Picture a sovereign gay city-state, built in the rubble of a depopulated post-WWII Berlin, benefitting from United Nations guarantees and the power to grant citizenship to refugees fleeing state homophobia all over the world. Its international radio broadcasts bypass authoritarian censorship to promise listeners a secure future in which they can be themselves, and its economic miracle has transformed it into an architectural paradise of shining skyscrapers and pulsating nightlife. All that would-be citizens of the Gay Republic have to do is reach one of its consulates, apply for citizenship, and prove the truth of their sexuality acceptably to one of the Republic’s suspicious border guards …
This latter criterion is just one of many touches in Proud Pink Sky’s portrayal of the Gay Republic that remind us of the state’s power to define the boundaries of identity. The state’s capacity to separate the normal from the perverse, and to punish the deviant, does not disappear just because the people in charge of it are queer (though the elite liberal men and women who prosper in the Republic would reject the thought that the borderless word could ever apply to them).
Similarly, Berlin has made Polari, the twentieth-century queer slang, its official language, and readers will learn several hundred of its words as the book goes on—though a prescriptive language board ensures Polari’s “ad hoc, free-form days are over,” like much else in the city that was once queer and underground. Still, Polari has been entirely banned in the “Great British Kingdom” of this 1998, which is even more repressive towards queerness than our world’s Britain, where Section 28 then still prevented schools from teaching about homosexuality or effectively supporting young people who might be queer. Teenage lovers William and Gareth resolve to escape it and reach the Gay Republic via its Brighton enclave. William knows he can be sent away to a distant residential school for conversion therapy if he is caught speaking Polari; a picture of First Minister Enoch Powell hangs in his disciplinarian headmaster’s office alongside the Queen’s.
The tensions in William and Gareth’s relationship drive their story forward in Berlin and are already evident before they cross the Brighton border. Gareth can hold his own in conventionally masculine pursuits like sport and woodworking, and takes refuge in performing heterosexual toughness as insurance against standing out and making himself a target. William, however, cannot, or will not, force himself to mimic the heterosexual mould. Through secret word of mouth, they make their way to Brighton—one of numerous such micro-territories that governments have ceded to the Gay Republic on the sites of real-life “gaybourhoods,” hinting that the border policing made literal and sovereign in Proud Pink Sky also manifests in the symbolic enclaves of a transnational queer nation that exists in our own world.
Readers already acquainted with these struggles, indeed, will probably have perceived that all is not as it seems in the Republic even before meeting William and Gareth, through the ominous exclusions in the novel’s purported extracts from a tourist guidebook, the self-proclaimed Honest Guide to Berlin. This narrative device punctuates the chapters to give glimpses into the Republic’s historically counter-intuitive past and its dynamics of class, gender, security, and space. For those already attuned to contentions in queer politics, these extracts place a succession of Chekhovian rifles on the story’s wall that start being fired as soon as William and Gareth begin to interact with the proud gay state.
Willingness to marry, we quickly learn, is viewed as the proof of gay status in the Republic—to the extent that same-sex marriage is not only legal but compulsory (and the Republic’s framing it as “same-sex” marriage, not “same-gender” or “equal,” is not innocent at all). In the 1950s (the years of the Cold War “lavender scare” in our own world), the Republic was swept by a wave of paranoia that infiltrators from hostile powers might pretend to be gay and settle in Berlin to subvert its values. Ever since then, migrant couples applying to settle in Berlin must either marry at once or be eligible for temporary residency only. Permission to live in the desirable districts of gay Berlin proper, each geared to a consumerist gay subculture like glittery Twinkstadt or the femme lesbian playground of Flora Lake, is restricted to couples who will embody the state’s desired marital unit.
Law, culture, and geography thus all combine to limit the Republic’s ideal citizen to the narrowest possible version of the “good gay” imagined by those assimilationist, “homonormative” forms of LGBTQ+ politics that seek to melt into the model of the conventional patriarchal, heteronormative state. The polyamorous, the transgressively partnered, the bisexual (who could be prosecuted in the Gay Republic until 1969), and those whose own genders exceed the male/female binary are all socially and spatially marginalised at best, at worst deported or otherwise criminalised. For example, the very first extract from the Honest Guide makes clear that, officially, only men and women live in the Republic; given the homonormativity we see in the meantime, we are unlikely to be surprised fifty pages later when another extract refers to “voiding the same-sex marriage contract via gender subversion (see Trans and Genderqueer Individuals, pp. 81-83),” making clear that cisnormativity literally comes with the territory.
