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Go late on the weekend as the clubs spill out to make the most of the pumped-up muscle crowd, who find their way from nearby Fire and beyond. It was very early doors, there were a handful of people scattered around and a couple of poles minus the dancers. Especially the area surrounding the Ethnographic and Archaeology Museums are interesting places to wander around. A good place to start your evening, before you head out to dance in one of the other bars in the gay district nearby.In Butch Girls Don't Cry, a self-proclaimed vintage tart encounters a mysterious stranger in her apartment building's sauna room. Annabelle Georgen, Culture Editor of the queer city magazine SIEGESSÄULE, introduces ten special spas and thermal baths all over Berlin where gays, lesbians and the queer community are welcome. Last week I was in the sauna on my own when another girl came in and lay down naked on the bench opposite me. The situation was just so excruciatingly uncomfortable; it felt I’d taken my nan to watch “ Blue is the Warmest Colour“ at the movies.

When the tour eventually concluded, we all scurried back to the (now slightly busier) main bar and were asked if we wanted to stay for the evening. A college girl can’t help admiring the body of an older woman that works out at the gym at the same time as her every day. However, next time I want to go to a sex party, I will just go to the sex party, not a lesbian sauna. BCN Checkpoint is a community-based center for the detection of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections, targeted at gay men, other men who have sex with men, and transgender women.

They could have done this on any other day, at any time, but they decided that midnight at a women’s event was the perfect time to force their way into the bathhouse. This was no fault of the sauna, the facilities, or the folks inside; everything and one was just swell. For almost 50 years, Berliners have been coming here to relax for a few hours in an esoteric atmosphere.