By Alexander Cheves
On Saturday, July 25, Berlin’s joyful Christopher Street Day ended in tragedy: a man drove a van into the crowd near the Brandenburg Gate, then attacked people with a machete.
One woman died, a 65-year-old Polish citizen visiting Berlin with her daughter, and 29 more were severely injured. The next evening, the Gate glowed rainbow over a small manmade field of flowers and candles with the words “Berlin, Stadt der Freiheit” (city of freedom) projected onto the side.
Queer Berlin is still struggling for words, so I called someone who has used language as a tool of love and revolt all his life. Dan Glass is a London and Berlin-based activist, author, and historian, and a dear friend. When I reach him, it’s 4 a.m. in Rio de Janeiro, where he’s attending the International AIDS Conference. He flew out of Europe the morning of CSD and woke up in Brazil to the news.
“I messaged my friends, messaged you, messaged everyone I care about to just check in that they’re OK,” he says. “Because that’s the first thing you do with your loved ones.”
I know Dan Glass through queer media. (I published my own piece in The Advocate about the attack.) Dan is a powerhouse: he reformed the London chapter of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, in 2014, an organization born of the 1980s AIDS crisis and active in chapters worldwide today.
He wrote the books United Queerdom and Queer Footprints, on London’s radical queer history, and founded Queer Tours of London, honoring the city’s hidden queer past. In 2008, at Downing Street, he superglued himself to then-prime minister Gordon Brown to protest a planned runway at London’s Heathrow Airport that would have worsened air pollution for hundreds of thousands of people. The stunt made international headlines.
And for nearly a decade, he’s run This Is My Culture, a free queer protest party held every summer in London.
You do a lot. How do you describe yourself to new people?
“I’m a very lucky faggot doing my best to carry the torch for liberation from our ancestors to the next generation.”
All his work rests on grief, he says: the AIDS crisis, four grandparents who survived the Nazi Holocaust, and his own HIV diagnosis in 2005.
And, he tells me, he lost four friends to suicide because of homophobic, orthodox religion. “And that was only by age 15,” he says. “There have unfortunately been quite a few more since then.”
If anyone can speak to this moment, it’s him.
What would you say to young queer people in Berlin right now?
For many young people, I say, last weekend was the first hate-fueled attack they witnessed firsthand.
“My primary message now would be to never underestimate the power of grief. Feel it, be vulnerable to it, surrender to it.”
He wants to hammer this point: It’s good to grieve.
“Grief has so much alchemy. Feel it for as deep long as you can, because grief, for the queer community and any oppressed community, has so much potency to carry us forward in our ability to make a different world.”
He’s lived through this before. In 1999, a neo-Nazi bombed the Admiral Duncan gay pub in London, killing three people. Dan Glass takes tours to the site every year.
“On the 25th of July 2026, we will remember that and mark that day for the rest of our lives.”
He points to ACT UP’s Ashes Action of 1992, when mourners threw the ashes of loved ones lost to AIDS over the White House fence to protest government inaction to the health crisis.
“It still gives me shivers when I think about that,” he says. “They utilised, in a very genuine way, their grief as a tool for transformation and direct action. Honouring the dead to fight for the living.”
“Grief is the most powerful tool in my toolkit as an activist. And for any queer, really, when you dig beneath the surface, grief is the most transformative thing in our treasure chest for changing ourselves and the world.”
Why grief before action?
As I wrote in The Advocate, the attack was immediately politicized: the far-right AfD demanded deportations, Berlin’s mayor called Islamism “the greatest threat to the queer community in Germany,” and the CDU accused the Left party of “denying the reality of the Islamist threat.”
Berliner CSD e.V., the group behind Pride, pushed back: “We do not want this deed to be used for political ends.”
Musing on all this, Dan Glass says: “A lot of people are skipping over grief and moving straight to action. We’ve got the rest of our lives to activate on this. But give grief space. Grief is a beast.”
A friend sent him a flyer for a Berlin gathering billed as a movement from grief to anger to resistance.
“Even that, for me, is too premeditative,” he says. “It underpins the value of grief in itself. Why can’t we lean into grief? Of course it will lead to resistance. But grief is so special.”
He’s grieving many things right now. Three weeks ago, a friend died, a queer filmmaker who co-produced the 2023 documentary Beautiful Trouble, starring Glass. The death from cancer was expected, but still hurts.
“I’m trying to lean into the journey of grief and how powerful it is.”
I tell him that, in Germany at least, queer grief already feels like a political strategy for anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant politicians. He says this is to be expected:
“Fascist power always plays on oppressed people’s vulnerability. We shouldn’t let them take our capacity for transformation. That’s our power. That’s our power to critically think and feel on our own terms.”
“I want our grief to be maximised for its power rather than wrapped up in the state’s mission,” he says. “That’s not me denying we need to respond to institutional homophobia and oppression in all forms, but let’s give ourselves time to heal, connect, and respond.”
What have you learned from running This Is My Culture for a decade?
Dan Glass knows queer nightlife is often where grief and joy meet. This Is My Culture began in 2017, after the death of gay pop megastar George Michael, as an act of mourning.
The name honors George Michael’s defiance in 2006, when a paparazzo ambushed him while he was cruising on Hampstead Heath. His reply, as he later told Gay Times, was iconic: “Are you gay? No? Then fuck off! This is my culture!”
