Germany, Then and Now
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“The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”
— Rosa Luxemburg
Those who know me personally know that earlier this year I moved to Germany to be with my partner in expectation of getting married, settling down here and starting a new life. This essay is part update, part political rant. With the realization that things go awry and plans fall through all the time, I nevertheless need to highlight a few unique things about my situation. What troubles me the most is not the end of the relationship, but the social and political context it took place in. After this unexpected breakup I contemplated simply returning to the United States to lick my wounds, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. After the recent brutal murder of Jordan Neely on a subway train, I’m even more convinced than ever that the United States is not the place for me, especially considering the fact that Neely and I have a few important things in common. At this moment, like Neely, I am essentially homeless and writing this from a cheap hostel in Berlin. Like Neely, I too was once in foster care and experienced homelessness after aging out of the system. And like Neely, I too am being punished for speaking my truth and refusing to be silent about the fucked up things happening in this world, things that affect me personally.
After what happened with George Floyd, to see the devaluation of Black life yet again in such stark terms once again was extremely disappointing to say the least. Worst of all was this intentional and explicit silencing of a Black man crying out for help — permanent silencing! Part of my artistic practice recently has been an attempt to make clear the connections between ecocide and genocide.
There’s a definite relationship between the images of death and destruction that so often grace our screens and the destruction of the natural world. The usual suspects and their toxic ideologies and institutions are the main culprits behind all of this. Yet when someone who has been on the receiving end of all of this speaks out about his pain and the suffering caused by total disenfranchisement, he’s brutally choked to death? What the hell is going on? What’s even more grotesque about these regular police and vigilante murders and the sociopaths who cheer them on is that they’re happening in the context of no reparations for any of the intentional harm that’s been inflicted on the Black community over the past centuries. No reparations for chattel slavery; no reparations for Jim Crow terrorism that pushed millions of people off of their land and into Northern ghettos; no reparations for redlining and the collusion of the federal government and financial institutions; no reparations for the destructive War on Drugs that has decimated and institutionalized entire families; nothing except gas lighting and exhortations to “vote harder” in the next election.
I was not planning on putting my business out there, but my mind was changed after seeing this ridiculous shit with Jordan Neely being silenced and his murdeerer allowed to walk free. Several conversations I had recently underscored the need to talk about the things some would rather we be silent about. One was with an African woman I met here in Berlin who said to me while talking about her own experiences with racism in Germany, “You must fight!” Later that night at a bar with this woman I came across a guy from Wisconsin who works for a large multinational corporation here in Germany. While talking about the situation in the States he started going on and on about how good his life was back in Wisconsin and said, “I’m not here escaping from anything.” I had to hold my tongue. By the way, Wisconsin is one of the worst states for Black people; it’s a racist shit hole, essentially. Sometimes the gulf seems unbridgeable… My experiences in Germany have taught me that in this specific context here it certainly is not all about race. I’ve met plenty of poor white men here who were doing things they’d rather not do in order to survive. The overarching problem is capitalism and its related ills, but in the United States, because if its specific settler-colonial history, these social and economic dynamics are very racialized.
My personal experiences, particularly what I’ve seen here in Germany, are the foundation of my activism over the past fourteen years. Reckoning with the effects of oppression is not theoretical for me. My experiences in are proof of the strange netherworlds that those without privilege are forced into in order to survive. This is not the place for getting into every single detail, but I’ll sketch the overall picture and circle back to how I ended up back here in 2023.
In his essay, ‘Recognizing the Unpeople,’ Noam Chomsky, a fellow Philadelphian, writes:
The strange breed of unpeople can be found everywhere, including the U.S.: in the prisons that are an international scandal, the food kitchens, the decaying slums.