*
Contemporary Western states’ intrusiveness around the sex lives of queer refugees from the Global South is, in the policies that this Berlin’s border guards apply, mirrored by and mapped onto queer Western bodies. Now that William has in Brighton witnessed exuberant radical queerness—and experienced his first time wearing lipstick—he is all the more certain that (unlike Gareth) he cannot imagine confining “the thousand possibilities of a free life” within the kind of marriage his parents made. Forced to migrate as an “uncategorised” couple, the pair are settled in what the Honest Guide describes as “the quasi-official district known as ‘Q’,” which is “particularly prone to disorder and civil unrest”—a spatialization of identity which defines the book.
Q is—alongside the even more liminal district of Remould where, beneath one of the Republic’s magnificent modernist bridges, Berlin’s trans and genderqueer underclass make communal lives of self-help and resistance—transparently the real haven of Proud Pink Sky. A verse from a Polari poem, printed with heavy legal disclaimers in the Honest Guide, sings the story’s sympathies: “Now say I’m nix a lady / Can’t stand the fit of ‘man’ / For all the fun’s found in between / That strange old borderland.”
Readers see furthest into “that strange old borderland” through the eyes of Cissie, whose name hangs the largest imaginable lampshade on her naivety as an American mother and homemaker who has followed her straight, construction-worker husband Howard to Berlin. Howard has set aside his religious and political misgivings about the Gay Republic to take up well-paid work in Berlin’s construction boom, through a scheme somewhat similar to the guest-worker programme that brought more than four million workers from southern Europe, Turkey, and Yugoslavia to West Germany from the 1950s onwards. (On arrival at the builders’ barracks, Howard and his fellow migrant men are “given Xeroxed pamphlets with directions to the nearest English-language cinema, the American grocery store, and the American Working Person’s Club”—a glimpse of how the politics of multiculturalism in contemporary Germany are mapped on to the idea of heterosexuals as a minority in a gay city-state.)
Allocated family housing in Hetcarsey, an impoverished and multicultural periphery crammed with ethnic restaurants, churches, and mosques, Cissie starts exploring the wider city after her family are caught up in a police charge against radical protestors—and pulled out of the tear gas by a mysterious woman who gives Cissie the second queer kiss of her life. Searching the city for her rescuer, Cissie finds herself outside the gate of what she does not yet know as Remould, defending a trans woman from a mob attack by trans-exclusionary lesbian feminists. Their language of “real women protecting real women,” or demonising Cissie as a “deluded” traitor to her sex, is—as with other sources of antagonism in Proud Pink Sky—almost indistinguishable from the rhetoric of those anti-trans feminists in our own world who confront other cis women for choosing to support trans rights.
Defying the mob who threaten that she will be a “gender extremist” if she crosses through the gate, Cissie enters the city’s hidden world of gender transgression and encounters Sam, an Afro-Irish trans man and community leader in the fight against the police. (Of course, authorities have been presenting this fight as civil unrest and terrorism.) Initially, Cissie’s story seems to illustrate a subject position from which straight, cis allies can resist transphobia and heteronormativity, but her story takes a queerer turn as she returns to help Sam rebuild the community’s defences and starts getting comfortable in her borrowed hard hat and men’s clothes.
As nationalist gay vigilantes ramp up to a decisive assault on the “subversives” of Remould, the story zooms in on “the group of men and women and neithers and everythings” standing together against them, with a climactic acknowledgement of identity for William along the way. Barrett’s tight third-person narrative voice uses each character’s best understanding of their pronouns at any given time, which this review follows; that same voice can change a character’s pronouns in a moment, inhabiting their self-realisation in real time.
*
Barrett themself, “a lipstick-wearing, beard-toting nonbinary giant some 198 cm tall” (as they write in their acknowledgements), currently lives in Berlin and has invented a setting where they themself would never be admitted to the halls of power. They invite us to see freedom not as coming from a security state which regulates gay identities as tightly as straight ones, but from the “sense of belonging” and the open ending which William and Cissie both achieve in Remould. Every move in Barrett’s social and political worldbuilding is engineered to draw pointed illustrations of homonormativity, complicity with state power, and the roots of these flaws in internalised homophobia.
Nowhere is this sharper than in the narrative strand featuring the Republic’s radio announcer Kenneth Luvvie, the originator of a strict media code which punishes any deviance from the gay and lesbian norm. His private sex life may be hypocritical, but his public statements give assimilationism its most fascistic undertone. When Sam decries the authorities’ “obsession with dividing everyone into homie and palonie” (Polari for “man” and “woman”), and “how they’ll hurt others in the name of family, security, tradition,” the adjacency of this ideology to fascism, played off against how the Republic’s ruling class have assimilated into it after winning the city from the Nazis, may give the best rationale in the book for why this story is set in Berlin.
