So you chose a recording by Claire Waldoff. GROSS: We asked you to suggest a performer, a singer, that we could listen to to give us some sense of the music people were listening to then at perhaps some of the gay clubs. They advertised all sorts of events, different kinds of venues and they also attracted advertisers who were really appealing to a gay and lesbian constituency, and that's also really startling, I think. So I think it's really important to emphasize these publications because they were sort of the substrate, in a certain way, of this culture. I mean, there was this proliferation of publications that started almost immediately after the founding of the Weimar Republic and it continued really right down to 1933 until the Nazi seizure of power. So it's really not until after Stonewall that one sees this sort of open expression of gay identity or homosexual identity - lesbian identity. I think there probably had never been anything like this before and there was no culture as open again until the 1970s. There were gay publications that were sold at kiosks, which is, you know, kind of remarkable for the 1930s. My impression from your book is that the gay subculture in Berlin not only included, you know, like, clubs and bars, but there were gay movies. Robert Beachy is an associate professor of history at Goucher College in Baltimore. Beachy is now writing a follow-up book about homosexuality in Nazi Germany.
This relatively open gay culture attracted English writers and artists, including Christopher Isherwood, whose stories were adapted into the musical "Cabaret." My guest Robert Beachy is the author of the new book "Gay Berlin" that describes that this culture, why it flourished, how it contributed to our understanding of gay identity and how it was eradicated by the Nazis. Gay prostitution flourished too, so did black male. More specifically, it's about gay Berlin, the gay subculture that flourished in Berlin in the era between World War I and the rise of the Nazis, when there were nightclubs and cabarets that catered to a gay clientele, gay-themed theater and films and gay-oriented publications that were sold at kiosks. GROSS: That's the opening song from the musical "Cabaret." This interview is not about "Cabaret," but it is about the place, time and culture that "Cabaret" is set in, Berlin of the 1920s and early '30s. UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Singing) Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome.