The first issue of Siegessäule was published in 1984. A lot has changed over the last 30 years, of course, both in the city and the company, but isn’t it a bit charming to see such familiarity?

I certainly remember the first time I encountered a copy. When I still lived in Michigan, a coworker had been to Berlin on business. Knowing that I was also planning to visit, he brought me back an issue as a souvenir. I had no fucking clue how to pronounce the name, much less comprehend the text, but I was sucked in by the visual content, and my puritanically bred psyche was delightfully shocked by the ads for fisting and piss parties. Fast forward to 2012: my “visit” was five years and counting, and Siegessäule invited me onto the team as editor for their newly integrated English content. Since then, more and more expats and tourists are grabbing a copy, but few of them know the publication’s rich history.

Despite the gloss, the magazine is a community endeavor rooted in left-wing politics. When it first launched, Paragraph 175 was still on the books, meaning male homosexual acts in certain cases were still a crime in West Germany. At the time, no other publications in the country gave ongoing coverage of the AIDS crisis. Siegessäule served to fill this void, offering useful information amidst the mainstream media’s reactionary attitudes. In 1985, there was a 40-page special edition on the epidemic, financed by the Berlin Senate. Politics aside, Siegessäule also helped shape the city’s cultural landscape, and not just within the printed pages: Contributors included a number of figures from the established community, including the nightclub SchwuZ and bookstore Prinz Eisenherz, all which are now gay Berlin institutions.

The 90s brought along numerous developments, including several shifts in publishing houses. The mag grew to over 100 pages and became available free of charge. In 1996, Manuela Kay took over as editor-in-chief, and lesbian content was dispersed throughout. “I’d always wanted to expand from just gay men to a wider community,” she explains. “Actually, I proposed a queer concept when I started, but since nobody back then really knew what it meant, we started calling it a gay and lesbian magazine. We also came up with a trans* section, but decided that just like a separate lesbian section, it doesn't make sense, that it all needs to be everywhere.” In 2005 after she stepped down, her successor Holger Wicht switched the tagline to “queer in Berlin”.

Now, with our 30th anniversary relaunch, it’s been expanded to “we are queer Berlin”, reflecting our more international spirit. Admittedly though, “Siegessäule” remains an intimidatingly German word. What does it even mean? “Victory Column”, the name of the monument overlooking Tiergarten, taken as a symbol of (gay) visibility in the city center. Perhaps more refined than one of the other titles originally considered, “Offene Beine” (“Open Legs”). Then again, some people claim the monument is awfully phallic, but I just don’t see it. I mean, if your peehole is shooting out angelic discharge like that, then you should probably visit the clinic.

Joey Hansom