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Entangled in our love 
and feeling no shame, 
we spend the morning in bed 
lying breast to breast, 
with their cries of

‘But it’s a sin. 
Women should not lie with women 
as women lie with men’

echoing around the void, 
unclaimed, 
their impact devoid 

when the sun 
and the moon 
and the stars 
bow down to us, 

and suddenly the sky above 
seems closer than the flames below, 
and we feel no shame for lying with woman 
as woman lies with man,

because it’s Sunday, 
and we are free.

Few people have the courage to demand change in a society that tells us that there is nothing to change. Or, in the rare instances when society does accept that change might be needed, ‘you’re not the one to deliver it’, they tell us.

It’s why artists who create experimental art face so much retribution, with the unveiling of a new piece being met with, not congratulations or pride, but ‘how dare you go against the status quo.’

Society hates change.

As the root cause of censorship, noun: ‘The prohibition of anything considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a ‘threat to security’, it is because of society’s disdain for change that our artistic freedom is violated.

Despite artists being the best people to deliver change, with change being to art what love is to poetry, (the ultimate muse), artists are all too often silenced for questioning norms (social and religious) or expressing political views that oppose the dominant narrative.

‘If you give artists freedom of expression, soon every American will want it’, the custodians of morality (men) say. 

The censorship of art is all but an exertion of male authority.

And where do such remarks come from? 

A place of fear.

Change threatens the place of those with power in society, hence why they are so vehemently against it…

What the people in power don’t realise, however, is that the rationale behind their opposition to art is counterintuitive to what they are trying to achieve.

When marginalised voices create art to get their voices heard in a society that demands that they move through the world in silence, silencing them via the oppression of their art only serves to justify the necessity of the arts even more. But, even so… Silenced they have been, particularly when it comes to LGBTQ+ people, women, people of colour, and anyone who questions the role of religion in society.

To focus on the former demographic, LGBTQ+ people, (lesbians in particular), while sex between consenting women is not illegal, silence is the weapon of their oppression.

In 1921, a conservative member of Parliament, Frederick Macquisten, argued that ‘Acts of Gross Indecency Between Female Persons’ should be added to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885.

How can you legislate against something that is human nature?

Lesbianism, he told the House of Commons, ‘threatened the birth rate, debauched young girls, and induced neurasthenia and insanity’, and such practices, Macquisten believed, would cause contagion, for in the home of his mind, a woman’s place was on his arm and in his bed only…

While the law was never passed, Macquisten’s campaigning led to censorship laws being introduced in Britain and America that prevented lesbians from publishing anything, whether fact or fiction, about their love lives.

It wasn’t just lesbians who were subject to such discrimination, either. Straight women were also tarred with the same ‘you do not belong here’ brush…

In 1996, Jamaican American artist Renée Cox made headlines for her controversial piece of art, ‘Yo Mama’s Last Supper’ (above). The piece was a remake of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper” (1494), with a nude Cox sitting in for Jesus Christ.

Many Roman Catholics were outraged by Cox’s depiction of the Last Supper. ‘“I think what they did is disgusting, it’s outrageous,” the former associate attorney general of the United States, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said.

In response to her critics? ‘Get over it!’ was all Cox had to say. ‘Why can’t a woman be Christ? We are the givers of life!’

Unfortunately, though, what is anatomically provable (woman birthed man), is wrongly said to be disprovable by what is nothing more than a fairytale (man birthed woman from his rib) …

The 19th-century French painter Gustave Courbet also caused controversy from a patriarchal perspective with his painting titled ‘Origin of the World’ (1866).

The close-up depiction of the genitals and abdomen of a female nude lying on a bed with her legs spread has long been a subject of obscenity laws, with some feminists arguing that the painting is a powerful symbol of female sexuality and liberation, while others see it as objectifying and degrading.

The same is true of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, too, whose work is deemed at once both liberating and degrading…

Is it outrageous, or is it a truthful exploration of the human body, sexuality and desire?…

In the 80s, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographic scenes of sexual domination and bondage caused a stir in the art world.

In his photographs, Mapplethorpe was portraying, not only gay sex, which was a taboo in itself, but sadomasochist gay sex, to intentionally provoke a prudish America.

Among his most controversial works, there was a self-portrait within which Mapplethorpe had a bullwhip in his anus, as well as photos that he had taken of his friends. There are many, too many to list here, but two that spring to mind are titled, ‘Fist Fuck / Full Body’, which is a photograph of a man elbow deep in another man’s anus, and ‘Jim and Tom, Sausalito’, which is a photograph of a man (Jim) urinating in another man’s mouth (Tom).

Arts ability to shock in ways that create long-lasting impacts on audiences is a testament to the power that it holds in society.

So shocking to the public were Mapplethorpe’s photos that displaying them led to one museum being taken to court on criminal charges for the first time ever as a direct result…

Fortunately, jurors decided in the museum’s favour, agreeing that art doesn’t have to be pretty or ‘nice to look at’ for it to be of value, but the fact that people are still scared to write about certain topics, or paint certain subjects, or take photographs that depict certain things today is proof that there is still work that must be done to ensure that artists are granted the permission to be just that… artists.

Unfortunately, someone who didn’t quite pass the obscenity check like Robert Mapplethorpe was the author of Ulysses, James Joyce.

Ulysses was first published in 1918 in a small magazine called The Little Review. However, due to the sexual content and blasphemous language within the book, it wasn’t long before it was banned in English-speaking countries around the world, and The Little Review’s Editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, were tried under obscenity. 

‘It sounds to me like the ravings of a disordered mind — I can’t see why anyone would want to publish it’, one judge said of Ulysses, the assumption being that its characters would lead women down a path of ever-expanding permission ending in broken families and a ruined nation.

Exploring sexual pleasure outside marriage could lead to questions about the wisdom of marriage and monogamy itself, which opened the door to questioning all unexamined pieties, including nationalism, capitalism, and religion.

As such, Anderson and Heap were found guilty, fined, and ordered to cease publication.

For many readers, as well as Joyce’s literary contemporaries, the idea that Joyce’s experimental work had been banned as obscene was absurd. For many legislators, journalists, and other readers, however, the book was pornographic and blasphemous.

Alas, if art is to be successful, it must reflect the world in its entirety, including the so-called ‘distasteful and obscene’ aspects.

To ban art is to ban humanity.

One cannot be an authentic artist under fear of censorship, for censorship is the antithesis of the freedom of expression that is art.

My partner and I are both interested in art and history and, as lesbians, we love to delve into queer history in particular. Berlin offers tourists an unrivalled opportunity to experience queer history, in all its glory…

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Armed with a burning curiosity and an eagerness to discover all that the bustling city had to offer, we arrived in the German capital at the fall of dusk on Friday the 15th of November 2024.

The journey from the UK was a short one. It took just two hours for us to get from Birmingham airport to Brandenburg, and from there, half an hour in an Uber to get to our hotel.

While there are hundreds of places to stay in the German capital, we chose the Arte Luise Arthotel based on its description of being an ‘art gallery to stay in overnight.’

For the next three nights, we took residence in room 206, the ‘Cabaret’ room.

Red velvet and brocade, the bed draped with lace and exposed on a pedestal, with red lights, erotic dancers and the sounds of the old Paris-Moscow trains carry the guest back in time to the atmosphere of the establishments of the 1920s and the old Berlin of Christopher Isherwood*.

*Isherwood’s best-known work is Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical Cabaret (1966).

A fitting tribute, one could say, for where we were to venture to the next day.

But first, the important stuff…

Whilst in Berlin, we both felt that it was important, no matter how upsetting it might be, to visit the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

An installation designed by architect Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold, the memorial, as pictured below, is a work of art in itself.

Eisenman placed 2711 concrete stelae of different heights on a site covering 19,000 square metres. Its openness and abstractness gives visitors space to confront the topic in their own personal way.

It represents whatever you think it represents. That is the beauty of it.

We also visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp while we were in Berlin where, in the years between 1936 to 1945, more than 200,000 people were interned. 

Those targeted included political opponents of the Nazi regime, members of groups declared by the Nazis to be racially or biologically inferior, such as Jews, Roma and other people derogatorily labelled as ‘Gypsies’, people persecuted as homosexuals, as well as social outsiders who were labelled as ‘antisocials’ and ‘career criminals’.

