Return home. What many people associate with a comforting, familiar feeling often causes difficulties for queer people in particular. At least that’s how the successful artist Nadia, the eponymous heroine in the story of Can Mayaoglu, experiences it when she returns to her hometown of Hamburg, which becomes a confrontation with everything she left behind five years ago. About her great love Rahel, but also her younger sister Dilhan, who disappeared without a trace. Can Mayaoglu, born in 1982, grew up in Münster in a German-Turkish psychologist household and studied religious studies. She will present her book “Nadja” on September 2nd in the context of the “1st Queer Literature Festival Munich”, organized by Queerculture e. V. is organized in cooperation with the Munich City Library and Gasteig München GmbH.
The three-day festival will open the evening before with a Munich story from the early 1980s, in which the Bavarian capital, with its ambivalence between freedom and repression, is both a lighthouse and a cliff: In his novel “Sauhund”, Lion Christ tells the story of Flori, who died from country comes to the city to look for the full life there – and a man who loves him at least forever. This Flori is an incorrigible optimist and good-for-nothing, a “bastard” to whom Christ erects an intoxicated monument against the background of the first decade of AIDS. The author, who comes from Bad Tölz, received the Munich Literature Grant for his debut novel in 2021, and “Sauhund” was published by Hanser Verlag this August.
In addition to the readings for adults in Hall X of Gasteig HP 8, there will also be a reading for children on Saturday afternoon, in which stories about being different and stories about being oneself will be presented in a way that is child-friendly. Only families with children are admitted to the library after prior written registration.
This event will probably not become a political issue like the drag reading for children that the Munich City Library offered this June during the so-called Pride Weeks for the LGBTIQ scene. Because this time it’s not a drag king who reads – his name “Eric Big Clit”, big clitoris, sparked the excitement in early summer – but the actor Mario Högemann. From texts such as “Butterfly Child” by Marc Majeweski or “Everything pink” by Maurizio Onano about gender clichés and rainbow families, selected by the children’s bookstore Kuckuck.
1st Queer Literature Festival Munich, Fri., Sep. 1 – Sun., Sep. 3, Gasteig HP8, information and tickets via www.queerliteratur.de