This essay was commissioned by director Tilman Hecker for the program book of Mein Süßes Leib, a Berlin version of Sarah Schulman’s The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination conceived as a collage of texts, file clips, newspaper reports and interviews from the beginning of the as yet untold Aids crisis in the 1980s until today. Illustrating the different effects of Aids in the then divided and later reunited city of Berlin, it also highlights the development of queer culture as one of the consequences of the crisis, asking who has actually benefitted from the struggles of Aids activists and actors of gay life in the 1980s.

How does a mind gentrify? Sarah Schulman describes it as a process by which comfort replaces imagination. It is “stupid,” she writes, “rooted in recieved wisdom, with aesthetics blindly selected from the presorted offerings of marketing…the gentrification mentality is rooted in the belief that obedience to consumer identity over recognition of lived experience is actually normal, neutral, and value free.” Schulman, in Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, uses her home neighborhood, the East Village in New York, as a metonym for this process. The people who died there in the AIDS epidemic, she writes, were replaced by gentrifiers who helped transform the neighborhood from a place where art and ideas were produced to a place where a limited and exclusive vision of urban life are consumed. Simultaneously, she argues, gay movements lost their nerve and imagination, shifting their focus from revolutionary social change to assimilation and civil rights.

Berlin is, thankfully, not New York City. It may be experiencing a frenetic wave of real estate speculation as neighborhoods once divided by an armed border, and land that was not available to global speculators because it was state-owned under Communism, have been snapped up by speculative landlords. I take hope from the movements fighting back, and from the fact that our strange beautiful wounded city is still a net economic drain on its host country. We remain a proud parasite. May it be ever so, and may the speculators lose their lunches.

Nevertheless, I want to suggest that Berlin has experienced two mental gentrifications related to AIDS: the first being the cathection of gay men to the state in the 1980s, and the second, occurring now, being the replacement of liberation politics with a politics of safety and comfort. 

First, gay men and the state. In the anglophone world, AIDS movements forged a new politics. Conflicts, disagreements, and tensions between gay and lesbian and trans separatists were subjected to the blistering heat of crisis.  They did not disappear, but new alliances were made. The term ‘queer’ was reclaimed, on the streets, from a slur. Deborah Gould, in her classic study of emotions and the queer AIDS organization ACT UP, calls this the “establishment, consolidation, stabilization, and reproduction” of a new “prevailing or hegemonic political horizon.” In this process of congealment, gay men and lesbians became more allied with one another as both groups confronted the crushing inaction of a state apparatus that, as U. S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop quoted President Ronald Reagan as saying, thought people suffering from and dying with AIDS-related illness were “getting what they deserve.” 

In Germany, as in other parts of northern Europe, this was not so. The state swung into action––not as quickly as it should have, and in its own interests, not in the interests of the most marginalized. One need only read ronald m. schernikau’s “fickt weiter,” a trenchant critique of the alliance between mainstream gay AIDS movements and anti-sex attitudes, or his searing essay “das personal” about an AIDS clinic at a hospital in Munich, to see the inadequacies of the state action that was taken. Nonetheless, state-funded and community-organized AIDS-Hilfen opened. This was the result of activist pressure and organizing, but unlike in the anglophone world that pressure and organizing led, comparatively quickly if not nearly quickly enough, to state action. Instead of learning that the state would never care for them, a generation of gay men learned that they were a minority group that could claim recognition like other minority groups. This occurred against the backdrop of a gay politics that, as historians like Sébastien Tremblay and W. Jake Newsome have argued, was shaped by the process of claiming a place in the post-1968 memory culture. Gay men stabilized as a minority category and successfully claimed recognition as such. 

It is good that gay organizing was able to win life-saving care faster. Everything I am about to argue must be conditioned by that fact: it would be grotesque to propose that suffering and death was ‘worth it’ to create queer politics. Just as it is true that it is good that care was won, it is also true that the lesson that the state was there for us brought some gay men in Germany into a homonationalist alignment. On the one hand, the gentrification of the mind Schulman describes in which liberation politics’ freedom dreams disappeared happened less here than in the anglophone world. On the other hand, anti-immigrant and misogynist sentiment is more prevalent in gay communities in Germany than in the anglophone world. Some prominent voices claiming to be the heirs to liberation politics denounce immigrants, queer theory, and trans people in the name of liberation. I understand the politics of AIDS and the state as one fulcrum for the creation of these homonationalist liberation politics. 

The second mental gentrification I described earlier is occurring now. Recently, what Schulman describes as the “stupefying cultural value that makes being uncomfortable something to be avoided at all costs” has also entered into the radical queer political imagination, with discomfort standing in for ‘safety’ standing in for ‘violence’ and ‘harm.’ Schulman’s book Conflict is Not Abuse, which I understand as a companion volume to Gentrification of the Mind, argues that radical queer politics unable to imagine liberation instead focus on comfort. Distinguishing “the safety from psychological ‘power over’ and actual harm” from “the safety from being made uncomfortable by…information that challenges one’s self-perception” points to how reactionary the politics of comfort often are. Think, for example, about the history of white comfort as a justification for police violence against and murder of Black and brown people. Comfort is not the same as liberation. Bad and gentrified comfort politics have infected too much of Berlin’s queer life. In the name of ‘comfort,’ trans women are excluded from or treated suspiciously in “FLINTA” spaces, as though they were men. In the name of the German majority’s self-righteous comfort in its remembrance culture, and with a growing fascist political movement, anarchists call the police to arrest and assault Jews protesting Israeli politics, and migrants and refugees are presumed to be the source of ‘imported’ antisemitism in a racist displacement of German guilt. Kink at Pride parades is denounced by curtain-twitching puritan ‘queers’ oblivious to their collaboration with far-right narratives. The purification of queer spaces in the name of comfort is racist, transphobic, narcissistic, and gentrifying. 

This critique should not be confused for an attack on inclusivity politics, for the racist and stupid attacks on “woke” politics that fill the pages of Germany’s racist and stupid ‘leading newspapers.’ The problem is not the insistence on justice for racialized, trans, and other minoritized subjects but the inability of a politics whose primary antagonist is discomfort to deliver that justice, and that politics’ sneaky ability to cloak attacks on racialized and trans subjects in the veil of social justice.

The task for queer artists and activists now is to imagine liberation for all. This task is not particularly easy in a world characterized by ecological, political, and social crisis. It was also not easy for the artists and writers whose words populate this evening’s performance. They were staring down certain death and managed to dream a future in their resistance and rage. What’s our excuse?