Safe House nr. 1 (2nd edition) Glorius hole

SAFE-HOUSE is a comic series about Berlin’s lost queer safe spaces , bars, clubs, and cruising spots. The first episode, released in 2024, is a 64-page A5 Riso-printed book divided into two parts. The first part (printed on yellow paper) features archival texts and articles about cruising and Paragraph 175, along with QR codes that link to interviews and materials from the project’s online archive. The second part is the comic story itself. The story follows Wolfgang, a gay man in 1980s Berlin who goes cruising in a toilet next to the Deutsche Oper, one of the city’s beloved underground meeting spots. When he notices a police car stopping nearby, Wolfgang spirals into anxiety. Caught between desire and fear, he’s forced to confront the paranoia of being added to the “rosa Listen” (lists the Berlin police once kept to track homosexuals), the risk of losing his civil servant job, and the pressure of living a double life. The episode blends lust, humor, and dread, capturing the contradictions of queer existence under criminalization and surveillance.