How did I get this way? The records responsible, plus a playlist so you can hear the damage firsthand

![On the record](/blog/record-shelf.jpg)

Yes, it’s another playlist blog. But they’re still a thing because they’re so effective – and yes, entertaining. If you wanted to get to know me, I could tell you my CV in narrative form – I graduated high school, moved, attended university, etc. – or I can give you a better picture of who I am through the music that shaped me. The facts are easy to fill in yourself (and indeed all over this website). So here, instead, is the version with the soundtrack.

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1.	**The Go-Go’s, _Beauty and the Beat_** I probably shouldn’t admit this but when I was a fledgling teenage punk, a friend and I stole a giant stack of secondhand records from a junk shop that were all vaguely punk or new wave. Among them was a record I had avoided purely because my mom owned it and I thought it would be too girly pop. Since I now owned it, I put it on for a listen and it blew my mind: these were some of the best punk rock songs of all time and I had no idea – _Beauty and the Beat_ really taught me to not judge by the (record) cover.
2.	**Nine Inch Nails, _Pretty Hate Machine_** It was my freshman year of high school, I was 14 and I was obsessed. _PHM_ was both danceable and subversive and kind of sexy too. At the same time, the internet had just crept into my home, opening up the record's entire subculture and lore to me – from my briefly wearing all black and dyeing my hair to hunting down bootlegs and rare VHS music videos. I’m no longer a baby goth but I still listen to NIN to this day.
3.	**Blondie, _Parallel Lines_** Since it was such a hit in its time, _Parallel Lines_ was still widely available in the mid-1990s. I must have got it from one of those Publishers Clearing House catalogs for $1 or something. The thing is, those songs were really good and their attitude was exactly what I needed at the time. I became a Blondie-phile – which was no easy feat since their other records weren’t quite as easy to find – and played them so much that I eventually got a ban from friends on Blondie, whether in the car, the basement or at a party. They’ve since lightened up on them.
4.	**Patti Smith Group, _Easter_** Listening to Patti Smith made me feel bohemian. I got into this record through “Rock n Roll N****r”, a song that's since been quietly scrubbed from streaming services, which tells you something about how times change. Fortunately, I was just as into the rest of the record. I’ll also never forget being derided by the snobby older punks for listening to that record instead of the more iconic _Horses_ (which is also great, I just got into _Easter_ first) because it was more “commercial”. I guess?

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5.	**Slits, _Cut_** This one is a beautiful anomaly to me. I’ll never understand why the public library in Anchorage, Alaska had this but there it was, filed under “Punk”. I had heard of the Slits before but I can’t describe how disappointed I was the first time I heard _Cut_. It was nothing like I wanted it to be. But so much more. For me it unleashed the potential of what punk was and could be and really is one of the best records of all time.
6.	**Public Image Ltd., _Metal Box/Second Edition_** I was fascinated by the character of Johnny Rotten – he was cute and full of vitriol but in a stylish and smart way. When I sought out more from him (under the less sexy moniker of Lydon), I was absolutely shocked to get these long, dub/bass heavy post-punk disco tracks after the straightforward sonic attacks of the Sex Pistols. I think I sat there with my mouth open for the entire first side.
7.	**X, _Los Angeles_** _Los Angeles_ came at a time when I thought maybe punk was just a phase for me. Not everything was instantly available to stream, so I was limited both by what I could find at the record store and what I could afford. But what a find _this_ was. Exene's wailing at the beginning of "Your Phone's Off the Hook, But You're Not" flooded my heart and brain with literate punk rock urgency – and I've never recovered from the dual vocals on the closing “The World's a Mess (It's in My Kiss)” either. The record’s cover became my first ever band tattoo.
8.	**Bikini Kill, _The Singles_** As a teenager, my angst and my politics were developing at exactly the same speed. Punk was a good launchpad for that but it was the visceral wails of Kathleen Hanna and the extreme noise surrounding her that were a real call to arms. This record kicked my ass and made me aware I needed to speak up.