Reading this essay for the first time was a little disconcerting and I said to myself, wait a minute…he’s describing me… There’s a saying that poor, inner city Black people are being “left behind.” No. We have been intentionally stripped of resources, intentionally stripped of educational opportunities, etc, and either left to rot or corralled into being a source of cheap labor. In Philadelphia, Black people who moved there fleeing Jim Crow terror and segregation during the Great Migration were pushed into redlined ghettos and subjected to the North’s somewhat less violent but more gas lighting form of anti-Black racism. My family was particularly affected by this and by the influx of drugs into the Black community during the 70’s and 80's. My grandmother was raised in the Richard Allen projects, the place that turned Bill Cosby into the selfish monster he later became. No, poverty is not noble or edifying. I spent the first half of my childhood in deep poverty in the neighborhood called the Black Bottom in west Philadelphia. It was indeed a slum and it was so damn bad I felt compelled to run away from home a few months before my 12th birthday.
Lets fast forward to 2003 when I aged out of the foster care system at the age of 21. Some attempts at reform have been made fairly recently, but back then, when one “aged out” of the foster care system all of the benefits and subsidies you were provided with up until that point were abruptly withdrawn. This means that people with no family support or resources would suddenly find themselves in a sink or swim situation. At that time I remember having a really hard time finding work. After filling out dozens of applications, the only place that got back to me was an adult bookstore in the so-called gayborhood section of the city, in the former red light district. It’s a struggle to decide which things are relevant because of course to me it all feels relevant, but for now I’ll simply say that being 21, like most young people, I was totally consumed with my social life and working in a sex shop was enough of a novelty that it gave me an air of being rather cool. What’s scary is that you can be exploited yet never feel the exploitation because you’re agreeing to go along with it. Exploitation can feel like a good time. This was a recurring theme over the next years.
A fraternity buddy of mine would come into the shop late at night (I worked the graveyard shift) after the bars let out to chat; one day he told me about a recent trip he’d taken to Germany. In his endearing, flamboyant way he literally bounced around with excitement while sharing with me how different it was for him in Germany than in the United States, how respected he felt, the way guys would approach him instead of turning up their nose at him, the lack of casual interpersonal racism, and on and on. We’d both had our issues with rejection from white gays, and this was a topic we commiserated on several times. To hear that he found a place where it was possible for one to live freely without the burden of the usual stuck up racist crap was almost unbelievable. “Girl, you have got to go to Berlin,” he said breathlessly. And so I did. Recently I had applied to Temple University and gotten in, and I decided to treat myself to a trip to Berlin to celebrate. After doing the online pen pal thing with a few guys in Berlin I was ready to travel there and turn my fantasies into reality; but really, what I needed deep down was a break from the oppressive atmosphere of living in a slum lord situation in west Philly and seeing the same depressing shit day after day.
I was especially excited to meet this guy from the former GDR, a dancer (with a dancer’s incredible body) who was extremely interesting to me; we always had interesting chats. So, I got on a plane for the first time and touched down in Berlin in December of 2004. I could only afford to go during the off season, and unfortunately my plan to meet this handsome guy in east Berlin never materialized, but I managed to have a good time anyway. Ate some good food, did some sightseeing, had a few nice encounters, and before I knew it the time had flown by and I was on the flight back to Filthadelphia. Shortly after I returned to work I was summarily fired over some relatively minor infraction by my supervisor, the one who had unsuccessfully propositioned me a few times. My coworker who I often worked the graveyard shift with was shocked and tried to intervene on my behalf but there was no changing the supervisor’s mind. So there I was with a $600 a month room to pay off and no income, trying to pay attention in class but unable to because I was so consumed with worry about meeting my basic needs.
Someone I knew from a home economics training program for foster care kids lived up the street in an abandoned building. Essentially she was squatting there and also selling drugs from in the house as well. We got to chatting and she told me I could get in on her action if I needed to. I told her I would think about it, but deep down I knew that path would lead to prison. But what other choice did I have? Soon another choice materialized. One day I received a message on the German chat site I frequented, from a guy in Frankfurt am Main. We had a few very roundabout back and forth conversations where essentially he was trying to find out if I was interested in escorting. I eventually sent him some pictures and of course he flattered me endlessly and told me that a handsome and well endowed Black guy like myself could do quite well there. He made it sound like the opportunity of a lifetime, and casting my gaze at what was around me and what was awaiting me, it seemed like an offer I would be dumb to refuse.
I stepped off of the plane in Frankfurt am Main shortly before my 23rd birthday, nearly two years to the day after I aged out of the foster care system (I only fairly recently made that spatial connection). In my pockets were five dollars and my passport. The way I had talked myself into doing this was by telling myself that I was making this decision, that I was in control. Getting away from depressing Philadelphia was my goal and this was the way I would be able to do it. I considered it to be a form of “working for vacation”; this would be my own personal extended holiday in Europe. But in reality I had less of a choice in the matter than I realized.
Frankfurt was like a mixture of Alice in Wonderland, Pinocchio's Pleasure Island and some drug fueled wild reality TV show. One day one of my projects will focus on that time period and take a deep dive into the lives of those who find themselves working in Europe’s sex industry. And it’s a huge industry here, even bigger now than it was back then. The newness and exoticness of everything overshadowed the reality of what I would need to be doing to earn money; but what made everything easier was the sense of comradery with the other young men I met while working in this “house of boys.” Most of them were from Eastern Europe and Latin America with a few East Germans here and there. Many of these guys were unreal, both in physical appearance and in personality some of the nicest and most beautiful people I’ve ever encountered. The moments of connection and commiseration I shared with people at that time may have been built on a foundation of exploitation and ruthless capitalism, but the feelings and the emotions were genuine.
The surreality of the house itself and my first work day are worth mentioning. The outside of the house was a garish shade of off-pink, so definitely not hard to find.
Interestingly, the now abandoned house was caught up in a scandal over the absentee landlord whose owner is (or was) connected to a major political party here.
The downstairs area of the house was decorated in a very kitschy baroque style with fake antiques everywhere, giving an impression of high class opulence. And that fit with the way this placed was advertised, as a “high class” establishment. The top two floors of this huge, four story building were devoted to living quarters with each room opening out onto a kind of rotunda with a spacious kitchen and bathroom. Of course everyone living there was charged rent in addition to giving 40% of our earnings to the house. The first floor was where most of the work took place; there was a red room, a blue room, a green room and a large bathroom with a mini jacuzzi. Each room was of course decorated to match the color scheme theme. In the basement there was an S&M dungeon with assorted equipment and toys set up near the washers and dryers. The best place in the house for me was the backyard with its wild tangle of overgrowth and huge, ivy covered fir tree. A makeshift shelter with comfy sofas was where we spent many pleasant hours; it was a very nice little green oasis and here it was easy to forget where one actually was.
The way things worked in this house was like this: some clients would make appointments to come and visit certain people, usually after seeing their pictures on the business’ website; others would stop by randomly, ringing the loud, jarring doorbell that summoned everyone to the living room with its comfy leather couches, mounted TV and full bar. The “host” (or hostess, depending on their mood) was usually one of two older Polish people, one of whom would be probably be considered non-binary or genderqueer today. They both had the occasional client here and there, but generally were past their prime for escorting and kept around to clean, manage the place and to run errands. When a client would arrive, one of the hosts would welcome them warmly, escorting them to the common room with its high ceilings and flattering lighting.
The most bizarre aspect of this for me was feeling like I was in a whorehouse from an old western where the girls would come line up and the customer would look them over before choosing one to take upstairs. Literally, this was how it worked. The client would either make a quick decision or sit there sipping the drink that the host had delivered on an ornate silver platter while he looked the young men over. Because I was being marketed as an exotic mandingo from America I had a fair share of regular appointments and people choosing me from the line up, but I always felt bad for the guys who almost never were chosen. There were a few of these types, usually reeking of desperation, and the manager of the place purposefully kept them as he explained to me later.
