SLAY IT LOUD: Checking in on the sex and gender deviants at the Rostock CSD

eugyppius attends a pride march.

Every significant municipality in Germany holds a summer festival to honour the Rainbow Brigade known as Christopher Street Day.

Contrary to its name, Christopher Street Day (or CSD) is never really a single day, but rather a series of publicly-financed LGBTQ festivities and debaucheries strung out over a week more, finally culminating in a pride march wherein participants demand very shrilly all the liberalised sexual freedoms that the state already ceded them a long time ago.

Longtime readers will be surprised to learn that CSD is not actually my favourite thing. Thus I spent the past weeks in blissful ignorance of the “HanseQueer Culture Weeks” unfolding beneath my nose as a prelude to the CSD march on 18 July. I missed such scintillating political hors d’oeuvres as a wreath-lying ceremony to commemorate the queer victims of National Socialism, an “art workshop for LGBTQ* people with migrant background,” a somewhat ominous “latex workshop” and “queer-feminist karaoke.” Happily I did not miss the “Acro Yoga workshop,” but only because it was cancelled due to illness.

I would’ve cheerfully missed Saturday’s festivities too, had a friend at the University of Rostock not drawn my attention to their incredibly cringe marketing. Their motto this year was “SLAY IT LOUD: Last chance for your voice.”

Now, I’ve been suffering some of the worst hayfever in recent memory, so I’m a little slow on the uptake. I didn’t realise until my tiresome Saturday that “Slay” is intended as a pun for “say,” and that the submotto after the colon alludes to the ominous strength of Alternative für Deutschland in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the upcoming September elections. We’re on the verge of being timewarped back to 1933, at which point our sex and gender activists will face an indefinite period of queer invisibility. This CSD may in fact constitute their last chance ever to pontificate before an audience about the intricacies of their gender identity, that’s how serious is the situation.

Anyway, I woke up early on Saturday and on a whim I caught the train from my seaside village to Rostock to slay it loud for genital mutilation, prolific anal sex and latex fetishism. I arrived at the Neuer Markt where the rally was set to start about 45 minutes early, and saw that the pridelings had already started to gather. A chubby girl with bright red hair stood on a bench holding a sign earnestly promising “FREE HUGS.” I avoided eye contact and after a while she climbed down, studiously unembraced. Then a gaggle of “pup play” fetishists wearing dog masks and tails streamed in; as they unpacked their signs and set up camp on the south edge of the square I learned that they were from some gay fetish organisation calling themselves the “Ostfriesen Puppies” – all the way from Niedersachsen.

More people arrived, and minute by minute the full Pride bestiary completed itself.

Best represented by far were the mousey teen girls, with an occasional mousey teen boy in tow. They seemed alternately timid, bored, and slightly scared in their poorly washed clothes. Some wore their pride flags like capes; others spread them out on the pavement and sat cross-legged on their nylon rainbows as if they were beach towels. A few had cutting scars on their legs and in general they lent the impression of juvenile refugees from some bizarre war-ravaged land. Three of these types ended up standing near me – two girls no more than thirteen, one of them with “Free Hugs” scrawled on her forehead in black sharpie. They were dragging behind them a rail-thin companion of indeterminate gender. He or she was wearing a white mask that impaired his or her vision so severely that the girls had to lead their charge around by the hand lest he or she trip over anything.

Another prominent constituency at these events are the plump young women with dyed Reddit hair. These are generally older than the mousey teens and seem mostly committed to implying a kind of pride-appropriate if opportunistic and not altogether convincing lesbianism. They’re the kinds of girls who tell everyone they’re bisexual yet somehow end up dating a long string of men. Their earnestness is unbearable, the bubble handwriting on their cardboard demo signs the greatest clue as to their interior disposition.

Then of course there are the creeps – unaccompanied men, no few of them presenting as trans women and waving trans flags despite abundant stubble and leg hair and little interest in passing otherwise.

As the square filled, I also noticed the kinds of people who weren’t there, at least not in very great numbers: Gay men were rare indeed; those in attendance were all older, well-dressed couples. Beyond some students sent to represent the University of Rostock and those in the meagre labour union delegations, there was also just a terrible dearth of ordinary people. The mood was some improbable mixture of tired, try-hard, seedy, naive and if anything faintly anti-sexual. Various unattractive people raised their black, grey, white and purple asexual flags, while a few others wrapped themselves in yellow flags with great purple circles, the banner of the intersexed. “We hate sex and we have defective genitals” at first seems an odd message, but when you remember the leering creep contingent I guess this too makes its own kind of sense.¹

Before long some orange utility vehicle retrofitted for service as a mobile dance stage began to belch pyrotechnic smoke into the air and blare electronic dance music. Then two overweight faintly demonic drag queens lumbered onto the sound stage.

