B am I safe in this place? I ask myself that more and more often. In cafes and bars or when I take the train to another city. I usually have a change of clothes with me, big, long hoodies that make my body disappear. When it comes down to it, I don’t want to be recognizable as a queer person at first glance.
In Berlin, queer influencer Quang Paasch was attacked with pepper spray and beaten up. The result: a traumatic brain injury and severe bruises. He had arranged to go on a date and was attacked at the meeting point by a group of men who had probably planned the attack on him. When I the video When I saw Paasch talking about the attack, I was shocked. I often travel around Neukölln myself. Could this have happened to me too?
How many times have you been beaten up? Journalists ask me this regularly. After all, I often shoot the videos for my songs in public places. The answer is: not once. But sometimes it was more than close. During a photo shoot at Alexanderplatz, a man followed me into the elevator and tried to hit me. In the subway in Frankfurt, two young people symbolically showed me a cut throat with their hand. When I was at the Bauhaus in Mainz with a friend, an employee spat in my face.
The Hatred of queer peopleespecially those who are present on social media, has increased. I receive threats in direct messages almost every week. In October, a user wrote to me in great detail about how he was going to rape me and then disfigure my face. He probably wanted to intimidate me.
Like a hundred years ago, violence spreads because people let it happen
If we queer people belittling ourselves out of fear, these guys won. And yes, they are always men. Hatred and violence towards queer people is an expression of toxic masculinity that is conquering the mainstream despite all feminist discourses. Self-proclaimed “Alphas” declare that feminists and queers are to blame for loneliness and other problems that many young men face. In this environment, hatred is growing, which has now affected Quang Paasch in the form of physical violence.
We are currently failing to protect marginalized people. Both on the street and on the Internet. I don’t want an overreaching state that persecutes the smallest online comments. But it is straight Social Media a space in which a) hate is rewarded by algorithms and b) tracking threats and cross-border content is hardly possible. That has to change. It cannot be the case that victims of digital violence have to listen to flimsy reasons from the police and public prosecutors as to why crimes cannot be prosecuted.
At the same time, platforms are rarely held liable if they distribute illegal content and thus profit commercially from it. In doing so, they signal to men that they can threaten queer people with impunity. But blaming the platforms alone is not enough. Because today, as it was a hundred years ago, violence continues to spread because people let it happen. The perpetrators almost always benefit from the fact that enough people look the other way.
I hope that Quang will not be intimidated by the attack that was directed not only at him, but at all queer people. That we as queers remain visible despite the shift to the right. We have to give each other the strength to do this.