Indeed, Luvvie’s gay fascism even manages to incorporate apparently the straightest ideological trope of all, demographic panic. All nations must instil their cultural identity into new generations over time to project their existence into the future, and the Republic is no exception. But the only state-sanctioned partnerships it recognises, between two cis men or two cis women, cannot produce children themselves. Instead, it is hinted, separate gay and lesbian couples co-operate through artificial insemination to have children (on a scale demanding thousands of schools) and reproduce the nation over time. According to Luvvie, this is a more virtuous and perfect nuclear family than anything in the heterosexual world, and only marriage can save the Republic from destruction (ideas which are no less fundamentalist than Christianised marriage for being secular). By the time he is calling upon “gay patriots” to gather on Pride night and cleanse Remould, the steps through which fascism can enlist cis homosexuals conforming to conventional gender codes are chillingly plausible in the story’s own terms.
Moves like these make reckoning with how Proud Pink Sky transforms Berlin’s past—and present—unavoidable. Overtly, its worldbuilding overtly positions emancipated Weimar Berlin as the birthplace of modern gay and lesbian identity, and the tragedy of its suppression under the Third Reich as the hook for the Republic’s origin. Our postwar world was one in which sex between men remained illegal in most countries after 1945, with the powers that agreed to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights making no mention of sexual difference, and prisoners liberated from concentration camps who had been convicted under Paragraph 175 re-imprisoned because homosexuality was still a crime.
Overcoming this vast apparent obstacle, the Republic’s origin story imagines that 1933 Berlin witnessed a mass gay rising against the Nazis, triggered by an incident at the famous Eldorado club reminiscent of Stonewall, and larger than any resistance that even the much stronger German socialist and communist parties could stage against the Nazis in our world. Rather than sending its stormtroopers to break this rebellion, the Nazis apparently abandoned Berlin and (seemingly having already brought the Wehrmacht entirely under their control, or obtaining their artillery elsewhere) bombarded the rebel city for years, leaving it already a flattened ruin before the Second World War.
Too often, the plausibility of the book’s premise rests on information in a timeline at the end of the book, which has curiously been held back until after the story’s end; might it have been better placed at the beginning instead? This World War clearly had major divergences from ours—though to learn how major, especially for Britain, we must wait until that timeline. For example, throwaway reference to William’s headmaster’s military service in the “Cologne Republic” suggests the Allies broke Germany into numerous statelets rather than two halves. Yet, with homophobia still as deeply embedded in military culture as the headmaster describes, we might still wonder why the Allies would have given any of this territory to the gay brigades. Was Berlin left so devastated and abject that no conventional state desired it, leaving it to the stigmatised queers?
Stigma is, indeed, the stuff of the Republic’s origin myth. According to one of Luvvie’s broadcasts—the kind of propaganda William and countless other queer outcasts have heard on secret radio sets—the Gay Republic threatened the Cold War binary more deeply than either capitalism or communism because “in the end they”—that is, the Cold Warriors—“all go home to their wives.” Instead, the voice of the Republic purrs, “the true barney in our world is between the pure and the perverse.”
Yet, while claiming to be a safe haven for the perverse of the world, Berlin, as we have seen, enforces its own purity. Its sovereign power as a state puts the force of laws, borders, and police behind its demand to know the truths of each person’s sexuality and gender and to determine what those truths can be. The Queer International Relations theorist Cynthia Weber writes of how the modern state “will to knowledge” over sex, gender, and bodies crystallises into the figure of the “normal homosexual,” who can be assimilated into the liberal state’s authority, and the “perverse homosexual,” who never can. No state in our world has placed the “normal homosexual” at the centre of its sovereign authority like the Gay Republic, but its divisions still reveal how statecraft separates the normal and perverse.
*
Proud Pink Sky advances its critique of assimilationist gay politics through numerous details, like “Lilly Law”—Polari speakers’ mocking name for the police force—becoming the official name of the institution that gives upstanding citizens like the anti-trans Radfems a free hand to threaten the “freaks” of Remould (“Lilly Law won’t come down ’ere,” gloats their ringleader as they surround Cissie). “Help lilly, keep your ogles and aunt nells open,” says the recorded message in Polari which disciplines incoming airline passengers to be on permanent alert—and perhaps we in our world are not so many steps further from this, with the rainbow police cars and uniformed Pride marchers about which liberal and radical queer politics take such different views.
