How it really happened…

So at one point in my life, only a bit more than six years ago, I packed my bags a moved to Berlin. No German under my belt and only a few previous visits to the capital to go on. I had a boyfriend at the time and with him set out to stake my fortune. Berlin had a lot of allure for me. From images of the film Christiane F. and its wild, fast and tragic youth in shiny and disheveled West Berlin to those all too familiar images of Iggy and Bowie here in the 1970s to the fact that one of my idols, Bruce LaBruce, shot two of his most beloved films here – the 2004 art-porn hybrid The Raspberry Reich and 2008’s Otto; or Up with Dead People (but more on him later). The broken cobble-stone streets and the endless late shops crossed with the nightlife energy happening here were totally exciting for me. But I still had a goal: to record my experiences and passions and share them with the world.

So here, I was. Working weird night jobs, learning German when no one was looking and taking internships after I already had a university education under my belt. On the side. Not too long after getting here I landed a job at a middle-sized city magazine. This being Berlin, they didn’t have any problem with their gay punk dandy and his predilections for writing about the sexier and dirtier sides of the city. Through them I learned the ropes of being more than a freelance writer but of how a magazine and its corresponding online arm worked – deadlines, working with different writers, being able to spot good (and terrible) writing in an instant. It was a second education for me and taught me things through experience that I could never learn in the everybody-gets-a-fucking-chance world of the university.

Possibly the biggest impact on me was my year-in-year-out coverage of Berlin’s PornFilmFestival, which was not always exactly, strictly hardcore films, but so much more. The festival was and still is the meeting point of some of the world’s most interesting people. I met feminist French porn starlets, bulky sex documentarians, eccentric gay hippies (or so they first appeared), eager porn educators, other journalists, directors, producers, just about everyone with any perspective on porn possible. And that also made it interesting. It was never one kind of porn or sex represented, but I had a million options to choose from. Among the people there was Jürgen Brüning, one of the founders of the fest, and the producer of the films that had such a profound effect on me early on. Yeah, he was Bruce LaBruce’s producer. And producer of The Raspberry Reich which blew me away when I first saw it.

It was an intelligent, irreverent and sexually explicit film that proved art, intellect, style and porn. That, in conjunction with the PornFilmFestival, opened up my eyes. Porn wasn’t just something to jack off to, there’s a whole world that goes with sex IRL, and so it should be with porn, too. Why not combine these things? Why not make sex part of a larger dialogue? Part of the many things that interest us as gay men.

It was these experiences and ideas that ultimately tempted me to begin my own venture. Nothing comes from just nothing. And I’m thankful for all the experiences that brought me to the conception of Dandy Dicks. I hope you are too.