Kreuzberg gay bar

The Cosy Corner was a shabby same-sex attracted bar located in the working-class district of Kreuzberg, just around the corner from W. H. Auden’s lodgings on Fürbingerstraße. Auden and Christopher Isherwood were regular customers, using it as a place to face working-class men and boys. In Goodbye to Berlin (), Isherwood fictionalised the Cosy Corner as the ‘Alexander Casino’; and he revisited it many years later, in Christopher and His Kind (), as the site of his sexual initiation.

In Isherwood’s self-mythology, the Cosy Corner became symbolic of the conclude rejection of bourgeois morality that Berlin enabled him to achieve. This was not a commercialised venue that catered for queer-curious straight customers and tourists, like the Eldorado, but a truly decadent place. Isherwood introduced other English visitors to the Cosy Corner, including John Lehmann, who left a candid account of his see in his erotic memoir, In the Purely Pagan Sense ().

While these English writers used the Cosy Corner imaginatively to abscond their social privilege, the working-class men and boys