Cruising the Countryside at Schwules Museum in Berlin insists on a simple, unsettling truth: queer life did not begin at the gates of the city. Curated by researcher Collin Klugbauer, the show traces how queer histories and present-day realities in rural Germany have been lived, archived and forgotten, and how they can be seen differently if the countryside is treated as a complex space instead of a backdrop.
Collin Klugbauer's central claim is straightforward: queer life in rural areas has always existed in many forms. What changes outside the metropolis is not the presence of queer people, but the way their lives are seen, documented and remembered. The exhibition deliberately breaks with the urban myth that freedom belongs to the city and backwardness to the village, showing that rural spaces hold contradiction, intimacy, repression, solidarity and invention at the same time.
An Archive Search That Had to Begin Indirectly
Because Schwules Museum is a Berlin institution, the search for rural queerness had to start indirectly. Collin Klugbauer describes digging through archives, networks and overlooked materials that were never neatly tagged as "countryside". What emerged was not a footnote to metropolitan queer culture, but a dense and surprising landscape of traces.
One of the clearest examples comes from magazines of the 1920s such as Garçon and Die Freundin. At first glance, they look like documents of Weimar Berlin's urban queer life. Read more closely, they reveal contact ads and letters from women in small towns and rural areas who were searching for friendships, companionship and love far beyond the capital.
Hella Knabe and the Letters of Rural Trans Lives
A similar shift in perspective appears in the material around Hella Knabe, a Berlin tailor who created gender-affirming clothing in the 1920s and 30s and offered trans people a discreet, affirming place to explore gender expression. Knabe was visited by people from across Germany, including rural regions, and letters preserved in her files show how powerful these encounters could be. One letter from 1935 describes arriving in fear and leaving with a sense of relief after simply being welcomed and allowed to change clothes without shame or spectacle.
These details matter because they dismantle a familiar fantasy. The countryside was never empty of queer longing, and the city was never the only space where queer selfhood could be assembled. The exhibition reveals a network of movement between places: people travelling, writing, ordering clothes, sending letters, building contacts and creating fragile infrastructures of survival across distance.
Osnabrück 1983: The Rainbow Flag With an Extra Pink Stripe
The exhibition also moves into the postwar decades and shows how queer presence takes shape in smaller cities through activism, symbols and coalition work. A key object here is a rainbow flag from Osnabrück dating to 1983, described as the first of its kind in the Federal Republic and designed with an extra pink stripe referencing the pink triangle and the memory of Nazi persecution. The flag points to a local history in which queer politics did not necessarily appear as a large, self-contained scene, but often as part of broader leftist and civic alliances.
This is crucial for Collin Klugbauer's reading of rural activism. In smaller places there were often not enough people to sustain a big, separate queer infrastructure, so groups had to build alliances with other movements. Rural and small-town queer politics therefore often look less like metropolitan scene culture and more like coalition, improvisation and mutual dependence.
Bikers, Farmers and the Queer Life Rural Germany Refuses to Hide
Collin Klugbauer's research also follows queer motorcycle clubs, feminist riding networks and agricultural organising. This part of the exhibition is especially sharp because it rejects the idea that rural life is culturally thin. Leather scenes, queer biker communities and feminist support networks appear not as imported urban aesthetics, but as real formations shaped by roads, distance, masculinity, risk and practical solidarity.
Agriculture becomes a central lens. Collin Klugbauer frames farming as a queer and feminist issue because family-run farms often reproduce rigid gender roles through inheritance, labour and cohabitation. If home and work are on the same property, bringing a partner there can mean outing yourself in ways that urban residents often underestimate.
That is why the inclusion of ELAN, an emancipatory agricultural network organised as a FLINTA project, matters. Their work connects feminism, queerness, land use, climate politics and food justice, showing that rural queer politics is not only about visibility but also about material conditions. The countryside here is not just a symbolic battleground, but a space where housing, work, mobility and care are structurally entangled.
Infrastructure, Health Care and the Weight of Distance
The exhibition is clear that romanticising rural queerness would be just as misleading as erasing it. Collin Klugbauer points to the infrastructural realities that shape queer life outside major cities: weaker medical access, longer travel times, poorer psychological care and fewer local networks. These conditions affect everyone, but they hit trans people in particular when treatment or counselling requires hours of travel and a level of mobility not everyone has.
The conversation becomes more urgent when it turns to the current political climate. Data on the past year shows that many Pride marches were disrupted, and examples like Bad Freienwalde and Bautzen illustrate how visible queer life in smaller places is increasingly targeted. In this reading, these incidents are not just culture-war gestures against queer communities. They are attacks on democratic plurality itself.
This is where the rural Pride becomes more than a local feel-good event. A CSD in a small town is not only a parade, but a public test of who gets to appear, who receives protection and whether civil society will defend self-determination when the setting is an exposed market square rather than a big-city boulevard. That is also why Collin Klugbauer stresses the role of alliances: in many rural regions, broad civic coalitions understand that far-right violence aimed at queer people threatens the entire social fabric.
Why This Exhibition Matters for a Berlin Audience
For Berlin-based readers, this story lands with a necessary discomfort. The city still likes to imagine itself as the place where queer life becomes fully visible and politically legible. But Cruising the Countryside at Schwules Museum suggests a different map: one in which Berlin is only one node in a much larger history of queer survival, desire and invention across rural Germany.
That shift in perspective changes the question. It is no longer why don't rural queer people just move to the city, but what kinds of culture, memory and support already exist there, and why have urban institutions taken so long to recognise them. The exhibition does not sentimentalise the countryside. It gives it back its contradictions.
Its most important gesture is to refuse treating rural queer life as a side note. Instead, it becomes part of the architecture of queer history in Germany: contact ads, tailor's letters, rainbow flags with an extra pink stripe, biker jackets, farm collectives and village Prides that continue even as threats increase. Queer life, this exhibition suggests, has always existed far bey
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