Story:

All these beautiful men

When I thought about coming out, the first thing that came to mind was my inner coming out and my earliest childhood memories. Leafing through the German Quelle catalogue from the late 1980s, it wasn’t the toy pages that captivated me (beside Barbie Ken dolls), but rather the men’s underwear section. The reactions to this from the outside quickly made me realise that I had to keep this obsession hidden and also that I was probably a bit different from the other boys. How good it would have been to have queer role models in my life back then who could have made it clear to me that this is absolutely normal behaviour for a queer kid. “All these beautiful men” – I thought to myself as I leafed through the underwear pages in this catalog – Barbie Ken had already been ordered long ago and was browsing through the pages with me.