Written By: Drew Kramer
Photos: Ulli Richter
My first night in Berlin. Airport baggage claim, taxi, checking into my hotel, Artim on Fuggerstraße, schnitzel at a restaurant down the block, and now for the purpose of my trip: I was going to a leather bar.
My lifelong strategy to avoid disappointment is to lower my expectations. After all, Berlin could not be everything everyone described.
The two principal leather bars in Schoenberg are New Action and Scheune. Scheune, German for “barn,” was described as sleazier and the man who described it that way had a huge grin on his face as he did so. Scheune it would be.
I got into my leathers and hauled on my boots, then plotted my course with the mapping app on my phone. It was a Tuesday night, after eleven o’clock. The streets were mostly deserted. And there was Scheune. Stickers attached to the door said, “No Women” and that smoking was permitted. I tried the handle but the door was locked. Was the place open? Tuesday night after all. I stepped out of the doorway and lit a cigarette, considering my next move. A man in rubber walked past me and approached the same door. He pushed a button off to the side and after a moment, a buzzer sounded. He turned the handle, opened the door, and went in.
I followed suit. The buzzer sounded, I entered.
Inside it was…a bar. It was dark, every stool was filled, and men leaned or stood around. I saw leather and rubber and denim. A man in full leather sat facing the door. As I looked around our eyes met. I nodded. He nodded.
I made my way to the door and ordered a whiskey. Once served, I turned to the room. The man in full leather caught my eye again. I nodded. He took his dick out.
Just like that. Right there in the bar. In full view of the bartenders. He took out his nice, thick, hard, uncut German dick.
Cruising apparently works differently in Berlin. No strangers in the night exchanging glances, then the approach, then the “how’s your night going?” The exchange of compliments, the first physical contact, the reciprocation… All leading up to him going home with you or you going home with him. He just took his dick out.
I approached, dropped to my knees, and started servicing his boots. He approved. He started stroking his dick while I worked. I gave his boots my full attention, but from time to time I heard around me murmurs of conversation. Nothing unusual going on here. Just two leathermen doing what leathermen do in leather bars. After I had gotten a good taste of his boot leather, I worked my tongue up the shaft of his boot then continued up the thigh of his leather jeans. His dick bobbed in front of me. First I took his balls in my mouth, came up for air, then took that dick right down as far as I could get it. It tasted the salt of his sweat. I sucked his dick for all I was worth. After not too long, my efforts were rewarded. He shot his load in my mouth. I looked up at him as it went down my throat. His face was impassive, only a slight smile. His glove hand slapped my face. He downed the rest of his beer in a few gulps, stood up. His dick was still dripping. I took a last taste before he put it away and zipped up. Without looking down at me he headed out the door.
I became aware of the barroom again. Conversation, the bartenders tending to customers. A light would flash, one of the bartenders would glance at a video monitor, push a button and the door would open to admit another customer. I sat on the stool the man whose dick I had just sucked had vacated.
But what about me? What about my dick?
I decided to explore. There was a lounge area behind the bar with rails and tables on which to set drinks and a leather sofa. It was separated from the bar in the front by what I first took to be an enclosure of iron bars. In the lounge I saw it wasn’t an enclosure, there was a cell door that was open and inside were stairs leading down.
Down the stairs I headed. At first it was pitch black. Slowly my eyes adjusted. There was a cell, a cage with a leather pad on top, a glory hole, and my ears rather than my eyes told me that someone was getting fucked in a sling. It wasn’t a large space but it was well laid-out. I explored, pushing past other men in the darkness, hearing the creak of leather. I was admiring the cage with the leather pad on top when I was approached from behind. Hands undid my belt buckle and the snaps on my leather pants, pushed me forward, and bent me over so my torso was on the leather pad. Okay. Looks like I’m going to get fucked now. I don’t get fucked often, my hole is pretty tight, but his size was not a problem. He worked his way in without too much trouble and started fucking me. I picked up his rhythm and would push back as he pushed forward.
I love getting fucked. Getting fucked is like pizza in that even when it’s just okay it’s still pretty good. I spread my feet wider and arched my back. “I should do this more often,” I thought. “Why don’t I do this more often?”
Why indeed.
