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The most popular party is Madonnamania, on every three months, where all 16 Junior Vasquez remixes of Don’t Cry for Me Argentina get played. On Fridays and Saturdays, up to three floors open with occasional shows onstage. Its DJ bookings are equally diverse, from Aérea Negrot playing tech-house to Lotic playing abstract beats. The club caters to all colours of the LGBTIQ rainbow, with teens to silver foxes passing under the disco ball. In 2013, SchwuZ tripled in size by relocating to a former brewery in the city’s rapidly gentrifying Neukölln district. The SchwuZ club, short for Schwules Zentrum (gay centre), has been a community institution since 1977. The glitter-bombed karaoke bar hosts a free-for-all in which all 10 of its private booths are fair game, allowing you to bounce around and share the mic with strangers or, if you prefer, step into the lounge where you can strain your vocal cords in front of a larger audience. Every Monday night at Monster Ronson’s is Multisexual Boxhopping. In Berlin, the weekend only ends if you let it. Gymrats with tight shirts rub against hipster goth lesbians through industrial caverns as a black-lit dragon sculpture on the ceiling shoots fire and screams “GOA!” Gegen happens on the first Friday of every other month. They also abolished the dress code, allowing a greater influx of guests. DJ Warbear and VJ Boxikus maintain their brand with a music policy of hard techno and experimental sounds, along with an adventurous visual aesthetic created by Stefan Fähler. When the Gegen crew stepped into KitKat a few years ago, the swinger club found itself home to one of the city’s most successful parties. Many Berliners feel the “underground vibe” of Berghain has been overshadowed by tourists seeking spectacle, creating space for other parties and venues to open up.
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Because the queue gets very long at peak hours, locals tend to get a full night’s sleep and eat brunch before going on Sunday afternoon. It closes sometime after sunrise and the sweat and broken glass are mopped up before Saturday night when the massive main techno floor opens. On Fridays, only the house-centric Panorama Bar is open. Once inside, there are no mirrors in the bathrooms to possibly judge your decisions, and the club enforces a no-camera policy to preserve its mystique. But the sexually permissive atmosphere happens every weekend. It’s been in a former power plant since 2004, but the nightclub’s roots go back 20 years to a gay sex party called Snax, which still happens twice a year (at Easter and in November).
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Even Hollywood celebrities talk about the world-famous nightclub on daytime talk shows! Homeland star Claire Danes called Berghain the “ best place on Earth” on The Ellen Show in September – which made lots of news in Berlin. You can’t talk about Berlin’s gay nightlife without mentioning techno mecca, Berghain.
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By Joey Hansom, musician and DJ, English language editor of Siegessäule (Berlin’s free monthly LGBT magazine )