More Thoughts on Berlin, May 2022
A Berlín 10 vs a US I don’t even know, y’all — for realz!
I take responsibility for putting off a lot of sexual energy. It’s me. Add cleavage and you get a perfect storm of visual impact on the Straßes of West Berlin. People were very direct. I got kissed a lot. There was tongue involved.There were uncompromising moments when a goddess learned a few new things her body can do. I received some said instruction at the hands of an accomplished musician who paid great attention to detail. If I hadn’t considered bottom surgery before, I consider it now.
It wasn’t all being a sex pot either. Berlin seemed thoroughly impressed with your girl. I imagine James Baldwin getting such a response (romantic and otherwise) when he was in Paris. Reading his novel “Another Country” awakened so much in me when I first read it in my twenties. I get why Nina Simone, Josephine Baker, James B., and other Black figures became and continue to become ex-pats. I don’t know if I was experiencing a positive reaction, or simply failing to detect familiar energies of racism and oppression of the flavor ever-present living in the US. It is not that I do not feel seen in the US. I am under constant surveillance.
I’m conflicted. I felt abroad that my work was embraced both on its merit (the workshop received a standing ovation), but also somehow as an achievement in spite of opposition to my existence. I mean, like people took for granted that life is a struggle for people like me and honor that I am thriving in spite of living in a constant ideological war zone with grave material effects. The festival provided space where my existence went unquestioned. It may have just been the novelty of new place, but I felt like Berlin got me. However I presented myself, I felt I blended in to a background of individuals who had opted to do this human thing a little differently. That’s in many ways the history of this city where even the Nazis came to let their hair down (or at least where the presence of the Nazis did not put a damper on the free expression that Berlin was able to maintain.
Do I need to join the ranks of so many of my idols who came before and leave the US in order to find out who the hell Notorious Pink really is? Do I get to come back to the country of my birth once I have figured these things out? My fear is that once I left, I might never return to the United States. The USA is a pretty toxic place to live these days if you’re a woman or trans person who wants agency over their own body. Maybe the message the powers that be are sending is “go away, we don’t want you here.” I’m imagining a country of nothing but straight cis white men and the people who serve them. The rest of us may have to disperse.
I look forward to being back in Berlin. I’d need more than a week to get a reasonable sense of the place—perhaps a year. Berlin is intoxicating, but drugs lose their potency and reality slips in. I’d also benefit from time out of Berlin, seeing parts of Germany where me all dolled up might not be as warmly received. The rose color of the place might very well fade, and I could discover Berlin as an oasis in the midst of as repressive a society as the one I’m living in currently. Repressive to me at least. People who live in the United States free of dread on a day-to-day wondering when it will be against the law to be who they are, are lucky and privileged and I envy you. Others should be so lucky. Yeah, Berlin is looking real good.
— Notorious Pink
