Vorleser*innen

"20 year old boy, a bit shy and still inexperienced, looking for tender and sensitive boys not only for bed!" "Just a lonely country lad interested in cross dressing, TVism and discipline." "Where is the 'penetrating' lesbian for 'penetrating' encounters?"

Lesbians and gays, trans people and queer cis peeps - alliances and common struggles, but also distribution struggles and fears characterize the relationships within queer communities. The lecture performance Vorleser*innen by Alex Mounji and Evan Tepest searches for the intersections and conflicts of queer movements in a historical-creative and playful-activist way for Queer History Month.

Despite the criminalization of their lives, appearances, desires and forms of encounters, queer and gender non-conforming people have always found ways to find each other. With the mass distribution of (print) media and rising literacy rates, personal ads have played a central role in this. From the German Empire to the Weimar Republic, through the seemingly conservative 1950s and the homosexual emancipation movement to the AIDS crisis and the age of online hookups - Alex Mounji and Evan Tepest read archival testimonies of people in search of love and sex, friendship and community. And ask themselves questions in the process: What is our relationship to dating apps? Which personal ads would we rather not have read? How would we have looked for love as gay boys in the 70s?

What approaches to political and private intimacy were there? In keeping with the fragmentation of queer archives, Vorleser*innen aims with text snippets and queer bodies right into a public space that is not really intended for this.

Lecture performance by and with
Alex Mounji
Evan Tepest

There are three time slots:
11-11.40 a.m.
12-12.40 p.m.
13-13.40 p.m.