Located in what very much felt like ‘the middle of nowhere’, (it was, in fact, just North of Berlin), we had to catch a train from Hauptbahnhof (Berlin Central Station) to Oranienburg, and from there a connecting train to Sachsenhausen to get to the concentration camp. The journey was approximately 25 miles, and it took just shy of an hour.

We got there an hour before closing time, as dusk was setting and the rain was just beginning to pour down, and it made the experience even more emotional.

Walking around the grounds in what we considered ‘grim’ conditions (a bit of cold and rain), made us realise what those 200,000 prisoners must have felt. 

The awareness that this was their life, but unimaginably worse, is hard to rationalise when you live in a free world.

It’s hard to rationalise, with the freedom that we have today, that even after the war, when the Nazis had been defeated and the concentration camps closed, that there would still be so much division in Berlin, the oppression of the Nazi regime being replaced with the oppression of the SSSR.

Post second world war, when Germany had surrendered, Berlin became occupied by several different (and opposing) forces, with the Soviet Union occupying the East under a communist state, and the US, the UK, and France occupying the West under a capitalist democracy.

Unsurprisingly, people in the East wanted to escape to the West, and so in 1961, a wall was built to divide the city into two halves.

The 27-mile-long stretch of concrete running through the city was comprised of two parallel walls punctuated with guard towers and separated by the “death strip,” which included guard dogs, landmines, barbed wire, and various obstacles designed to prevent escape. East German soldiers monitored the barriers 24/7, conducted surveillance on West Berlin, and had shoot-to-kill orders should they spot an escapee.

In 1989, however, on November the 9th, five days after half a million people gathered in East Berlin in a mass protest, the barrier that had divided Berlin and ripped families apart for 28 years finally came toppling down.

With the collapse of the Berlin wall came freedom, and with freedom, art.

Welcome: East Side Gallery.

Today, what remains of the Berlin wall is home to more than 100 murals, painted by artists from all over the world, thus making it the largest open-air art gallery in the world, and the finest example of how art and activism can combine.

Splashing politically charged messages across Cold War barriers; the illegal status of graffiti only served to add to the political statement that the artists were trying to make.

‘What happens when freedom limiting laws are imposed? We break them’…

This is a sentiment that brings me nicely onto the final destination in our whirlwind weekend trip to Berlin, the KitKat Club…

If Weatherspoon’s is your go to pub and you squirm at the mention of sex, then the KitKat Club is probably (definitely) not for you. But before we get into all that, first, the history…

What is the KitKat Club, exactly?…

‘KitKat Club’ was the name given to the infamous gay nightclub in Cabaret, a musical based on Christopher Isherwood, an American novelist and playwright’s novel, Goodbye to Berlin.

Goodbye to Berlin, although fictional, is very factual in its storytelling of a city under attack.

Isherwood’s writing largely mirrors his own experiences as a gay man who fled to Berlin at the age of 25 to find sexual freedom amongst the plethora of gay bars, such as The Eldorado, that the city had to offer.

The same sense of liberation and freedom that was sought in the clubs of twentieth century Berlin, as portrayed in ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ and Cabaret, can still be sought in the real-life KitKat Club of today….

Opened in 1994 by Austrian pornographic filmmaker Simon Thaur and his partner, Kristen Kruger, with a vehement sex positive attitude where patrons are allowed to engage in sexual intercourse openly, a visit to the KitKat Club is quite the experience.

To get in, remember the ‘undress’ code. If you turn up as a single man wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a pair of trainers, you will be turned away by the two bouncers who stand at the door. 

Less is more.

Once in, you can strip down even further, if that’s your thing. You wouldn’t be alone in walking around stark naked, in fact. Any bags or items of clothing that you want to shed can be stored alongside your phone (phones are not allowed on your person for obvious reasons, as the topless women behind the bar will tell you), to be collected at the end. And then… It’s time to explore!

Within KitKat Club there are several rooms to explore, accessible only by pushing through a crowd of sweaty bodies dancing to techno.