Though it invaded his privacy, seeing a celebrity so proudly celebrating his sex life, the way I celebrate mine, still leaves a lump in my throat over his loss. Michael was arrested by an undercover cop in an L.A. public toilet in 1998, outing him to the world; he responded with “Outside,” a music video that turned a public toilet into a discotheque. He died of heart disease on Christmas Day 2016, at 53.
Dan Glass and friends took the party to the Heath at the spot regulars call the “fuck tree.” It became a ticketless, unlicensed gathering with speakers from liberation movements, DJs, naked oil wrestling, and a piñata, often of a shared nemesis (Thatcher once got smashed). It’s grown over the years from a few hundred people to a few thousand.
This Is My Culture turned ten this year. But there was a hiccup: as Britain’s protest laws hardened, the party drew police attention, and an injunction now bans Dan from the area.
The official letter, which he shared with me, says the party must end because Dan Glass and comrades displayed banners with “offensive and profane words in public view, including ‘fuck,’ ‘cunts,’ and ‘shit.'” The letter alleges that they referred to police officers “as ‘cunts’ and ‘wankers.'”
The letter is serious, but I tell him it’s the most rock-and-foll, badass thing I’ve ever seen. Even so, the risk is real:
“If I set foot there, they can arrest me,” he says.
Still, he says with a wry smile, he attended the ten-year anniversary party this year. “But I was ‘Gunther from Hamburg’, not Dan Glass,” he says with a wink.
He refuses to treat this as an ending. The group is recruiting twelve new This Is My Culture “disciples” to carry it forward.
“When you see birds flying in a V, they rotate so the leaders can rest. If you’re a good activist, you should do yourself out of a job. If you get run over by a bus, people must know it can continue.”
I ask about Berlin, his second home.
What does it mean that this attack happened here?
It happened just a short walk from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism, a proximity Glass felt personally. His four grandparents were all Nazi Holocaust survivors, two from Germany, two from Poland.
His Opa (grandfather) escaped Berlin as a teenager. His grandmother survived the war by hiding in a cupboard in Holland. Her sister was murdered in Auschwitz. When Germany paid the couple reparations, they bought a rug, and his grandmother called it “the blood money of my sister.”
His relationship with Berlin is rendered more complex by this history. His great-grandparents married in the Neue Synagoge, the iconic golden-domed synagogue on Oranienstraße, close to where he lives now. His grandfather went to school nearby and delivered cigarettes by bicycle to the city’s cabarets.
On one bike trip in 1938, his grandfather saw the Reichstag burning.
“For me, Berlin is a real process of reclamation. I find it so special that I’m even here, in the knowledge of how my ancestors left, or fled. It’s powerful that I’ve been able to come back.”
He feels the city’s many memorials tell an incomplete story, and he points to Blessed Is the Flame, a book on concentration camp resistance, and to Hannah Szenes, the Hungarian-born, Jewish poet who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe to aid the resistance and was executed in 1944: “Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.”
Many memorials, he says, paint queer folks only as victims, never agitators. “The memorials never say we resisted, on a queer level, on a Jewish level,” he says.
“No one can call us victims. We were resisting here. We were resisting fascism in all its forms.”
The modern, “super corporate” versions of Pride have “issues,” he says, but:
“Look at CSD and Internationalist Queer Pride: what a totem of resistance! We will never be victims. We will always be resisting. We’ll always be fighting back.”
Tell me about the AIDS Conference. What are you doing there?
He’s in Rio with our mutual friend Dan Hall, an independent film producer and fellow member of ACT UP London; together they run the podcast HIV: The Morning After. The conference draws some 10,000 people, and Dan Glass says it’s beautiful and overwhelming in equal measure.
Among those they’ve interviewed there: an Amazonian singer who came out publicly with his HIV status and calls the rainforest his spiritual guide, a leader of a Nigerian sex workers alliance, and members of a Colombian nurses union. These are people doing vital, on-the-ground work and changing their communities: people, I think to myself, much like Dan Glass himself.
Before we hang up, he shares two quotes he’s been thinking on. The first is Martin Luther King Jr., from 1967: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”
“Love is the most revolutionary force. It is so powerful. It’s not some weak thing we get sold on Valentine’s Day. Where can this love for each other, for our community, take us?”
The writer Tennessee Williams is the second quote. Dan reads it to me in full, and it moves me to tears:
“The world is violent and mercurial. It will have its way with you. We are saved only by love. Love for each other and the love we pour into the art we feel compelled to share. Being a parent, being a writer, being a painter, being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.”
Dan Glass returns to Europe next week and plans to spend more time in Berlin. He’s writing a people’s history for ACT UP’s 40th anniversary and developing a film. His retirement plan: sell ice cream to queers out of a van he’ll call the Wham Bam Ice Cream Van (a reference to the Wham! song) and live “a good life, because we deserve it.”
But right now, the sun is rising over the beach in Rio, and Dan Glass wants to go for a run. He leaves me with some words for me, for everyone:
“You’re needed and wanted on this planet,” he says. “And we need to be here in the long game.”
Follow Dan Glass on lnstagram and see all his links on LinkTree, where you can find his recent appearances, books, and more.
Alexander Cheves is an author and essayist exploring sex, culture, art, and music. Winner of the Geoff Mains Prize and an NLGJA journalism award, he can usually be found dancing shirtless in Berlin or working on his next book.
Images: Mara Menzel + images provided by Dan Glass