In illustrating liberal gay politics’ complicity with patriarchal nationalism and outright fascism, Proud Pink Sky sometimes recalls another project interfacing with the legacy of queer Berlin, Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller’s podcast and book Bad Gays. (It is perhaps no coincidence that one of their emblematic “bad gays,” the architect and Nazi sympathiser Philip Johnson, is projected back into the architectural heritage of this Berlin.) Lemmey and Miller see three key angles of the failure of mainstream white homosexual politics to enact liberation: its fear of gender non-conformity, dramatised throughout Barrett’s story; its obsession with “the bourgeois politics of ‘sexuality’ itself,” manifested in Luvvie’s demonization of polyamory and non-marital sex; and its denial of racialised people’s humanity while appropriating their bodies as objects of desire.
It is about this third angle that Proud Pink Sky is quieter, and where more aspects of Berlin’s past and present silently haunt the book. Few cities in the world represent as thickly layered a palimpsest of historical memory as Berlin, and certain layers still peer through the story’s imagination even where they are unaddressed. This Berlin’s queer activists of colour, resisting racial profiling and security politics within the queer movement, spotlight the coloniality and white supremacy of mainstream queer culture more than any conflict set up in Proud Pink Sky. Likewise, the figure of Sam hints that unapologetic Blackness is outside the Republic’s norm, but we do not learn if that norm is explicitly racialised as white or colour-agnostic, and even in Q and Remould there is no visible space for queers of faith whose multiple identities might be most foreclosed by the Republic’s relentless stigmatisation of churches and mosques.
Admittedly this Berlin’s own queer past is more fable than history, to an extent that seems bizarre but must surely be intended. Oscar Wilde is the secular saint of its civic religion [1], and a Harvey Milk Platz commemorates the movement’s San Francisco martyr; but Magnus Hirschfeld has left no mark behind. And like any speculative alternate history set after the 1930s, and more so than those which take place further from the epicentre of Nazi rule, Proud Pink Sky also, tacitly, has to confront the implications of the Holocaust for its world. The ramifications of this question bring queer Jewish life in Germany and occupied Europe into the spotlight. Where, in this Berlin, are the queer Jewish survivors of Nazi rule—the counterparts of Margot Heuman, the first known lesbian Jewish survivor to bear witness, via the painstaking interviews of historian Anna Hajková? Should we suppose they took ships overseas (as many did) rather than stay in Berlin’s homosexual homeland, or should we suppose none of them survived at all? Why are the queer survivors, especially the queer Jewish survivors, of Nazi rule not the elders of this Berlin, keeping memory’s score on the fringes of society—even if (as is all too possible) the capitalist homonormative utopians who hold the city’s reins do not wish to remember them? [2] Cissie’s elderly neighbour Mrs Fortier, who leads her to the bars of Flora, is the story’s closest link with any generation who would have lived through the war, but where and how she lived through it we do not learn.
In other words, this novel’s playful extrapolations of Western gay consumerist stereotypes into the urban geography of its fictional Berlin sometimes appropriates, and sometimes sidesteps, the politics of the material Berlin which its author inhabits. The fact that Proud Pink Sky’s setting invites these questions is testament to its conceptual ambition; yet its deconstructed utopia might be more satisfying as an allegory for the dynamics of oppression in which the gaybourhoods of Berlin and many other cities are implicated than as a dialogue with Berlin’s own memory.
Endnote
[1] Wilde in this world supposedly joined the sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the social reformer Jane Addams, whose intimate relationships were with women, to write in 1888 the first manifesto for a homosexual homeland, which made Polari an international queer language and drew queer migrants to Berlin on a scale dramatically greater than in real life. [return]
[2] Additionally, the Gay Republic’s self-advertised status as the only safe gay enclave in surroundings of hatred could even seem to establish in Berlin’s queer politics parallels with contentions over “pinkwashing,” Israel, and Palestine (Israeli governments’ discourses of Israel as the only safe haven for LGBTQ+ people in the Middle East clashes with the struggles of queer Palestinians under occupation). Ideologically, the Republic is a state under siege, and the dream of a homeland for a stigmatised nation that must guard its borders tightly has been part of its logic since 1888, eight years before Theodor Herzl in our world published his manifesto for a future Jewish nation-state.
No parallel, however, is exact: the threats this state perceives as existential do not come from its immediate neighbours (other microstates formed from what was once Germany, too insignificant to even be named), but from the forces of anti-queer religious fundamentalist reaction, which do play their own murderous part in the story’s end. [return]