‘When I was a kid, my father and I were close, and I felt loved. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he became disillusioned with politics and turned to the extreme right. As I grew up, we fought all the time. When I was sixteen, after another fight, I moved out and went to live with my lover. My father and I did not talk for years. All my lovers back then were at least ten years older than I was, and they were all hairy.
As I grew older, I became more open to different and more diverse kinds of masculinities. A lover of mine has red hair but no body hair whatsoever, and his skin is white like porcelain or milk. I am also into what they called Adepten in Ancient Greece; guys who are between adolescence and manhood. On the one hand, they are still young, but on the other, you can almost see their mature masculinity, it is literally shining through. You can see what kind of men they will soon become. That is superhot.
Image: Elvin Boer
I have three husbands. Stephan is forty-seven, he is more mature, completely shaven except for his moustache. There is something incredibly kinky about the combination of a shaven body with excessive natural facial hair; two extremes that reinforce each other. These features, combined with Stephan’s ‘70s sunglasses, is just totally porn to me. Jens is younger, he is thirty-seven, he is cuddly and very furry. The furriest of them all is Marc, he is fifty-four and the one of my husbands I’m legally married to.
What attracts me most in my three men is that they are authentic. They are natural and true to what they feel. I do not like men who play games or are fake just to project an ideal image, that is too Instagrammable for me. We have an open relationship, so we do date other men. Honesty is key. At the end of the day – or night – we always come back to each other.
Image: Elvin Boer
I am not much into the gay scene in terms of clubbing. I prefer hiking in nature. But I try to be active in my community in different ways. I live in Lebensort Vielfalt, a multi-generational house for gay men in Berlin. In most North-European countries, everything is so integrated that gay culture gets erased in a big melting pot. For me, it is important to keep your own space. It is not a ghetto where I live, the only thing we have in common is that we are men and gay. It is the diversity within this group that I love.
Fifteen years ago, my father got diagnosed with cancer and we decided to put the things that were dividing us aside and look for the things that were connecting us. We became closer and closer. The last thing we said to each other was that we love each other. When he died, my mother, my brothers and I washed and dressed him before we called the doctor and the funeral service. I see now that the older I get, the more like him I am.’
