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Directed by Frank Ripploh
Written by Frank Ripploh
Starring:
- Frank Ripploh as Frank Ripploh
- Bernd Broaderup as Bernd
- Orpha Termin as Neighbor
- Peter Fahrni as Gas station attendant
Release Date: November 1, 1980
Rating: 
Real life reinvented as cinematic dramatization. Autobiography weaponized as gleeful provocation. Frank Ripploh puts his scandalous and proudly gay double life front and center, balancing the respectability of teaching by day with the irresistible temptations of queer hedonism by night. Playing himself, directing himself, and constantly poking fun at himself, Ripploh transforms his wild and kinky adventures through early-’80s West Berlin into an infectious celebration of freedom, pleasure, and unapologetic self-expression.
For all its cruising, hookups, and loud-and-proud horniness, the film’s biggest curveball is Bernd—played by the real-life Bernd himself. He walks in expecting Prince Charming; Frank walks in expecting another adventure. Bernd dreams of settling down, Frank dreams of never settling at all. The catch couldn’t be more deliciously tragic. Bernd is a hopeless monogamist who sees Frank as the love of his life, while Frank is an incorrigible polygamist who sees Bernd as one wonderful chapter in a much longer story. Suddenly, the movie isn’t just about sex anymore—it’s about two completely incompatible ideas of love trying to share the same bed.
Between urinals lined with peepholes that inevitably become glory holes, Frank Ripploh delivers one of cinema’s cheekiest middle fingers to intolerance. His autobiographical docudrama laughs straight in the face of the moral crusaders who shunned him and stripped him of his teaching career—not simply because he was gay, but because he refused to package his sexuality into something polite enough for postwar Germany. Set in the anything-goes nightlife of pre-AIDS West Berlin, the film revels in an underground world bursting with leather, rough trade, drag queens, and enough uninhibited homoeroticism to make Fassbinder spill his drink. The laughs come easy, the sex even easier, but Ripploh never settles for easy shock. He stares directly into his own reflection, turning autobiography into an intelligent psychosexual excavation fueled as much by self-awareness as self-mockery.
Ripploh’s storytelling gleefully crashes pornography into psychology, treating both with the same emotional weight as everyday life. His razor-sharp editing reshuffles every scandalous chapter of his gay autobiography into what gradually feels like a relentless self-interrogation. Or maybe self-therapy. Conversations wander in and out with almost accidental rhythm while the camera treats cocks, shameless anuses, and every variety of queer lust with complete matter-of-factness. Ripploh gradually reveals himself as a filmmaker completely at peace with his contradictions. He’s not chasing controversy for its own sake; he’s chasing self-understanding. By the time the notorious golden shower sequence arrives and the colorful humor slowly gives way to quiet reflection, the film closes not on scandal, but on acceptance. It’s a beautiful ending, and exactly the one this wonderfully unruly film deserves.