Our hype trannies introduced themselves as “Fatty Acid” and “Bitchnu,” which through the distorted overloud speakers sounded more like “Fat Ass” and “Bix Nood.” Despite their upbeat catty affectations, the general lethargy of Rostock CSD infected them too. Their delivery was flat, their jokes obviously rehearsed, their notecards always at the ready. They professed themselves impressed by the enormous turnout but the square seemed half empty and before long they were asking all of us to crowd closer. “It’s for the cameras,” some guy behind me said, and indeed I noticed an NDR film crew milling about. The press wanted footage of thickly packed crowd at the Rostock CSD.

I went into this event firmly determined to report on the speeches, but I found it almost impossible to pay attention to them. First up was a spindly redhaired woman named Sophie Koch, Queer Commissioner for the Federal Government. I guess Queer Commissioners mainly spend all summer jetting frenetically around Germany to give canned speeches at one CSD rally after the other. Koch said something about hate crimes against the queer community and the importance of solidarity and everybody clapped, but the boredom was already setting in. Ever greater numbers of the disaffected teenage girl contingent began chatting among themselves or adding more sharpie art to their cardboard placards.

The worst speech was delivered by Birgit Hesse, the Social Democrat president of the state parliament. At least I assume it was the worst speech, I sit here and type today I with literally zero idea of anything she said at all. I only remember she’d built a lot of pauses for applause into her remarks during which nobody ever applauded, so it must’ve been bad. At some point the Head Mayor of Rostock, Eva-Maria Kröger, took the mic to shout about how many of us were there and how we were all raising our voices together, and that woke the emo girls up a little. Then the Rector of Rostock University took the mic to babble about the importance of diversity for research and teaching and this put the emo girls back to sleep again. By this time the crowd had lost basically all interest in the familiar platitudes of their own movement; the only thing that could draw shouts of applause and support any longer were speakers’ periodic calls to ban Alternative für Deutschland.

Finally Bitchnu and Fatty Acid welcomed the concluding speaker, a 16 year-old transmale reading remarks off her mobile who called herself Jace. In the typical kazoo voice of the testosterone supplemented-female, Jace rambled for a while about diversity and inclusivity and about the dangers faced by queer people and the need for more state resources for transgender people. Finally she abandoned these themes and embarked instead upon a sustained rant against the evils of capitalism, the relevance of which Jace explained by insisting that capitalism is also bad because it both scapegoats and exploits transgender people like Jace.

Eventually Bitchnu and Fatty Acid ushered their overexcited squeaky communist offstage. The time had come to make our demands, which were read out in a great litany. After each demand – whether for more funding or more recognition or more free mutilation surgeries or more whatever – we were asked to snap our fingers and shout “SLAY IT LOUD.” Only about half of everyone bothered with this nonsense; the aforementioned thirteen year-old girls next to me plainly thought it was an enormous drag.

As I stood there amid the creepy autogynephiles taking selfies and the earnest Uni girls snapping their fingers and SLAYING IT LOUD, I noticed the woman in front of me was wearing a shirt depicting a vibrating personal massage device above the caption “What a feminist sounds like.”

So much of the stuff you see at pride events is like this, just baffling impenetrable nonsense:

??????????????????????????????????????

Finally the demands were over. Bitchnu and Fatty Acid spent the rest of the hour thanking everybody under the sun and reading out various rules for the pride march through the city to the harbour. I considered tagging along but decided I’d had enough. The emo girls, the Uni girls, and the rest of the girls lined up behind the big orange pyrotechnic EDM dance truck – one big listless teenage girl parade with some weird guys wearing puppy masks bringing up the rear. I tried to note the slogans on their cardboard signs: “NO HATE. Fascism. Speciesism.” “I’M A DESASTER BUT AT LEAST I’M NOT HOMO-/TRANSPHOBIC AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS. STRAIGHT.” “I don’t mind straight people as long as they act gay (!) in public.” “Homophobia has many faces and they’re all UGLY.” “Make love not war.”

I walked back the way I came. First I stopped at a kitchen store to shop for drinking glasses, then I bought an espresso at a coffee shop that I enjoyed on a park bench. It took me more than 20 minutes to cover the 600 meters from the square back to Kröpeliner Tor, and still I arrived ahead of the pride marchers on the parallel street, whose progress was so slow it seemed to defy human biology.

1. The last big pride events I witnessed took place years ago in New York City and Munich, and they were much different – openly subversive, loud, packed, and also eager to foreground their aggressively sexual participants. The contrast with this past Saturday was staggering, and I don’t think it’s only because CSD Rostock is a smaller event held in a lefty Uni city embedded in deep AfD territory. The rise of transgenderism has profoundly changed queer activism, as have the decades of political ascendance that the Rainbow Brigade have enjoyed. They’re no longer a countercultural movement, but a schoolmarmish mainstream. Beyond the major activist centres, their events have devolved into weird larps for insecure conformists and confused people.