Because where I live fucking in a bar can get you kicked out of that bar, possibly 86’d for good. Because where I live we have to rely on apps. Wanting some action, we scroll through the profile photos. Marketing research tells us that an overabundance of options makes it more difficult rather than easier to choose. Finally we settle for one of those options. The messaging back and forth commences. Usually this ends with me or him making an excuse for not getting together then and there. I jerk off and go to bed.
He shot his load inside me. I love that. My sensitized anus can feel the throbbing as his dick pumps his gift into me. He moaned. Slowly he withdrew then leaned over and growled something in German in my ear. “Mein Deutsche is nicht sehr gute,” I said.
“Buy you a drink?”
“Ja! Danke schön!”
I followed him upstairs. He was wearing latex, a man about my age. Another whiskey for me and a fassbier (draught beer) for himself. His name was Martin. He was a lifelong Berliner. He grew up in the American Sector. He was a church organist. It was the Tuesday before Easter. “You have a busy weekend ahead! What will you be playing?”
We talked about church music. Being a High Church Episcopalian I know something about that.
He introduced me to his friend Bernt whose English was not as good.
“This is a great bar,” I said. Martin said it suited him but he wouldn’t call it great.
I described to him how in the U.S., women were allowed in leather bars and sex was not allowed. A bar could be shut down for allowing sex. “That makes no sense at all,” said Martin in careful English. “Why else would you go to a bar?”
Why else indeed.
While we talked, I noticed a man about thirty-five, stocky and muscular, with a handsome beard, smoking a cigar. I heard him speak English with an American accent, telling a Brit it was his first time in Berlin. At one point, he ventured downstairs and came back up almost immediately. He walked around, smoking his cigar, or leaned up against the wall, looking hot as hell. Around him, dicks were getting sucked, boots were being licked, piss pigs were getting a drink. He circled back to the Brit and they talked some more. And then he left. He didn’t engage once with anyone. I couldn’t help wondering why not. Whatever he was after sexually was available to him there. Did none of his fellow patrons meet the requirements he had in mind? I got the impression that he had no idea what the rules were, had no idea how to engage.
I’d made the trip to Berlin for Leather Easter. This year was the fiftieth anniversary of the event, put on by BLF, Berlin Leder und Fetisch. There were organized events, a leather dinner, the Mr. Berlin Leather Contest (Congratulations, Miroto!), erotic art shows, play parties, a PIG party, and even a boat ride. Alas, by the time I got around to getting tickets for the dinner and the boat ride they were sold out. I did have tickets for the PIG party but did not end up going. I didn’t want to take time away from the bars. Every time I stepped inside a bar it was as if the leather gods had answered all of my lifelong prayers: a bar filled with men in leather and fetish gear all looking for action and getting it.
On my second night in Berlin, I went looking for action at New Action. New Action was packed, and I got there not long after they opened at 10 P.M. A larger space than Scheune, again inside the door is a barroom. (New Action has a cover of ten Euros and that gets you a plastic token good for one drink.) Beyond is a room about twenty-five feet by twenty-five feet with three tiers of benches going up along the lefthand side and the back. If they ever gave out awards for leather bar design excellence, New Action would go home with the gold. This room is all about display: showing off what you got and getting a look at what is on offer. Men in leather and rubber and skinhead gear stood in the center or sat on the tiered benches. Boots were there for the licking.
I like erotic encounters when one man is In Charge and the other man is very much Not In Charge. I do not describe myself as a “switch.” I prefer “opportunist”: if the connection is there, I will find a way for both of us to have a good time and I am experienced enough to do a good job at that. As a Top, I enjoy bondage and singletail whips. On the bottom…well, I’ll leave it up to my partner and as long as I don’t end up going to the ER or end up on a slab in the morgue I’m good. But even when I was just starting out, I was always given more opportunities for domination than for submission. Maybe that is attributable to the infamous Top/bottom imbalance, but very often, with men who present themselves as dominant and me being as submissive as I can be, it just doesn’t work. More than a few Tops have told me that they are intimidated by me.
