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Agreed on Jojo. The book, btw, ‘Caging Skies’, was better than the movie although, by the end it had also outstayed its welcome, but at least the appallingly misjudged Kiwi Führer was never in evidence. I was lucky enough to work in Berlin in the early 80’s and caught the fag-end (it occurs to me that this is a Brit expression, but oh, what an apt one!) of the then still thriving rent scene at the Hauptbahnhof and in Fuggersrasse. I had some experiences then that I still look back on with great fondness - very much along the lines you have mentioned before about boys (and of course boys, these days, are any age up to 30 to someone of my advanced years) wanting to check certain things out and, delightedly, earn a bit of pocket money also. There were also bookshops that stocked English BL books and a variety of erotic magazines that were still totally legal. Slowly these bookshops dwindled in number until there was only one left. That shop became slowly more mainstream PVG and the boy-erotica went from being in the window (1981), to being in a corner rack in a side room (1985), to being in a box under the table to be accessed only if you asked and were willing to put up with the scorn of the new PVG, LGBT, H&P (Haughty and Proud) shop assistant (1987), to being completely unavailable and, if you asked after it you would not have been surprised if the cops were informed (1990). All dates approximate. It seems that our generation, despite all of our inevitable individual traumas, really has had the best of times. A generation that didn't go to war, was able to travel freely, could at least see the remnants of a reasonably working BL culture before it was neutered, and hadn’t yet been decimated by a pandemic. Cheers! |