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9.	**Crass, _Best Before… 1984_** What can I say? It’s where I stole my name from. Crass was an entire world. Immersive. And not just in a subculture way. There was an entire lifestyle – from their communal living to their lived anarchist politics to their uniform record art. And it was borderline unlistenable. Simplistic yet avant-garde. I loved it.
10.	**Blatz, _The Shit Split_** This is one of the first "obscure" non-legacy punk acts I ever heard and their defiant brattiness really spoke to me. Unlike most of the punk I loved, they weren't yet a legacy act – just long over by the time I heard them. By the time I moved to San Francisco, every song was burned into my psyche and they were my fantasy of what would happen every time I went to 924 Gilman Street.
11.	**Sonic Youth, _Goo_** I was living in San Francisco and working at Tower Records while I went to college. Sonic Youth had somehow hit for me just then, becoming a portal to cool. I first remember that Raymond Pettibon record cover and the title track but the rest of the record and the Sonic Youth discography made me feel hyper cool as I walked down the street with my Discman on. I had access to a much bigger underground now.

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12.	**Nena, _S/T_** After I moved to Berlin and started learning German, I got into this one more than I ever expected. "99 Luftballons" was an easy hook but the situation had me listening to the whole record (and her other records as well) deeply for an early period of my life in Berlin. With this record I had something to bond over with my new German friends while quietly leveling up my language skills. Not only did that help me settle into Germany a bit easier, I ended up working with her throughout the years as well. “_Mann, wer hätte das gedacht_?” as the “Luftballons” lyric goes.
13.	**Duran Duran, _Rio_** I was already in my thirties by the time I really got into Duran Duran, and hitting a professional stride I hadn't known before. Ratty, disheveled punk just wasn’t me anymore. I had really gotten into the groove as an editor at the city magazine, I was just tapped to be the face of another magazine’s website and I was getting noticed all around town for my work at the film festival. I needed sunglasses and blazers. I wasn’t slouching anymore but standing up straight and ready for globetrotting adventures and Duran Duran were the perfect soundtrack for that.
14.	**Chappell Roan, _The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess_** The numbers don’t lie. Okay, maybe they’re a bit skewed as there’s no count on all the music I’ve listened to my entire life but my Spotify play count for this record is up there – surpassing most. This is the record though that got me up on my feet in my forties to just dance around and so joyously pushed pop back into my life – hopping from my living room couch reading Alan Moore to dancing in full view of the neighbors while attempting to do the “Hot to Go!” moves. The neighbors have seen things.
15.	**Charli XCX, _Brat_** In some ways, _Brat_ reminded me a bit of Sonic Youth. Listening to it – and Charli in general – was a _portal to cool_. This time filtered through hyperpop and TikTok. But walking down the street with those songs on my AirPods was like tapping into a version of myself that I don’t see so much anymore. Vicious, sexy, cool and ready for the limelight. “Cult classic but I still pop!” I’m underground and on top of my game at the same time here – no punches pulled, no apologies made – which at this point in my life is liberating again. There’s something a bit punk about Charli, too.

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How did I get this way? The records responsible, plus a playlist so you can hear the damage firsthand.

15 Records That Made Me This Way


Germany’s capital has long been a vortex drawing in the world’s societal outlaws – from art, politics and sex alike. From the early 20th century onward, Berlin repeatedly built and discarded its own mythologies. By the early 2000s, that new mythos was as the global capital of sexual freedom and pornography. And no one was contributing more to this mythos than gay porn production company Wurstfilm.

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This essay was originally written for a book about the Berlin gay porn production company Wurstfilm. The publisher Salzgeber ultimately shelved the project, so I am publishing it here for the first time.

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In the early 2000s, pornography was still taboo and still revolutionary. Berlin in turn was where you went to break taboos and take part in a revolution. It was a mysterious and alluring hotbed of horny people waiting to fuck on every corner, and a place to maybe become an underground star at the same time. Porn was a major part of what drew me and my punk rock, art-damaged international friends to Berlin.

This image of Berlin echoed through several features from the Wurstfilm crew throughout the decade, but the definitive portrayal of radical, subversive sexual Berlin on film is Ebo Hill’s _Bonking Berlin Bastards_, a porn not only with a name as wickedly anarchic and gloriously WTF as Germany’s capital, but it had a ‘plot’ to match. More accurately a proto-Wurstfilm, the film was released in 2001 as producer Jürgen Anger’s final feature for Cazzo Film, Wurstfilm’s Berlin-based predecessor. It kicked off the decade in which Berlin became a porn mecca and Wurstfilm, founded shortly after in 2003 by Anger, was its flagship representative of the dream/fuck factory.

