Nightlife in Berlin, Warsaw and Krakow

Ever since David Bowie glamorized it in the '70s, and extending through the Love Parade years in the '90s, Berlin has had the reputation of a great nightlife city. So Joey and I were really looking forward to going out there.

We didn't count on it being Black Party weekend.

Folsom Europe, the event is called, thought it's a couple of weeks ahead of Folsom San Francisco. We discovered it by accident, while looking for the bars and clubs in Berlin's Schoenefeld neighborhood. First we saw a few random leathermen, which didn't surprise me because I know that community is big in Berlin. Then we started seeing groups of them. Then we rounded a corner and saw at least 800 men in leather milling around in the street drinking beer from mobile beer stands that had been brought in for the occasion.

Not just ordinary leather either, but the type of wild thing you see at Black Party or Folsom: skinny young blond boys with zippers in the rear of their leather hot pants being led around on dog leashes by their masters in chaps, armbands and police hats. That sort of thing. (I wondered whether ordinary Berliners would bat an eyelash at this scene, but there were no ordinary Berliners to be seen, it being a cold and somewhat rainy night on a quiet side street.)

And we had left all our Black Party gear in New York. Sigh.

We did find a couple of bars with people dressed like us, in Lacoste and designer jeans, and frankly, they were fine, but nothing you couldn't find in New York, or even Portland. And they were somewhat empty, I presume because the Folsom event, like Black Party, probably drew many people away who would normally go to an ordinary bar or club and not a leather-specific one.

Our one dancing experience was at Connection, right on the street corner where the 800 were milling around. Inside was relatively empty. It turned out to be a very small space, about the size of the old Hush/Champs in New York, split evenly four ways into two bars, a lounge and a dance floor. Looking into the DJ booth revealed that there are now two skinny shaved-headed lesbian DJs in the world, one of whom can spin many varieties of music into a joyful whole. This one had only two speeds: hard looped techno, and hard looped techno with a thin layer of trance on top.

But it didn't really matter, because it became obvious that the dance floor, indeed the entire ground floor, was merely a life support system for the largest and most elaborate back room I have ever seen, in the basement. It was divided into stalls, one with a bathtub, another with a toilet, others with stools, most with fully closable doors; and larger areas for wandering and where porn was shown. I can only imagine that this was what bathhouses looked like in the '70s, except that then they wore towels rather than street clothes, and those bathhouses were full.

A few days later, we were in Warsaw and two straight women friends offered to take us out to see the gay bars there. Unfortunately, we could only get two clear references to gay bars, one of which was closed that Thursday night, the other was billed as men-only. So they took us to a few places they said were mixed. "Mixed" seemed to mean that they were populated partly by skinny beautiful college-age boys with sweaters neatly tied across their shoulders, who covertly sneaked glances at each other on the dance floor while bumping and grinding with the women in their party.

The last stop of our trip was in Krakow, and there we had the weirdest and most depressing experience. Lonely Planet had listed a bar on a major street just north of the Old Town, but gave the wrong address for it. When we finally found it, it turned out to be in the back of a courtyard whose entrance had a big sign saying "Furniture Store." Inside the courtyard there was no sign of a furniture store, but deep in a dark corner was a tiny buzzer labeled with the bar's name, Ciemnia. Buzz it and you are let in.

Inside, the bar turned out to be a repeat of Connection, minus the dance floor. A small bar and a huge, subdivided back room. And at midnight on a Friday night there were maybe 20 people present. A few gorgeous ones, to be sure. The Poles, like the Portuguese, seem to be a people whose young men are all beautiful until about age 28, and then all lose their looks quickly after that. Half the crowd fell into the young-and-pretty category. But they weren't interested in us, and we weren't interested in the back room, so we asked the bartender to recommend a place to dance.

He sent us to what he said was a brand-new club holding its opening night. It turned out to be a recently decommissioned movie theater, missing the seats but still with its sloping, sticky concrete floor. It still could have turned out well except that at maybe 75 people, this crowd was even smaller proportionate to the space than the crowd at Ciemnia. And of those 75, maybe 10 were identifiably gay, including a few of the beautiful blonds from Ciemnia and the male equivalent of a fag hag -- I nicknamed him the "dyke tyke" -- escorting three or four lesbians around. The dyke tyke was quite cute, and seemed to find me so as well; Joey had a boy making eyes at him; but there was too much empty space in the room for anything to happen (and the music was way too random, and by this time I was feeling the first effects of what would turn out to be a nasty case of food poisoning), so we left.

I wasn't quite sure when Paris would start to feel like home, but after that I was looking to get back to it.

This weekend will be my first full weekend here since the assignment began, and if the lingering traces of the food poisoning are gone by then, I'll give you my first report on the nightlife in the City of Light in a few days