The “workday” was over by 10pm and then, especially on the weekends, a group of us would get ready to go out and spend our money on partying and forgetting our troubles. But more about all that some other time. For now I should say that after a few months the shine really started to come off of the place as the horrible exploitation going on became glaringly apparent. A year later when I returned to Frankfurt from Berlin in a desperate attempt to make a little money, I barely made it out of there before getting beaten up or worse by the same guy who had welcomed me to the house on my first day, a huge, muscular Slovakian guy. There was probably some explicit human trafficking going on there as well based on a few things I saw.
It was mid-summer of 2005 when I met Jirka, an interesting but rather nihilistic guy from the Czech Repubic. He was one of these bisexual guys who was more into girls but knew how to use his assets to his advantage. He came there around the time my Afro-Brazilian buddy had been expelled from the house after getting into a fight with one of the Polish hosts (who could be quite provoking and irritating).
Jirka and I became fast friends and he told me about an opportunity to get away from Frankfurt to another city where we could share an apartment and live a more relaxed lifestyle. Around this time the money wasn’t exactly rolling in the way it had been before, and after having my own screaming match with someone in the house I was over it and decided to take Jirka up on his offer. The plan was to get set up in an apartment in a town called Duisberg, but first I would have to wait for a few weeks in another town called Dortmund while the apartment was made ready. While in Dortmund I was managed, or shall we say pimped, by this Roma guy, who in turn was managed by some German man who lived in the suburbs (I was driven out there to meet clients a few times). This was another wild experience that merits revisiting one day. I need to mention that I was taken to service a priest one time. Normally, myself and the other guys (a very young looking Roma guy, a Czech guy and a Slovakian guy) worked out of an apartment building near the city center, and this was where I eventually met my future partner.
“Carl,” as we will call him for now, seemed like a rather nice guy when I first met him, very easy to get along with, sympathetic to my situation, generously tipping me, and very interested in keeping in touch. We met several times in Dortmund and again after I moved on to Duisberg. The strangeness of him being freshly married to a Romanian guy (also an escort) while consorting with money boys didn’t register to me as a red flag, although it should have. I’ll circle back to Carl soon because it’s almost time for me to transition from Germany in the past to Germany current day.
The adventure continued in Duisberg where I met most of my clients online; it was certainly a much more relaxed atmosphere than in Frankfurt or Dortmund where one had to contend with a pimp taking part of your income. The only problem was that Jirka put the burden of pleasing the owner of the apartment onto me because he was totally disgusted by the guy. Mr. Ghost as I’ll call him (a play on his literal real name) came by the apartment once a week for a massage with happy ending; for me it wasn’t difficult, but Jirka’s attitude towards the whole thing was annoying. As winter set in, the tension between Jirka and Mr. Ghost became unsustainable and I realized it would soon be time to move on. So I took a trip to Berlin to meet a guy I had been chatting with, my “Europe Angel” as I called him because he really did save me at that time. Thankfully I was able to go to Berlin and move in with this guy who was to be my lover over the next months. We could have been more, probably would have been if I had been more mature and able to read the cues.
The Europe Angel, being the mensch that he was, realized after some time that I needed my own space, so he convinced a friend of his to sublet his apartment to me. The apartment was literally right up the street from where he lived, so we were able to keep in touch. I’m overwhelmed writing this because the memories are flooding back…
Fast forward to early fall of 2006 and the time spent partying and not going to the doctor and not eating properly finally caught up with me. Honestly, I barely made it back alive. I reached out to Carl in Dortmund and he sent me money for a train ticket. He was living with his husband at the time and I remember being irritated about his husband asking why I wasn’t into having sex if I was there as a call boy. I was like, can’t you see I’m in bad shape?