![Bonking Berlin Bastards](/blog/bonking-berlin-bastards1.jpg "Bonking Berlin Bastards set. Photo: Ebo Hill")

Punk rock and scrappy, _Bonking_ follows a loose-knit group of unnamed bastards as they fuck and cum through Berlin’s dilapidated streets, bars, cellars cemeteries and even in an aerial tram, while never giving much motive or reason for any of it – save for the rape-revenge scene enacted by a group of drag queens leaving Oranienstraße’s notorious gay bar Roses. _Bonking_ stitches together hardcore gay sex scenes from the hot and hilarious to the extreme without stopping for breath. Action ricochets from punk crash pads to highway bridges, phone booths, bars, basements and finally a clinic, imitating the breakneck speed at which the metropolis paces itself… and fucks.

The opening scene in which a rough-looking punk pulls his cock out and shoots streams of piss upward onto himself in broad daylight – on a public street corner – lets the viewer imagine just what one could get away with in Berlin in 2001. This was bolder than bold.

It wasn’t just the protagonists and their sex acts that were radical, the filmmaking and structure of the porn was radical itself. The earlier scenes in the film present clear shots of the action – cocks, assholes, blowjobs and fucking – with the controlled clarity of conventional porn cinematography. But towards the end the film leaves the explicit obscured in a pixelated, experimentally shot climactic indoor pool orgy for its penultimate scene. By this point, one’s eyes have adjusted enough to know what’s going on, yet it’s hardly conducive to a typical masturbatory experience. Then, as a reminder that we are after all (most likely) watching the film alone, _Bonking_ ends with a lone punk visiting a sperm bank for a literal ‘clinically shot’ final solo scene, closing it not with a whimper, but not a big bang either. It leaves the viewer a bit bewildered.

But _Bonking_‘s images remain with the viewer and are now iconic impressions of a Berlin more than 20 years ago. Today scenes from _Bonking_, like the two punks pissing on each other in the graveyard, resurface remixed and newly presented in various corners of the internet. Or as memes or stolen clips for music videos made by new generations of gay punk rockers. In 2021, two decades after the film’s release, [the soundtrack was reissued on Ostgut Ton](https://www.berghain.berlin/de/shop/releases/bonking-berlin-bastards/), the label of Berlin nightclub Berghain – proof that _Bonking_ had already passed from porn into legend. _Bonking_ was the first film to represent Berlin as the radical porn capital of the world in the new millennium and it continues to give that impression, long after most corners of Berlin have become too gentrified and too populated to get away with this sort of renegade filth.

<YouTube id="smOMIo4GuCg" caption="&quot;Ficken&quot; from the Bonking Berlin Bastards OST (Ostgut Ton)" />

In 2006, Wurstfilm brought out Horst Braun’s _Gefangen in Analkerker_. This Wonderland tumble down the rabbit’s fuckhole takes an even more state-of-mind approach to the Berlin mythos as a porn mecca. Just below the surface of the city is an entire world for the fucking! Most of the action in _Gefangen_ takes place underground… a Dante’s Inferno of Nine Circles of Sex below a public toilet somewhere in Berlin. _Gefangen_ follows performer Lupus (a mainstay of Wurstfilm throughout the 2000s) as he goes to relieve himself in a public lavatory. After giving the bathroom attendant a randy look, he heads in for a quick fisting. There’s no wait before getting to the hard stuff. On his way out, however, things take a stranger turn when Lupus refuses to tip the bathroom attendant and next thing he’s dropped with the flip of a switch into an underground labyrinth of fuck. It’s then and there that the surreal fuck scenarios start taking place, starting with Lupus being shoved into a box of dicks to suck, fuck and stroke and then being the one dick for multiple bodyless arms and hands to jerk off. And the number of players and their misdeeds grow as we are led around each new corner. At one point we get a scene where someone is literally blowing smoke up another’s ass. The unending, anonymous, and maze-like quality of Berlin’s _Analkerker_ is almost reminiscent of a harder and filthier Berlin equivalent of Wakefield Poole’s groundbreaking 1972 porn _Bijou_.

