Christmas Markets

I'm travel editor of the UK's biggest and best lesbian magazine Diva, which means when I'm not hunting down Deutschland's hot spots, I'm exploring the great and the glamorous gay scenes around the world.


Being a self-confessed ‘recessionista’, this year Christmas shopping is all about being chic and cheap and finding some beautiful, unique gifts that don’t look like they’ve come straight from the Argos catalogue.

So, this month instead of traipsing New Bond Street or the boutiques of Portobello Road, I’ve jumped on the first Lufthansa flight I could find and touched down, (having been thoroughly pampered with the blue-grey elegance of Business Class), in Frankfurt.

I’ve given myself just five days to hit Germany’s top three Christmas markets and buy my very demanding family and friends some extra special presents.

I’ve come for the beautiful wooden crafts, the candles, the lambskin blankets and of course, the festive thrill of a nice glass of mulled wine and baked apple while I browse.

Despite the amazing retail opportunities, Deutschland’s famous Christmas markets resist the tacky taint of commercialism because they have a history and tradition far holier than Oxford street’s.

The centuries-old tradition reaches back to a time when regular seasonal markets took place throughout the year. Christmas Markets were a welcome distraction during icy winter months. They would have been mainly held around the city’s main church to attract a holy crowd. The markets were so popular that apparently, in 1616 a priest in Nürnberg complained that no one attended the Christmas Eve service.

I imagine Christmas Markets got way more popular once religious reformer Martin Luther instituted new customs for Christmas. Before Luther, the exchanging of presents took place on the saint days of St. Nicholas, December 6, or of St. Martin, on November 11. But Luther suggested that children receive presents from “the Christ child,” hence the name “Christkindlsmarkt”, which many of Germany’s Christmas markets are known as today.

Ok, history out the way. Back to shopping.

I started off in Frankfurt because, I love this city. Particularly in December when fairly lights and sparkling Christmas trees make everywhere just seem a little more magical.

The Frankfurt Christmas Market has been going for over 600 years, making it one of the oldest and most popular. In fact, it’s so good there’s even a Frankfurt Christmas Market in Birmingham.

No offense, but I know where I’d rather be any day (even if there is a Harvey Nichols in Birmingham!)

So, I bought some gorgeous wooden toys for my nephew and some snug slippers for my dad before heading to my favourite gay bar in the city Luckys Manhattan
(http://www.luckys-manhattan.com/) where I befriended a lovely lesbian couple and we showed off our purchases.

Cologne was my next shopping stop. There are seven Christmas markets in total here, but I head straight to the one at Cologne Cathedral where I bag some more hand-crafted bargains and fill up on mulled wine.

The Gay Games are being held in Cologne next year, so its good to get to know the city now.

Feeling all warm and fuzzy after a couple of glasses of hot red I headed to my favourite gay bar in the city Max Bar http://lithowerk.de/maxbar/index.html it’s packed with gay boys but is totally lez-friendly.

The final must-see city on my Christmas markets marathon is Munich which has it’s very own gay or ‘pink’ Christmas Market. Held at Stephansplatz this is the place to pick up quirky gifts for your queer mates. And of course, the town-centre’s more traditional Christmas Markets mean you’ll find something for mum too!

Happy Christmas gays and gals, and happy shopping!


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20 Years Of Reunification

Darren Cooper, travel editor for Beige Magazine reflects on the 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down and why it still has relevance for the worldwide LGBT community today.

It's hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I can still vividly remember watching events unfold on TV in 1989 and the sense of a new age dawning. At 17 it was hard not to be caught up in the swing of things. Young and idealistic at the time it seemed that at the dawn of this, a new decade, change like at no other time in history was afoot and of course it was.

Back at home things seemed a little less optimistic, the Poll Tax was introduced in Scotland, Iran had broken off diplomatic ties with the UK over Salmon Rushdie’s Satanic Verses and, perhaps most worryingly of all, Kylie and Jason topped the charts with ‘Especially for You’. So the fall of the Berlin Wall, reunification of Germany and the imminent end of the Cold War was definitely something worth celebrating.

In fact it wasn’t just in Germany in 1989 that people were rejecting the old and standing up to tyranny and oppression. Poland’s first free elections ushered in the Solidarity Party and Hungary dismantled the first section of the iron curtain to fall along a 150 mile stretch of their border with Austria. The impetus for the Velvet Revolution, also in 1989 in the Czech Republic came in part at least from East German’s catching the train to Prague and then on to West Germany. The fall of the wall in November may have made this detour redundant, but the images of Czech citizens facing up to heavily armoured riot police are still as relevant today as they ever were.

In still more troubling protests, innocent and peaceful demonstrators were killed in both Tiananmen Square and Tbilisi's central square in Georgia, simply for demanding the human rights that we now take for granted. This kind of struggle is surely not lost on the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender communities. For most of us at least those images of someone offering a line of riot police a flower, or a single student standing with arms outstretched in the way of a tank is something that we as a community can and should especially identify with.

The fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t something that just happened on its own, and of course while this was part of a much larger transformation that was happening all over Eastern Europe, Berlin seemed to solidify the feeling that was taking place all over the world. This was the start of something big, the aftershocks of which are still being felt all over the world today, people matter.

There’s something further about the events of 9 November 1989 that should also resonate with the LGBT community today too. The first people to arrive at the wall on that day 20 years ago were few, but what started as a trickle soon developed into a deluge. Normal, every-day people started to turn up in their hundreds, then thousands to protest against injustice and division and changed history, sound familiar?

I think that it’s no coincidence that gay rights group Stonewall was also founded in 1989, an organisation that sought to take down the walls of intolerance and bigotry brick by brick starting with the notorious section 28. It’s no secret that Margaret Thatcher was in favour of keeping the Berlin Wall, as well as denying equality for everyone. Thankfully though what happened in Berlin gave hope and showed that a few ordinary people, a trickle can turn into a deluge that changes the world despite what politicians and regimes think.

As I watched the celebrations that took place in Berlin this November I couldn’t help but look back at the optimism I felt 20 years ago and reflect on how both I and the world have changed over the last 2 decades. I’ve now been to Germany, many times and have found it to be one of the least divided places in the world to travel as a gay tourist. There’s not only a great scene to be enjoyed all over the country, which is one of the most progressive and avant-garde in the world but also great culture, art, history, nightlife and people too.

Germany has taught us all something very important; walls are for houses, not for people. The unification of Germany wasn’t just about connecting people geographically; it was also about connecting people socially and integration too, something that everyone ultimately benefits from.

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Walls Come Tumbling Down

I'm travel editor of the UK's biggest and best lesbian magazine Diva, which means when I'm not hunting down Deutschland's hot spots, I'm exploring the great and the glamorous gay scenes around the world.

I know I can come across as a little flighty and shallow with all this talk of spas and gay bars, but every now and then something a bit more meaningful captivates my attention and puts all these glam jaunts around Germany into perspective.

I’m in Berlin this week, and sure, I’ve been to Checkpoint Charlie and posed in front of the graffiti-clad remnants of the Wall before, but for some reason this visit I’ve really stopped to think what this behemoth of a barrier meant for my favourite city.

I’m so used to hopping on a bus and going from the upmarket West to the über cool East, I just can’t imagine what life was like at a time when a barricaded border severed the two sides of the city, creating a political and ideological wall as much as a literal one.

I can’t help feeling that it’s this richly complicated history that makes Berlin such a complex, edgy and fascinating place.

2009 marks the 20th anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. These events triggered drastic changes around the world, marking the end of the Cold War and of the division of Europe.

On a smaller scale, the fall of the Wall meant the city had a lot of catching up to do, and fast. This has contributed to the sense of constant kinesis I always feel from Berlin. It’s making and remaking itself as new on such a regular basis that it is without a doubt Europe’s most exciting city.

Berlin’s young, fashionable gay scene is equally fresh. Parties and ‘places to be’ are driven by trends and are as mutable as Kylie Minogue. Nothing hangs around long enough to seem tired or outdated, meaning every time I visit Berlin there’s something new to experience on the scene.

I’m in town for the Festival of Freedom (7 to 9 November) which is celebrated on both sides of the Brandenburg Gate. The highlight of this event is the multimedia staging of the symbolic fall of the Wall using a 'domino effect'. Amazing, and so powerful.

I also made time this trip to visit the Berlin Gay Museum (www.schwulesmuseum.de) which holds a fascinating collection documenting Germany’s often-troubled GLBT life, as well as Berlin’s history as Europe’s post-war queer capital, which reached its heyday in the 1920s. I learnt that the reawakening of Berlin’s gay subculture happened slowly throughout the 1950s, culminating in 1968 with the abolition of Paragraph 175 which had outlawed homosexuality.

What I really respect about Berlin is that it doesn’t shy away from its past. There’s the beautiful Holocaust Memorial of course, but also just across the street, at the entrance to Tiergarten Park, you’ll see a slightly off-kilter cube set by the side of the path. Read the sign, which proclaims that this newest of memorials (inaugurated in 2008) honours the GLBT victims of the Nazis and stands as “a lasting symbol of opposition to enmity, intolerance, and the exclusion of gay men and lesbians”.


As this year, marking the 20th anniversary of the reunification of Germany, draws to a close, there’s no better time to visit Berlin and discover its fascinating pre and post-war history. Learning more about Nazi rule, the Berlin Wall and how a vibrant gay and lesbian community didn’t just survive, but went on to thrive, put today’s scene in context for me.

It meant that later that evening while I was sipping a cocktail in Rosa’s bar I felt not just part of a trendy, emerging gay Berlin but also connected to the people and places that defined the city’s colourful queer past. And somehow it made that Mojito taste so much the sweeter.


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