The day I was to take a plane back to the United States I remember Carl standing over me crying, thinking I was asleep. I was so touched by that in the midst of feeling like my life didn’t matter, feeling like a piece of trash aimlessly drifting, on my way back home broken down and in disgrace. When I got back I had to build my life again from scratch. After being taken in by a good friend who took pity on me, I was approached by his mother after a few months who told me in the gentlest way possible that with Christmas coming up and family members planning on stopping by, it was perhaps best for me to find another place to stay. My friend was adamant about me staying anyway, but I didn't want to cause any trouble so I left early one morning and went to a homeless intake shelter, the same one I used to walk past on my way to work each day not so long before. This experience was for me what they call rock bottom, but once again, it was the people around me who helped me endure it. One small act of kindness I’ll always remember from this time was a trans woman who was forced to stay at the men's shelter lending me her Brandy album, knowing that music was a therapeutic thing for me. This is another experience that I’ll delve more deeply into one day.
But fast forwarding to 2008 I was back on my feet health wise and visiting Carl in Dortmund. By this time his Romanian husband was gone. In 2010 on another visit he asked me if I wanted to get “married,” in quotation marks because at that time there was no gay marriage in Germany only civil unions. Originally I thought it was what I wanted, a chance to move to Europe but in a more meaningful way this time with someone I cared about. But the advent of the Occupy movement threw a wrench in those plans. We actually did get the civil union in early 2011, and I began making preparations to move there. What held me back from taking the final step was my activism and the belief that maybe if we could harness grassroots power we could make Philadelphia a better place to live for everyone and not only a nice place for people with money. Occupy seemed to finally be giving a voice to the downtrodden, to the forgotten, to the poor — to people like me essentially.
Of course Carl was upset when I informed him that I wouldn’t be coming back to Germany. But honestly, considering all the people I’ve met, and everything I’ve been able to accomplish with my activism over the years I don’t regret it. I simply can’t imagine what my life would be like if I had moved away from the States permanently in 2011. And I say this despite my current situation. What I learned and what I experienced over these past twelve or so years has been too valuable.
Germany Now
I’m writing this from Berlin after leaving Dortmund behind, this time for good. Germany feels somewhat different than before. Capitalism is really wearing this place down…
I reconnected with “Carl” in the fall of 2021 when it started to become clear to me that the United States was sliding deeper into the abyss. Several occurrences made it crystal clear that things are likely unrepairable in the U.S., at least as far as I’m concerned. After having stable housing for eleven years there was the loss of my subsidized housing after the “non-profit” tasked with managing the subsidy 1) failed to pay their portion of the rent on time for months on end, and 2) then decided to warehouse people in their program in a roach infested building on the outskirts of the city rather than put in the effort to find people proper homes. Incidentally, the arts non-profit I was working for at the time I was gentrified out of my home has been an integral part of the mechanism that has helped push mostly poor Black people out of their neighborhoods. Learning about that was certainly fun. And then some employees there dared to get an attitude when the subject of gentrification was raised. After essentially being forced to give up the housing subsidy I moved into a collective house in west Philly. Having to endure weird racist shit from my non-Black housemates literally while the George Floyd upheavals were going on certainly didn’t inspire confidence about the future. On top of everything else there was the out of control gun violence in Philadelphia which mainly affects Black communities, which is a whole other topic. In the months before I left Philly, several people were shot and murdered quite close to where I was living.
So, yes, I was certainly looking for a way out of a situation that was looking increasingly bleak. Over the past years since I decided to end the relationship in 2011, Carl and I had only chatted a handful of times, usually to give greetings on the holidays. Because he had been willing to keep the lines of communication open I was under the impression that he might be willing to give things another chance, and so we decided that I would come for a visit in the late spring of 2022 for his birthday to see what feeling were still there. While I was there he told me that being together again felt so good, that he missed me and was willing to give things another chance. The funny thing is, I actually did have feelings for him even though it wasn’t like a whirlwind romance on my end. He had a lot of complications, but so do I, and he was well aware of my complications. He knew my about my family issues, my health issues, my nudist hobbies, my leftwing politics, everything. But in retrospect he was not very forthcoming about himself. However, he promised to open up more in the future, and he said he was willing to work on himself while I worked on myself, and we agreed that together we could support each other and grow together. I thought he was a genuinely good person, and I felt bad for hurting him years ago. I believed that we would be able to build a life together. I was wrong.