It ends with Berlin star of stage and screen Susanne Sachße entering the public lavatory and winkingly asking the attendant: _“Gibt es etwas… für Damen?”_ (“Do you have anything… for the ladies?”) Laughs aside, it’s a testament to Berlin’s commitment to daring to be so radical (at the time) as putting a woman in a gay porn (which also happens in the Marcel Schlutt and Christian Slaughter’s softer 2009 Wurstfilm entry, _Max and the City_). But her request to be sent down the rabbit hole is a direct reflection of what many wanted from and thought of Berlin. Everyone wanted to come here and partake in Berlin’s amazing smorgasbord of sexual freedom and pornography.

_Bonking Berlin Bastards_ and _Gefangen in Analkerker_ may have done more than any other two films in spinning the legend of Berlin as pornographic candy land of the 2000s, but Wurstfilm continued to feed the mythos machine throughout the decade and beyond. Features like _Sex TV_ (2005) and _Max and the City_ (2010) were a bit more on-the-nose regarding making Berlin such a character: both could have their explicit scenes excised to create video postcards that the city government of Berlin would be proud of. But that’s all good and fine. Sometimes a straightforward fuck right after leaving Berlin Central Train Station is enticing enough.

Berlin has had many radical epochs over the 20th century: The political and social hedonists of Weimar Berlin, the student and cultural rebellions of late 1960s West Berlin. Bowie and Pop. The Baader-Meinhof Gang. Punk rock and gritty bohemianism in the 1980s. The Love Parade and Techno after the Fall of the Wall. And then the fantastical, edgy gay guerilla porn playground of the 2000s, cultivated by _Bonking Berlin Bastards_ and Wurstfilm.

Porn may be fantasy, but Wurstfilm was concerned with something larger: mythmaking. The mythmaking of Berlin.

How Wurstfilm’s anarchic gay porn helped create the myth of Berlin as a radical sexual playground in the early 2000s.

How gay porn helped create the myth of Berlin


Finally a website! Now you can explore my writing, interviews and curatorial work across culture, film and queer life

![Welcome to waltercrasshole.com](/blog/blog_welcome.jpg)

Alright! I finally did it and put a website together – and I’m exceptionally proud of it and excited to see what it brings. Why now? After all these years in my career and in this city, it was time to put all my work in one place – to consolidate it all, make it easier to find, and open the door to new freelancing work that otherwise wouldn’t have been on my radar.

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- Writing and columns
- Interviews with artists and cultural figures
- Curatorial projects
- New work and updates

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This site is a vast overview of everything I’ve done. It’s a portfolio of writing and curatorial work, an archive of interviews that I’ve done with some of the most important icons of indie, underground, alternative and queer culture from Berlin and the world. It also promises to be a space for ongoing new writing. My biggest projects can be found at the top of the website while everything else is easily browsable by type.

What can you expect from this site in the future? For starters, occasional new writing exclusive to this site, as well as updates and links to writing published elsewhere. Of course, there will also be occasional updates on projects and an up-to-date list of events I’m part of. There may be some archival digging in the future too. If you want updates when something new goes up, sign up for my newsletter.

> Connecting underground and mainstream culture through a queer Berlin perspective.

There’s a lot here from me, but I’m also happy to hear from you. So if you have any comments, be it feedback on the site, bugs you run into, general thoughts, commentary or just questions for me, go ahead and shoot me an email at [hello@waltercrasshole.com](mailto:hello@waltercrasshole.com). On that note, a big thank you to [Ines](https://ines.io) for putting this site together, getting it up and running and encouraging me to run with it in the first place!

This site is a way for me to continue connecting underground and mainstream culture, providing a unique Berlin perspective as well as a queer cultural lens to the world at large.

I’m glad you’re here. Go ahead, have a look around.


I finally built a website. Come explore my writing, interviews and curatorial work across culture, film and queer life.

Articles

Celluloid pride: Queer Berlin on Film

Man about the Kiez

Can Tuntenhaus still be saved?

Queer film: The Teddy turns 30

The eternal punk: Wolfgang Müller

Mega gay on display: Homosexuality_ies

Kotti for… queers

HIV testing and treatment for expat Berliners

How queer is the Berlinale?