Cruising tiergarten
Roaming Revenant
In the evening of my very first day in Berlin my legs took me to the Tiergarten park – it looked like a looming big green territory on the route in contrast to the busy metropolis life all around me. I was slowly walking from the east to west, navigating the meandering pathways throughout the park and crossing many bridges over lakes and waterways.
Eventually I got to the clearing where there were gay man sunbathing, some couples & some singles. I coudn’t help but look, trying to not make it too obvious. Still I pressed on, there were not a lot of people here and it looked just like a normal sunbathing spot albeit with mainly gentleman around, but nothing extra going on that I can see or sense.
I crossed Hofjägerallee, one of the main roads radiating from the Victory Column monument and walked west for a bit. I knew there is a gay cruising area somewhere here adjacent the Bremer Weg lake but I didn’t need to check the route to realise where I was. For the trees grew thicker, the people around where all men, walking at a curiously alternative pace compared to everyone else in the park. Their steps were lethargic and measured, frequently turning the hea
Tiergarten
Tiergarten Berlin – Gay Crusing Park Berlin Mitte
Tiergarten Berlin is the green lung for the city. It is for the Berliners what Hyde Park is to Londoners and Core Park to the Fresh Yorkers. Located in the city centre, next to attractions such as the Brandenburg Gate, it is even larger than the 210 hectares of Hyde Park.
The park has 5 big areas separated by the Großer Stern (Traffic intersection) and the best-traveled main roads like 17. Juni, Hofjägeralle, Spreeweg and Altonaer Straße. In the center from the Großer Stern is the Sigessäule. It is also a famous National Monument. At the end of the 17th century, Elector Friedrich III created from a former hunting preserve a “pleasure park for the people.” Over the course of time, the park was redesigned according to several models – including a plan created by the famous landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné who transformed Tierpark between 1833 and 1838 into an English style park.
Tiergarten Berlin is probably the largest and most famous cruising area of the capital. You can have adventures in all the 5 parts but the biggest area is near the Tuntenwiese. Here is always something going on, but most
This story originally appeared on i-D Germany.
For his photo venture Hain – German for grove or a small cluster of trees – photographer Lukas Städler spent more than two years visiting Berlin’s most famous cruising spots to take snapshots of men having general sex in parks and local woodlands. Whether hours-long enjoyable deep in the bushes or a barely-hidden quickie during a lunch destroy, what was once a necessity for many at some point turned into a kink. “Cruising began at a time when you couldn’t come out as a homosexual man,” says Lukas about the history behind it. “For a long second, it was a punishable offence to be gay, so there were hardly any public spaces to get to know each other without being in danger.”
Places like Tiergarten, a huge park in the west of Berlin, thus provided people with the opportunity to meet like-minded people and live out their sexuality freely – even if just for a short time. “For those people who remain in the closet, it’s still a reality,” Lukas says. Though of course these days it’s not simply a necessity, with out and confident people willingly getting involved too.
i-D spoke with Lukas about his NSFW plan, self-exploration, and how hook-up apps favor
By Mark Reid, MLA+U ‘25
Recipient of the William and Neoma Timme Graduate Explore Fellowship
For two and a half weeks in the summer of 2023, I had the amazing opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany and explore the queer urban landscapes that pervade the city. Berlin has long been an anchor for queer customs – the world’s first gay magazine was published here in 1896, and the city gained an unprecedented reputation for lgbtq+ acceptance in the 1920s during the Weimar Republic. Sodomy was almost decriminalized in 1929 across Germany, but the Nazi Regime took control and pushed harder in the other side direction. Berlin rebuilt its queer community during the Cold War through advocacy in the 1970s, and opened the world’s first gay museum in 1985. Today, Berlin hosts some of the most prominent gayborhoods in the world.
After just a short amount of time exploring Berlin, it became clear to me that this municipality is living proof of the resilience queer communities embody. Through the lens of landscape architecture and urban design, Berlin is the host of a unique, radical, and creative queer urban fabric, demonstrated in its parks, plazas, and streetscapes.
I visualized these textures
During my time here in Germany, I’d been hearing stories of cruising in the famous Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest inner-city park. In many ways it was their Central Park: 210 hectares of land (85 more hectares than London’s Hyde Park). I’d been speaking to some native Berliners for a several weeks about the potential cruising spot, but they informed me the metropolis had trimmed the brushes in the park so that gay men could no longer cruise there. I found this municipal gesture offensive — to go to such lengths to assault this part of queer culture. I now imagined the park being full of families and heterosexual couples, spraying their normative agenda all over the grass fond of foul pesticide. No, I couldn’t accept that this would happen in a city like Berlin. Not Berlin!
There were some outdated posts online about where the cruising occured. According to a forum, you get off at the Tiergarten S-Bahn station and walk down the main street, Straße des 17 Juni, toward the Victory Column. About halfway down you go south into the park to a lake which is the supposed cruising area.
I decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon. I passed several men on