I am a man and this is my story. This was about 4 years ago when I was still quite new in Berlin. I went to a well known venue with my friends on Sunday, and I guess I had Monday off so I decided to stay to experience a closing once while my friends left. Later I was sitting in the back of the room. At this time it’s always quite full so people were dancing in front of me, but the space next to me was free. A man came and sat down next to me, quite close and started rubbing his ass on me. I didn’t think much of it and moved over to make him space, but he just moved with me. I thought “ok this is weird” and got up and left, no big deal so far. I went to another area where you can sit on a bench. where somebody was already sitting and sat down next to them. A few minutes later I see the guy from before coming, ass first, trying to sit down on my lap. I was like “ok he didn’t get the hint” and pushed him away before he could sit down. That’s when he totally lost his shit.

So to set the scene I’m about 190cm so not too small either but this guy was easily over 210cm and about double my weight in muscles. And he started shouting in very broken English “I’M NOT GAY! I’M NOT GAY” and other stuff I couldn’t understand. Thankfully I saw somebody I knew and just went to them. But then I remembered that I was all alone in this dark club and this guy could overpower me easily in whatever corner if he wanted. And he was clearly not the most stable person when he reacted in this way when he felt that somebody was suggesting he was gay when rubbing his ass on other men. So I decided to leave.

Thankfully this didn’t affect me too much in the long run, I almost forgot about this incident in fact as incidents like this are incredibly uncommon for me, it just opened my eyes to what it feels to be powerless in such a situation, something probably every female looking person does experience all the time.

I have called out behaviour like this to that specific clubs security before when I saw it happen. I don’t know why I didn’t when it affected me personally.

I hope we can change this together so when clubs reopen we hopefully find ourselves in a better and more inclusive future.