Oh, So Beautiful and Complicated!

Queer Berlin?

Samet Durgun lives in Berlin and Come Get Your Honey is set here. Berlin is not just another European city. It has a unique vibe, an ongoing insistence on progress, emancipation, change, freedom. But there is also an ever-present undercurrent that reminds us that rights, freedom and progress lead a fragile existence.

The complex Berlin of today owes a lot to what happened in the wake of World War I, where the rise of the democratic Weimar Republic transformed Germany and its capital in particular.

As 1918 drew to an end, a seemingly unstoppable desire to party flooded Berlin. During the war, there had been a Tanzverbot (dance ban) and when that ban was lifted on New Year’s Eve in 1918, Berlin went mad. A journalist from Berliner Tageblatt wrote this rather spot-on description of that New Year – and of that particular hectic vibe that soon would permeate everything in the German capital: ‘What does the Berliner celebrate? The right to celebrate – and celebrate precisely as he pleases. He’s celebrating what he might not have again: extended curfew hours; freedom from obligation; the drinking before the sinking.’ This marked the starting point of a decade in which Berlin became probably the most exciting, scariest, and, in certain ways, the most liberated city in Europe.

It was an age of liberty, experimentation and extreme chaos, an age of contrasts. Poverty soared in Berlin. Many, both children and adults, turned to sex work in despair. Crime loomed large and drugs were everywhere. The city also had a massive influx of intellectuals, artists and scientists who settled and permeated all walks of life in Berlin where they wrote some of the most influential books of the century, did ground-breaking research, composed brilliant music and turned filmmaking into an art form of its own. Berlin was a mix of big parties, big thoughts, big possibilities and big problems.

In all this, queer culture was present – and visible. It was reflected strongly in the legendary Berlin nightlife but also in art, science and literature, basically in all walks of life.

It was also in Berlin that Dr Magnus Hirschfeld established his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in 1919 – an early sexology research institute situated in Tiergarten. The institute housed an extensive archive on sexuality and offered a whole number of educational services and medical consultations to rich and poor alike, ranging from marriage counselling to hormone treatments.

Hirschfeld was the first European to distinguish between gender and sexual identity, and wrote countless articles and books on gender fluidity and the diversity of sexual variants that he described as almost limitless.

These were early days and the language on gender topics and sexuality was still rather unsophisticated in Germany, but the work done at this institute, whilst anything but flawless, was indeed progressive and ahead of its time. The rise of National Socialism put a very brutal end to the institute, liberal thinking in general and the vibrant, liberated art and nightlife in Berlin (and the rest of Germany).

So here we are – one world war and two dictatorships later, in a Berlin that was almost smashed to smithereens by bombs, then cut in two, then reunited. After the wall came down, it was as if Berlin reclaimed some of its Weimar vibe. A techno scene grew out of the ruins and abandoned places in the old East. Suddenly, Berlin was dancing again and the city became an incubator of diverse lifestyles. In later years, the gentrification has been a source of great concern for all those who cherish the roughness of Berlin, but despite massive tourism, expensive flats and shopping malls popping up everywhere – Berlin bleibt Berlin. A city built on ruins – literally and metaphorically – again and again, Berlin is primarily a state of mind. Permissive and rough at the same time.

Long story short, for various historical reasons, there is something almost poetic and very appropriate about the fact that one of the extremely few dorms especially for LGBTQIA+ refugee and asylum-seekers in Europe is situated in Berlin. Magnus Hirschfeld would certainly have applauded this! It is some of the former inhabitants of that dorm and their friends that are the focus of this book by photographer Samet Durgun. Come Get Your Honey is a story about a group of very special individuals in a very special city that offers space if you are brave enough to take it. It is a story of a photographer who explores his own artistic identity through the people in front of his camera and vice versa. It is nothing less than a love story – but not a rosy one. Berlin does not judge you – but neither does it pick you up if you fall.

