A column of international perspectives on queer Berlin

Madi Awadalla looks at Berlin’s queer party scene, examining how a culture built on endless nights can produce both connection and distance

The DJ clears the dancefloor with a killer set. Another choreography begins. The energy hasn’t dropped. Blood is pumping with intoxicants, protein supplements, HIV cocktails. Phones come out. Messages are sent. Alongside it: the desire to connect, and the equally strong fear of going home alone. A door opening for more people to arrive. Supplies at home. Techno playing. This is what “a chill” usually means. On dating apps and in group chats, it’s shorthand for getting together to take something and, if the stars align, have sex. It overlaps with the afterparty, but increasingly no longer depends on the club at all.

Berlin is not just the backdrop to this. It is a machine of extremes, built around a pleasure industrial complex. Here the question is never why you are still going, but how long you can last. Staying up for two nights in a row counts as a minor virtue. Substances are not only recreational. They allow bodies to keep pace, to stretch time beyond the usual limits. Consumption operates as a way of syncing with the place, which rewards excess with belonging and punishes refusal with a sense of being out of tune. What would register elsewhere as alarming is often seen as impeccable vibes. Long sessions, blurred boundaries, a collapsed distinction between friend, lover, stranger, creative collaborator, host. The afterparty is not an event but an infrastructure. A recurring promise that there is always somewhere else to go, someone else to join, something else still to feel.

Chills offer space to experiment, to unlearn, to undo inherited scripts of intimacy and morality. But they privilege the thrill of arrival over the friction of staying. Friendships disappear during the weekdays. The party boyfriend ghosts the day after. Sober sex starts to sound like a distant memory. The case against party drugs has no shortage of sponsors, from media to local politicians. I’m interested in the quieter effects, the ones that slip past alarm and concern. This is a refusal of both scripts: pleasure as resistance, hedonism as vacuous self-destruction. Chemical intimacy can draw people apart while producing the façade of closeness. Nonchalance becomes a posture, and non-commitment, even numbness, starts to feel elegant. Connection is scheduled. Desire is conditional. Care, when it exists, is intermittent. The result is uneven. Not everyone pays the same price. Some people burn out trying to keep up, while others, backed by stable incomes and decent contracts, can afford the grind, the baggies, and remain buffered from the consequences. Some find chills generous. Others find them empty. Both can be true. Often at the same time. Depending on what body you have.