When the KitKat Club is more than just a nightclub, but a cultural institution, I, for one, wanted to experience all of it…

After adjusting to the environment that was unlike anything we had ever seen before, we made our way around the three-storey building, entering the dark room before being abruptly told to shut the door. ‘Nothing can happen when the door is open.’ I’m still a bit lost on the purpose of the dark room, if I’m honest… With sex going on in every room, what is its purpose, exactly?

Does the woman bent over with a guy’s penis sliding in and out of her mouth know him, or have they just met tonight? Who knows… Onto another room.

We carried on looking around, and unbeknown to me at the time, we entered a room that made everything glow in the dark. In it, there was a man who kept smiling at me, his teeth glowing in the dark. Because I was slightly (okay, maybe very) intoxicated at this point and had no idea what was happening, it scared me, and he must have been able to tell. ‘Are you afraid?’, he asked, and If I wasn’t afraid before then I was then… We left that room and went back downstairs to join the mass of sweaty bodies dancing. I can remember my girlfriend tapping me on my shoulder and looking up to see a woman being fucked over the railings upstairs.

Can you see why phones aren’t allowed now?…

What is allowed, however, is voyeurism, and in a venue where sex is essentially a (consensual) free for all, it’s to be expected.

In other words, you can’t venture into the KitKat Club and get mad when you stop kissing your girlfriend and see several men stood behind you wanking off like you’re there to put on a show for them. If the thought of that makes you want to vom, then I’d suggest that you give it a miss and stick to the trusted ‘spoons instead…

Go with a free spirit and an open mind, however, and you will see the best of Berlin. In every sense.

Would I go back?

With so many countries to see in the world, and so little time (and money) to visit them all, I’m usually a ‘once is enough’ type of person when it comes to travelling. With Berlin, however, and the amount of culture and history it has on offer, I would love to go back and do it all over again.

In the meantime, though, onto our next destination as I travel the world with the love of my life…

Paris.

Nowhere does ‘love means love’ ring truer than in Paris, the city of love and the capital of the first (modern) country to legalise same-sex relationships.

While homosexuality wasn’t decriminalised until 1967 in the UK, and even later still in the US (2003), in France, homosexuality was decriminalised approximately two centuries before, in 1791 at the end of the French revolution.

The Revolution of Love

With an amendment to the penal code, a ‘crowd of imaginary crimes’ including sodomy were abolished.

‘Private acts by private individuals are not a matter for state intervention’, the French authorities said, thus inspiring the first wave of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Western Europe.

With its open mindedness triggered by the French Revolution, a time of political upheaval, from the late 18th century, Paris became the place to be for creatives. Queer writers in particular, including the likes of Oscar Wilde and James Baldwin no less, flocked in their droves to the French capital.

Not only did Paris provide queer people with a place where they could live openly, but it also provided everyone, no matter their sexual orientation, with a place where they were granted permission to just… exist.

Pursuing goals because, ‘#productivity’, too many of us, in the modern Western society within which we live, forget that the prerequisite to doing is being.

Idyllic for writers, with cafes on every corner, Paris however, with its slow way of living, reminds us of that, and they even have a word for it; ‘Flaneuring.’ The art of wandering around without intention or direction.

The Parisian life is good because in it, life can just be life. Slow and intentional.

Someone else who moved to Paris as the French Revolution drew to a close was the trailblazing American bookseller and publisher, Sylvia Beach.

Beach exchanged the noise of America for the calm ease of Paris at the age of 30. Once there, she set up the independent bookshop, ‘Shakespeare and Company’, in 1919 with her partner, Adrienne Monnier.

A ‘sanctuary for progressive writers’ and a ‘hub for innovative publishing’, Shakespeare and Co was the first combined English-language bookshop in Paris. Also a ‘lending library’, it gave cash-strapped readers in post-World War I Paris unprecedented access to Anglo-American literature. 

With an ethos very much centered on literature for literatures sake, Beach wasn’t in the business to make money as much as she was in it to make a difference.

It’s why Beach would encourage visitors to browse and read books in her store for hours without making them feel under any obligation to buy. Or leave. Beach also regularly offered writers a bed for the night under a ‘tumbleweed’ scheme, something which many established writers and aspiring wordsmiths alike took her up on. 