One tragic thing that has happened in Germany since the last time I was here is the rapid growth of xenophobia and open racism, mostly due to the influx of refugees from the Middle East. Germany has taken in millions of refugees and in fact needs them because of its demographic crisis, but the presence of these refugees has caused a lot of friction with the locals. Based on my experience with Carl in the past I never imagined that xenophobia and racism would be an issue in our relationship. I was wrong. The first red flag that I purposefully downplayed was him telling me that his mother was “a little bit racist.” Because of past issues with his parents controlling and dominating behavior I asked him to tell his mother about our plans to marry before I came to Germany and he assured me that he would.
This was a very serious point because in 2011 he wanted to move to Thailand to start his own business in order to escape from his dominating parents who literally controlled his life and finances to a large degree. After his father passed away in 2021 he admitted to feeling more free to live his life, but the mother was still in the picture, and I needed to know that she would not be a problem.
Another red flag I ignored was him relating to me what his mother said when he showed her a picture of me. “Oh, he’s not so dark,” she said. Who says something like that? But I brushed this aside because at that point I was too deep into the situation. As I was making plans to move to Germany with my cat and my belongings I was doing so under the impression that there would be no major obstacles. I was wrong. When I arrived Carl admitted that he had in fact only told his mother that I was coming to live with him, and left out the part about us getting married. So she was under the impression that we were “boyfriends.” But at that point I was already there, and so I simply swallowed my misgivings yet again. But after I noticed the casualness with which he was making xenophobic and borderline racist comments about foreigners and “bad” neighborhoods in Dortmund, I felt deep down that I had made a big mistake. Yet I continued pushing forward, hoping that somehow things would work out and he would change. Yet the red flags kept popping up, like his cavalier attitude towards covid and mask wearing despite knowing I’m higher risk, and his disregard and even distaste for my politics and my worldview. It turns out that he held very strong right wing attitudes and opinions, to the point where we agreed to simply not talk about politics.
But the most difficult thing about all of this is coming to the realization that I’ve been suffering abuse. Unfortunately, over the past few months I’ve become quite familiar with narcissistic abuse, a type that is not always immediately recognizable. Without realizing it, I was being manipulated. I came across an article entitled ‘How Narcissists Use Future Faking To Manipulate You’ that describes what was happening in the relationship perfectly:
Future faking is when a person lies or promises something about your possible future in order to get what they want in the present. It could be as basic as promising that they will call you later, and then never calling. Or it can be promising to go on a vacation with you, and then never taking any steps to make that happen. Or even promising to marry you, carry you off into the sunset, and living happily ever after, all in order to make you complacent and to control you in the present.
In the hands of a skilled manipulator, future faking preys on your dreams and goals in order to fabulate a possible future so that they can string you along in the now. These promises are destined to be broken, and can be seen as a form of overpromising and underdelivering.
Carl knew that I wanted to start a new life in Germany and he used this desire to manipulate me while avoiding doing what he promised to do like quitting smoking and taking other steps to live a healthier lifestyle.
Looking back over everything, the behavior was textbook narcissistic abuse. He would do little things to provoke me (like praising the British royal family even though he knows I hate that shit), and then if I responded negatively my response became the major issue. The last time this happened was when he purposefully let my cat out of the apartment then sat there looking weird, waiting for me to react. When I responded philosophically about it saying the cat would likely return on his own (which he did a few hours later), it only seemed to confuse and irritate him. The next day he purchased a bunch of random unnecessary crap for the cat which to me confirmed his guilty conscience, if such a thing is possible for him.
