing in between. ‘Neukölln is a neighbourhood two homosexual guys can’t hold hands’, says another. You certainly do feel a minute funny walking hand-in-hand down Sonnenallee, before the ancient men smoking shisha. TIP’s article is dense with discussion about Islamophobia, and statistics (so far reassuring) about the paucity of aggression against gay p