An estimated 30–40,000 people (and counting, it is still running today) have slept in Shakespeare and Co as part of the scheme…

As Edwina Hart, travel writer and former ‘tumbleweed’ wrote in this blog post:

My fellow “tumbles” were like characters from a novel; a mix of Oxbridge undergrads, artists, poets, and bohemians — united by a love of literature. After the shop opened at 9 am, we would meander the backstreets of the quarter and pause at a local tabac for an espresso served at the bar. Following in the footsteps of Hemingway, we frequented his old haunts and continued towards the “wonderful, narrow street market” of rue Mouffetard. Here we would use the jangling purse of coins donated in the bookstore wishing well (Sign: “Feed the starving writers”). We’d buy a baguette on rue Monge and, if the donations were generous that week, some gooey Camembert.

While the Tumbleweed scheme still exists today, it is in a different location, in a later ‘Shakespeare and Company’ that was set up by George Whitman.

Whitman opened what was originally called Le Mistral, dubbed by Slyvia Beach as the ‘spiritual successor’ to Shakespeare and Company in 1951. In 1964, two years after Sylvia’s death, Whitman changed the store’s name to Shakespeare and Company in Beach’s honour.

The store is, as of January 2025, run by George’s daughter, Sylvia (named after Sylvia Beach), and follows the same ethos now as it did then. 

In trying to uphold Beach’s legacy, smaller publishes are prominently displayed on their shelves, with the aim to ‘offer a diversity of contemporary voices and subject matters’, the latter point being something that Beach, who helped shape the literary landscape of her age, prided herself on…

Shakespeare and Company (1919) was the first place of publication for some of the most important poets, novelists, and critics in the early decades of the 20th Century, including, most famously, Irish writer James Joyce who had been trying (unsuccessfully) to publish ‘Ulysses’ for several years.

After meeting Joyce in 1920 when nobody would publish his novel because it was deemed obscene, ‘far too hot to handle’, Beach decided that Shakespeare and Co. would put the book out, making it, for many years, the only place on the planet where you could get a copy.

‘It sounds to me like the ravings of a disordered mind — I can’t see why anyone would want to publish it.’

As a lesbian, Sylvia Beach knew all too well the tools that the people in power will use to stay in power.

The authorities hated Ulysses because they feared it. It’s why Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, the editors of the Little Review (1918) were summoned to court owing to them having ‘violated New York’s anti-obscenity law’ when they printed a mere excerpt of the book.

It’s also why, in 1931, the BBC prohibited its radio programmes from so much as even mentioning the title of Joyce’s novel on air.

In 1921, John Sumner, the man who led the Little Review prosecution, argued that “radical feminists” were “writing insidious books on the freedom of the modern woman, and advocating still greater sex freedom” (contraception, perhaps, or information about contraception, both of which were illegal). Censors like Sumner assumed that Ulysses’ characters would lead women down a path of ‘ever-expanding permission ending in broken families and a ruined nation.’

Reviewers saw Ulysses not just as obscene but as “completely anarchic”.

Exploring sexual pleasure outside marriage could lead to questions about the wisdom of marriage and monogamy itself, authorities feared, which opened the door to questioning all unexamined pieties, including nationalism, capitalism, and religion.

Alas, ‘If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing, it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water.’
George Bernard Shaw.

Unafraid to stand for what was right, and fearless of the repercussions that might arise in doing so, we have Beach and her literary comrades of the twentieth century to thank for our freedom in the twenty-first.

Paris, and the modernism that it, in many ways, birthed, is the mirror, as held up by Sylvia Beach, and Margaret Anderson, and George Whitman, and Jane Heap, and all the other trailblazers of the twentieth century, through which we are all reflected.

Because of them, we don’t have to live in fear that one day we might produce the ‘wrong’ kind of art and end up in jail because of it. We don’t have our self-expression diluted, our words banned, our voices stifled.

Because of them, we can write about masturbation and sex and abortion, and secularisation and white supremacy and capitalism, all the things that were deemed too close to home, ‘off limits’, a century ago.

Because of them, we are free.