Embracing the Ungraspable

Durgun’s photographic gaze is interacting with a group of people who, statistically, remain the most invisible constituents in the international asylum system, a system that in many ways is still extremely hetero/cis-centric. This is a very, very problematic fact. Many might therefore (understandably) be tempted to make this a story with a bombastic social and political agenda. Luckily, Durgun’s work walks down a much more complicated path paved with fragments of stories, details of lives lived, glimpses of dilemmas, conflicts, joy. He is not on a mission to ‘enlighten’ us; instead, his images unfold something endlessly intricate and quite ungraspable, because he knows being human in the world cannot be explained. Come Get Your Honey is like a melody. It has an undercurrent of emotion and empathy stemming from the fact that Durgun embraces the complexity inherent in photography and he is able to do that because he is being empowered by the people he photographs. He addresses it himself when he asks, ‘what if photography is more listening than seeing?’ Durgun’s work progresses from straight-up documentary to art photography for that very reason – he acknowledges the absence of a one-stringed narrative. Art asks questions, takes us on journeys into the unknown. Art and life are a million stories told simultaneously.

Come Get Your Honey is the result of an organic and very human process – that of a deep, ever-evolving friendship. How this came about is described beautifully elsewhere in this book. Suffice it to say at the very core of Samet Durgun’s pictures is subjectivity and participation.

Several photographers have depicted queer life. Mostly with very mixed or disastrous results, reducing the subjects to objects exposed to an outsider gaze indicating ‘otherness’ and voyeurism. Two photographers who avoided these pitfalls and ended up producing important bodies of work in this field are Swedish photographer, Christer Strömholm and American photographer, Nan Goldin. In some ways they can be seen as forebears for Samet Durgun.

Christer Strömholm

Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm (1918–2002) went to Paris in the 1950s. Here, he got to know a community of trans women from Place Blanche in the Montmartre district. For the next ten years, he photographed many of these women – in the street, in bars, in hotel rooms. The carefully constructed photo essay Vännerna från Place Blanche (The Friends from Place Blanche), which was a result of this work, is a testament of friendship and love in the trans community and certainly also between the photographer and the photographed. At the same time, it documents an area in Paris legendary for being a melting pot for all kinds of lifestyles at a time when France in general was anything but ‘gay’ (in the broadest possible sense of the word). In fact, France in the late 50s was a very rigid society, governed by general Charles de Gaulle, who along with his wife Yvonne, campaigned fervently against all things ‘immoral’ – from miniskirts to pornography. Queerness was considered sinful and wrong by French mainstream society, which was dominated by conservatism and Catholicism. Being trans and visible was decidedly dangerous – which is still the case everywhere in the world. On a daily basis, Strömholm’s friends were harassed by the policemen patrolling the area and it was impossible for most of them to get daytime jobs – so most either worked as sex workers or cabaret performers.

One of the women, Nana, describes her relationship with the authorities like this: ‘The police were odious. Whether we were on the game or not, they always picked us up. They’d keep us in custody for ten hours sitting on a bench, sometimes in a cage …’ (Les Amies de Place Blanche, 2011, updated French edition)

Being harassed and on the very fringe of established society did not change the fact that the community in Place Blanche offered a strong sense of belonging to a family that accepted you, so queer individuals from all over Europe and North Africa flocked to this part of Paris. Without any assistance from the city or state – very much the contrary – they formed their own safe space with each other: ‘our group was closely knit, and if a guy assaulted us, all hell broke loose’ (Nana in Les Amies, 2011).

Vännerna från Place Blanche is not a tale of suffering but a tale of surviving and creating a life despite being rejected by biological family and society at large. The book is ‘… about the quest for self-identity, about the right to live, about the right to own and control one’s own body. It is also a book about friendship, an account of the life we lived in the place Blanche and place Pigalle neighborhood’ (Christer Strömholm in the introduction to Vännerna från Place Blanche, 1983).

Strömholm was invited into the world of these women, accepted, perhaps loved – and the feelings were reciprocated. Strömholm came from a complicated family background, and it seems that he spent most of his life looking for extended families around the world. He was quite simply a fellow human being with a camera when he arrived in Paris. In this case, the term fellow human being is crucial, for Strömholm did not identify as queer himself contrary to Durgun. Strömholm was strictly speaking an outsider, which makes some of the (nude) portraits seem a bit dubious. However, the series as a whole is permeated with a sense of mutual respect, a synergy between the photographer and the subjects. Nana described her feelings about Strömholm’s portraits of her like this in 2011: ‘I was happy. In his photographs I saw myself.’ Seen out of context, there is something quite exotic and therefore cliché-ridden about the poor but sexy setting of Vännerna från Place Blanche, but Strömholm’s friends actually did lead so-called unconventional lives (because that was their only option) – working at night, hanging out in cafés and bars, living in cheap hotels in a decadent and lively area.