As I stood in the center of this erotic amphitheater at New Action, I decided that none of the men in their beautiful boots would be intimidated by the likes of me. In terms of submitting to a dominant man, this was an opportunity I had waited for my entire life. I dove right in, and I was completely correct about my intuition. I spent that night at New Action worshipping boots and leather and latex encased torsos and crotches until my lips were chapped. It was a night of absolute wild abandon.
Behind the room with the tiers is a bathroom and also a maze of dark corridors. I preferred the room with the tiers. One of the things that make Tom of Finland’s drawings so compelling is that for the most part, his men are getting up to whatever they are getting up to in broad daylight, without fear or shame, no need for the cover of darkness. This middle room was well lit. As I was being a boot hound, everyone in the room could see me being a boot hound.
The men whose boots I worshipped as they smoked their cigars, resplendent in their leathers, all of them were completely comfortable with domination. If any or all of them were so impressed with my submission that he hauled me home, stripped me, beat me, and locked me in a cell in his dungeon, claiming me as his property for the rest of my days, I would not be surprised. If a man wanted to beat my ass with his crop or grind his boot into my crotch he did it. He was a Superior, I was an inferior. That’s what I was there for. That is the natural order of things. I was to be used.
And those men were, of course, just men. They had jobs; they were church organists or house painters or pharmacists or airline pilots or hotel managers. They saw their doctors for annual check-ups, sat in dentist’s chairs, went home to be with their families at Christmas, had, at times, to navigate the civil service bureaucracy. But whenever they wanted, they could put on their leathers and their boots and take themselves off to New Action, get a beer, say hello to friends, wait for a seat on the benches to open up, settle themselves in, light a cigar, feel the eyes of a hungry boot pig on them, pick him out of the crowd, and with some small gesture invite him to submit. Whatever necessities of life hemmed them in during the daylight hours, here at New Action there are no limits to the aspects of themselves they want to explore and discover.
And that’s how it was for me, too. I could just dissolve into surrender and submission.
It was glorious.
I spent my first nights fulfilling all of my fantasies of submission built up over a lifetime, and then decided that I would round out the experience. I headed out with my whip and a pair of handcuffs secured to my belt, a predator on the hunt. Berlin, of course, did not disappoint.
My nights of submission served me well as I had to relearn everything I thought I knew about cruising in leather bars. Vetting, negotiation, discussion of limits and aptitudes here are implied rather than explicit, nothing interrupting the interplay of leathersex. I found my feet quickly and without too much trouble, in spite of all my insecurities.
Again at Scheune, I had to piss. I went to the bathroom and there sitting next to the toilet was a handsome piss pig. “Bitte…” he said and then opened his mouth wide. “No! You’re inconveniently pee shy!” shouted my insecurities, but I did not want to disappoint the man. I plopped my dick in his mouth. I didn’t have to keep him waiting long. Our eyes locked, I let my piss flow, he gulped it down like nectar of the gods, savoring every drop. Then, his expert pig mouth went to work. My dick stiffened. I swear I’m not exaggerating: it was one of the best blowjobs I have ever gotten in my life. I felt my balls churning and started to moan.
“Willst du meinen Arsch?”
“Ja!” I answered.
He got up and then braced himself over the sink.
I looked down at my dick. I was hard as iron pipe. I sank it into his arsch to my balls.
Damn. I had forgotten how good it feels to fuck a man, how great it feels to move in and out of that warm wet tunnel, feeling him relax and tighten his hole, knowing I am giving him as much pleasure as he is giving me. He and I rocked with freight train rhythm.
He got my load.
After exchanging Dankes I asked if I could get him a drink. “You already did,” he said, “and I get my drinks here.”
I headed out to the bar.
I got a whiskey and that’s when I saw him.
He was about five foot eight inches with a lean, muscular body. He was wearing skinhead bleachers and braces, boots and a leather vest. His head was shaved and his face looked like a clenched fist. His dark, soulful eyes were looking at me. I returned his stare.
He approached smiling, then stood in front of me, head bowed, hands clenched behind his back.
With my gloved hand I slapped his face, full force. His smile now became a grin.
I took my handcuffs from the holder on my belt, turned him around, and secured them to his wrists. Now he was mine. I smacked his ass hard several times, probed the crack. With my gloved hand planted on top of his head I forced him to his knees. I presented my boots to him and he went to work with his mouth. I took another sip of my whiskey and lit a cigarette.
