WEBUM – Queer Expedition

In my humble opinion, the most highly anticipated event during the Whiney Expatriate Bloggers Unmissable Meetup – the WEBMU – is the (now) annual Queer Expedition, which is now in its third year.

Two years ago, in Dresden, Ian, of Letters Home, and I checked out its tiny and noisy gay scene on Friday night—it was too smoky and noisy, but it planted an idea in our heads.

Last year, in Bremen, after dinner on Saturday night the childless portion of the group went out after dinner to Friends, a nearby gay bar, where we successfully occupied a portion of the bar. The bartenders quickly assessed the situation and provided, save for spillage, the best service at any venue during the Bremen Meetup.

As I’d done the research for Bremen, I was nominated to do the research for Munich. It’s incredibly tricky to do this remotely, but I did my best, acquiring a list of gay bars in Munich, from which I started visiting websites, looking at photos, and reading reviews.

Both rent boy and leather (as well as leather rent boy) bars were automatically eliminated—not that I object to them, but I’m not sure they should be subjected to a large group of mostly hetero-expats.

A beacon of civilization

Eventually I found an older review of Mylord (Ickstattstraße 2a) that made it seem perfect—along with pleasing photos that made it look ideal. Deutschland über Elvis, a local member of the organizing committee, checked it out and said it was perfect—later revealing that he’d never even heard of the place before I asked him about it.

So Saturday, after dinner at Blue Nile, an Ethiopian restaurant, that the lot of us, including the Heidelbergerins, Regensbloggers, Snooker in Berlin, PapaScott, JeweledConcrete, Jentry in Germany, Zurika, the AmiExpat, Deutschland über Elvis, Lucid in Deutschland, and J of Germany Doesn’t Suck went to the gay bar.

There’s something cool about getting together a group of expats—since we’re all fish out of water and used to dealing with diverse cultural settings, only a distinct minority even question going to a gay bar.

Grandma's Living Room!

Ultimately there were probably 15 of us enjoying the atmosphere. Mylord is very much like visiting your grandmother’s living room—with couches, comfortable chairs, and a kitschy collection of art. Really the biggest difference between my grandmother’s living room and this living room was the subject matter of the art: my grandmother didn’t have two naked girls rubbing up against each other in her art collection.

It was an ideal environment for conversation. It lacked the loud dance beat of many gay bars—the beat that makes casual conversation difficult, if not impossible.

The hardest aspect of this is capturing the conversation. Doing so is probably impossible and pointless, however I have to make some attempts to capture my two favorite moments.

First, I was in a conversation with Jentry, who was explaining about how she lost some of her naïveté with respect to some specific sexual fetishes. She’d learned about scat and couldn’t believe that such a fetish was real. This was where I had a moment where I misheard the rest of her sentence—and lest I think it was just me, Zurika’s husband, Scott, who was sitting next to me, heard what she said roughly the same way I did.

What I heard her say was that “I didn’t believe it, so we went and did it.”

My heart stopped and my jaw dropped—talk about jumping into the deep end of the pool—going from having just learned about a fairly rare, and possibly dangerous, fetish, to trying it out is pretty impressive. However, even though it was clear that Scott and I were trying to digest what was just said, the rest of the people at the table were not experiencing the same consternation, so we sought clarification.

It turns out that what she’d said was that “I didn’t believe it, so we went and googled it.”

I’m not clear how I misheard what she’d originally said, but I ended up laughing so hard my sides hurt—something that hasn’t happened in years.

Later in the evening, closer to midnight, I changed tables and was sitting with J of Germany Doesn’t Suck and two Germans—the guy I was sitting next to was suffering from hiccups—although I didn’t realize it at the time. JeweledConcrete happen to come into my vision and I called her over—I haven’t seen her since Dresden and I wanted to get in some conversation before she parted ways.

I ended up hugging her from a seated position, which caught J’s attention, since I’m almost never in that position with girls, so he went to snap a picture. To make the picture better I threw my legs over the hiccupping man’s lap in order to make the picture more salacious.

Apparently that was enough to cure his hiccups.

Obviously I am rather biased, but if I were compelled to judge this year’s Queer Expedition, I would judge it a success.