All in all, the series has aged quite well as an early photographic celebration of both queer life and a colourful neighbourhood in Paris at a very specific time in French history. Because it was considered too controversial, Vännerna från Place Blanche was not published until 1983 and even then it caused a stir.

Nan Goldin

A couple of decades after Christer Strömholm met his friends in Paris, American photographer Nan Goldin met her queer tribe in Boston:

’I first saw them – Ivy and Naomi and Colette – crossing the bridge near Morgan Memorial thrift shop in downtown Boston. They were the most gorgeous creatures I’d ever seen. I was immediately infatuated. I followed them and shot some Super 8 film. That was in 1972. It was the beginning of an obsession that has lasted twenty years.

Soon after, I met them again through David, my closest friend, who had started to do drag. From my first night at The Other Side – the drag queen bar of Boston in the 70s – I came to life. I fell in love with one of the queens and within a few months moved in with Ivy and another friend. I was eighteen and felt like I was a queen too. Completely devoted to my friends, they became my whole world. Part of my worship of them involved photographing them. I wanted to pay homage, to show them how beautiful they were’ (Nan Goldin, The Other Side, 1993).

Nan Goldin’s words from her book The Other Side, speak volumes about her instinctive, urgent need to give both herself and her friends space and visibility. Goldin (b. 1953) grew up outside Boston in a dysfunctional middle-class family. Her older sister committed suicide when Goldin was just eleven, leaving her deeply traumatised. It was through photography that Goldin discovered a way to move forward in life and connect with people she instinctively felt attracted to. The Other Side was published for the first time in 1993 and re-published in an extended version in early 2020. It tells the story about members of a queer subculture that were left behind to fend for themselves in the early 70s while both the gay rights movement and the women’s liberation movement gained momentum. It depicts the horrors of the AIDS epidemic that killed so many of Goldin’s friends but it also celebrates the advent of queer theory and a growing queer visibility in mainstream culture in the 80s and 90s.

Where Strömholm and Durgun depict an international group of people in one place, The Other Side is the story of queer people Goldin met and befriended all over the world. After Boston she went to New York, then Europe and Asia. And its global approach is perhaps the one weakness of the series, particularly the Asian section where Goldin becomes an outsider. Though her photographic gaze is a queer one, she is also a Westerner taking pictures of Asian individuals who live in cultures that have very different gender systems and discourses. Still, The Other Side is a milestone in the history of queer photography, not least because of the early pictures which contain so much youthful vulnerability and determination on both sides of the camera.

Labour of love

Strömholm and Goldin. Two different photographers, two generations. Both depicting queer life from the inside and both doing long-term projects. Together they underline the importance of time, patience and participation when it comes to creating expansive, intimate, nuanced portraits of individuals in a community. We are reminded of the fact that excellent photographic narratives are about so much more than mere technique and composition. These projects are basically also stories about how it is possible to go out in the world and create a family of your own when the biological one for some reason or another cannot be there for you. In the process, Strömholm and Goldin have created important historical documents mapping the conditions in certain decades and certain cities. They become prisms of the time they were made in.

With Come Get Your Honey, another important chapter in queer photography is being created which contains all of the above – and then some. Samet Durgun is the next generation.

He strives to photograph all that we cannot see – as mentioned earlier, he is listening – and he makes us listen with him. This is about the rich inner lives of his subjects and the glimpses of everyday life that contain everything from the glamorous to the banal. The photographs give room both to the spectacular and to the ordinary, quiet stuff. Come Get Your Honey offers a nuanced insight into queer life, which is much needed and extremely refreshing.

Durgun is constantly exploring questions regarding the ethics of his projects. He is careful, open and seeking new perspectives, thereby expanding the visual language of queer representation. He is telling a well-balanced story, serving us a slice of Berlin life as it is. And unlike Strömholm and Goldin, he is getting this book out in the process and not years later – because that is possible. This is just the beginning! I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next.

About Marianne Ager

Marianne Ager is a curator whose work at Kunstmuseum Brandts in Odense, Denmark, includes Love, Lust and Freedom, an exhibition exploring queer experience through photography. Presented in 2024–25, the exhibition brought together artists from different generations, including Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Wolfgang Tillmans, Sven Marquardt and Birk Thomassen. In discussing the exhibition, Ager highlights photography’s role in self-expression and resistance, and the importance of museums as spaces for conversations about identity, visibility and difference.