He looked magnificent, slobbering all over my Wesco loggers. When he was servicing my left boot, I raised my right foot and planted the heel first on his back and then on his head. My diverse desires came into focus: I wanted to use this man, to subjugate him totally. I wanted to lock my steel collar around his neck. I wanted to hurt him, to make him bleed and sob. I wanted to lock him in a cage for days at a time, eating table scraps gratefully from my hand, squatting to shit like an animal.
With both hands I grabbed his head, moved him so he was sitting upright, then bent down and whispered in his ear: I could fall in love with a man like you, pig.
He moaned and relaxed his head against my thigh. I took out my dick. He was looking up at me with awe and wonder. I spat in his face then slapped him again hard. Another grin from him. I pushed back his forehead so his mouth opened and shoved my dick down his throat. He choked at first, then relaxed and closed his mouth around it, his tongue working the underside of the shaft. I held the back of his head and skull fucked him, all the way in, all the way out.
He was very good with his mouth. I wanted to see what else he could do with it.
There was a leather sofa at the back of the bar near where we were enjoying each other. I got him into position sitting on the floor with his back leaning against the sofa. It was the perfect height. I dropped my pants, turned around, straddled him, and then sat down, forcing his head back onto the seat of the sofa as I did so. His tongue was as muscular as his body. I felt it exploring my shit hole. He lapped furiously, moaning with pleasure. I relaxed, another sip of whiskey, another smoke, lazily stroking my dick.
After a time, I decided that all the pleasure he was giving me should be rewarded with some pain. I repositioned the both of us. I shifted his leather vest off of his shoulders and eased it down his arms so it hung from the handcuffs then slipped his braces off his shoulders. There wasn’t enough room in the bar for me to use my whip so I used my hands, punching and slapping his muscular back, watching his white skin turn pink and then darken. One day I would whip this man and whip him severely, holding nothing back. He is magnificent and deserves nothing short of the best that I have.
My palms started to sting so I switched it up. I turned him around so he faced me. Our eyes locked. As if he intuited what was coming, he tightened his abdominal muscles. I began to punch him, putting my weight behind each jab. When you are getting your abs punched, the pain is not so much from the punches as it is from having to keep your muscles tensed. Those muscles fatigue and soon they are screaming at you for release. Our eyes were locked the whole time, his face spoke of determination to hold out and a yearning to earn my approval. He wanted to impress me.
I sensed that he was reaching his breaking point. Rather than a solid gut punch leaving him winded and gasping, I relented my assault and I kissed him, first his forehead, then his neck, then his lips. That mouth that had done so well on my dick and on my shit hole was also good at kissing. I retrieved my keys from my belt loop, found the handcuff key among them, and set him free from the cuffs.
He wrapped his arms around me and I wrapped my arms around him. We both sat together on the sofa. I held him tight, kissed him, whispered sweet words in his ear. We were like two teenagers on a first date. The world receded and we had the universe to ourselves for awhile.
And then we spoke.
He is Swiss. His first language is French. My French is much better than my German and his English is about as good as my German so French is the language we used. In fact, his name is the name assigned to me in my middle school French class as there is no French equivalent.
I asked if he would like a beer and he said he would. I went to the bar and got us two. I drank mine from the glass. I gave him his by taking a mouthful, swishing it around, and then spitting it into his mouth.
He was heading home to Switzerland the next day. He told me his screen name on Recon. (Finally, after all these years, Recon turns out to be good for something.) Back in my room with the hotel’s wifi, I found him and sent him a message. We messaged back and forth as he packed, then switched to WhatsApp. We are still messaging back and forth. That night was as meaningful to him as it was to me. He calls me Maître, I call him esclave.
Although I have been home in Palm Springs for several weeks, a part of me never left Berlin. I miss the bars and the men in the bars, I miss the streets lined with elegant architecture, I dearly miss my afternoon Kaffee und Kuchen.
I don’t want for Berlin to be the repository of my sexuality. I don’t want airfare and hotel costs to be the price I have to pay for erotic joy, to feel truly myself—a leatherman among leathermen.
I want somehow to have that here.