I think the worst thing though was the time he bought cleaning products for me to use after claiming that I wasn’t doing a good enough job of it, and this after we had a conversation about whether or not the relationship was working. He was purposefully keeping me hanging on in order to extract things from me in the moment, classic abusive behavior. And knowing my situation, he probably thought that he could use my lack of resources and my vulnerability as a foreigner to get me to do whatever he wanted in perpetuity. Our sex life was very one sided with him never putting in any effort to get me off; it was always about him. The day I told him no more sex until we got married he seemed to realize that I was catching on, which I had not done quite yet, but I was beginning to realize that something fishy was happening.
Some might say, “well, what did you expect getting intimately involved with a former client?” And yes, I certainly feel stupid now, but I was caught up in the dream of starting a new life and only saw what I wanted to see. Near the end, he admitted to me that over the past decade that we had not seen each other his only relationships were casual ones with sex workers. And then it began to click in my mind that I had indeed made a terrible mistake; he still viewed me as a sex worker even though he had been privy to my social media and everything I had been working on in Philadelphia. He didn’t want a partnership, he wanted someone he could control and manipulate. At the end of the day, when he realized that I’m a conscious Black man who refused to be used and manipulated, he decided to punish me by essentially throwing me out of the apartment. Admittedly, I did call him a nazi out of frustration and anger, but if the shoe fits... Scheißegal as the locals here say.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been living in hotels and hostels, contemplating my life and musing over the way these political considerations manifest in our lives. What does it mean to be screwed over by white people on two continents? It all circles back to the devaluation of Black lives and Black aspirations and the modern day manifestations of colonial dynamics which have never really completely disappeared. And I know this because I’ve been experiencing it. There’s nothing more threatening to white supremacy than a Black man who knows what’s going on in this world and what it has taken from him. I’m sure James Baldwin said something to this affect.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow to know that people here in Europe are able to get their basic needs met by their government while myself and people like me are forced to go around begging and relying on screwed up individuals to get what other people receive as a matter or course. This ridiculous unfairness is part of my reluctance to go back to Amerikkka where poor Black people are being lynched in broad daylight. I’m still here because even though Germany has some serious problems, their government is not totally dysfunctional and I don’t have to worry about being gunned down in the supermarket. Regardless of what ends of happening I feel compelled to snatch some sort of victory from the jaws of defeat and make this situation more than just a total waste of my time. I’ve literally left everything behind to come here, and the thought of going back to the States and starting over again from scratch in that aggressively anti-Black and anti-poor place fills me with dread, honestly.
Right now my main considerations are taking care of my cat and finding a way to continue working on my Victor Klemperer project. For those who might be wondering, the work I was doing here in the past is out of the question. While part of my artistic practice includes utilizing and exploring erotic art, sex work and dealing with clients again is absolutely out of the question. First of all, I feel too old for all of that, secondly, I know too much now and it would simply be too irritating. If nothing materializes here I’ll simply go back to the States under duress and salvage what can be salvaged, resigning myself to being miserable like so many others are. But that would be a last resort. Because I’m physically here in Germany at the moment I feel that I should do all I can to make something work here. So my plan over the next month is to find a place where I can stay in Berlin together with my cat and do some networking to see if maybe I can find some consulting or social practice artwork based on my previous work history.
While everything feels extremely complicated and overwhelming at the moment, especially as it concerns my poor cat who is stuck with a sitter, I feel that I can’t give up on Germany just yet. Sometimes you’ve got to simply roll with the punches, as they say. My exploration of Victor Klemperer’s work as revealed to me that this is indeed a country of extremes, a place inhabited by devils and angels; some of this is rooted in the philosophical and cultural traditions here, especially as it concerns German Romanticism. “We soar upwards and then fall correspondingly far,” Klemperer wrote of the typical German mentality in his book, The Language of the Third Reich. I can relate!
If you would like to see more of what I’m up to and what I’ve been working on please visit my Instagram page and my website.
If you are able to contribute to my cat sitting, housing & living necessities fund please do! I really need to be able to stay here in Berlin a bit longer to network, link up with like minded people and see what the possibilities are. Please donate via my cash app or my PayPal.
Thank you for reading.
