Is 1928's Café Dorian Gray Actually Cubbyhole 2025?!

I'm enamored with Café Dorian Gray in 1928 Berlin – maybe because I've been to its twin(!), none other than the renowned Cubbyhole in 2025. Yes, really.

Also, this post is 1) a sneak peek to the second episode of Our Dyke Histories which launches Monday Nov 17th!!, and 2) TL;DR – though riddled with gossip and good stories! As well as primary content of what it's like to be in 1928 queer Berlin (OMFG, yay). The joy of writing in retrospect.

I've been deep in learning about the 80(!)-odd LGBTQ+ bars, clubs, and parties in 1925 Berlin. Although the records are few and far between from afar, some translation goes a long way. In my last post, I got to share the absolute delight in discovering Ruth Margarete Rolling's 1928 Berlins lesbische frauen / Berlin's Lesbian Women at Berlin's Spinnboden Archiv. Since I've now finished that translation, I want to share at least one of the twelve clubs/parties/bars that Rolling describes. (Also, given German copyright, I can't share the German – which I so deeply respect – but can share my translation which is then mine to copyright. Weird, wild.) My adoration to the CDG German Wikipedia entry authors! All quotes are from them unless indented (all Rolling), or attributed otherwise.

Welcome to Café Dorian Gray (and Why Not a Lez Name, eh?)

Here's Rolling first (in all of the indented quotes):

Café Dorian Gray, located at Bülowstrasse 57 opposite Alvenslebenstrasse, is considered one of the oldest and best-known restaurants in the women's world. What Oskar Wilde's beauty apostle Dorian Gray has to do with this is incomprehensible - but the child just wants to have a name!

Ruth Margarete Rolling, you minx! The idea that there is an "oldest" or "next-known" women's restaurant in ye olde 1928 is a majestic idea to witness! I wonder still: Is she being sarcastic? Or in this quick, lush growth of LGBTQ+ spaces, mostly in the previous decade(!), was there a sense of an entire world built? If it's the latter, I swoon. If it's the former, I lol.

Café Dorian Gray, open from 1927 to 1933, was "one of the most well-known dance halls and cultural meeting places for the [large German] homosexual movement in Berlin at that time, especially for the city's lesbian scene." CDG was sometimes described as a "dance hall" rather than restaurant or café. In 1921, gay men's magazine Der Eigene magazine "praised the atmosphere with the keywords, 'Ingratiating music, elegant clientele, comfortable armchairs; pleasing silhouettes on the walls.'" The staff of Frauenliebe / Women's Love magazine met regularly at CDG, and its editor reported: “It was absolutely pleasant, friendly. In the back room there was a piano, you could dance, talk.” Cultural historian Curt Moreck said in 1931 : “The establishment is one of the oldest of its kind, already a hallowed site of Sapphic Eros, where, however, the masculine brother is also granted the right of hospitality. However, with a strict separation. Gentleman's and ladies' evenings are kept separate." Unclear where the many trans folks in attendance wound up, but my guess is everywhere/everywhen.

Per historian Andreas Pretzel's book Vom Dorian Gray zum Eldorado, this "first of a kind" event space recall the steady stream of event nights in lesbian bars today: "in addition to the evening performances of the own house band," there were "performances by singers, comedians and dancers (including the well-known Harry Braun and Ilonka Stoyka), variety inserts, theme festivals and author and reading evenings."

Rolling's cheeky joke about naming a dyke space after a gay man made me giggle. Oscar Wilde was in fact a hero to all queer people for sticking to his gay identity even in the public scandal that decried him and sent him to jail for sex with other men (1895-1897). His name was known so widely that by 1913 (in E.M Forster's Maurice not published until 1971) being called "the Oscar Wilde sort" meant you were a queer. In comparison, a more fitting name for a lesbian spot was The Scorpion as it was named after Der Skorpion, the first lesbian novel which was just recently published (to her) in 1919 — and still yay for Oscar Wilde regardless, Rolling added.

Tell Us More about How the Lezzes Frolicked, Ruth

However, it must be admitted that everything possible has been done to make the two rooms that make up the café intimate and homely. As soon as you get to the door you are warmly greeted by a tall porter in livery and warmly welcomed inside by the landlady.

"Intimate and homely"...does not draw me in. But a porter in livery / a uniform, now that's just wild.

There are separate men's and women's days here. Friday is mainly considered the “ladies' elite day,” on which a so-called “colorful evening” takes place, which means that the dance music is temporarily interrupted by not-so-bad lectures of various kinds. - This place doesn't have a specific audience - it's constantly changing, you just have to be there from time to time without getting stuck.

Lectures! What fantastic nerds we've always been. Plus, it's clearly not just the academics among us – though always a significant population of lezbiqueertrans people – who delight in dykeacademic-ness. Living a trans life is basically a M.A. in Gender Studies for most of us, because once you pop to open one book to understand yourself, you just cannot stop.

Is a Cigar Always a Lesbian Bar?

While some call Café Dorian Gray a lesbian bar – and, surely, we can estimate that claims to "my lesbian bar" are likely eternal – but was more a restaurant, café, and/or dance hall with a weekly dyke night per Rolling. But it's common for those epic parties to become dubbed a full-time bar, like the eternally adored Clit Club. Here's what I wrote about the Clit Club in 2020 in A Queer New York:

Of the ten most often mentioned bars and parties, only Clit Club, a popular party that ran from the mid- 1990s through the early 2000s, had such staying power in participants’ memories that it was sometimes misremembered as a seven-day-a-week bar. Participants described and I too recall its great music and clublike atmosphere. Lesbian porn played on TVs, and there were hookups after hookups in corners or even the middle of a packed dance floor. As Naomi ’89 put it, "Clit Club was off the chain.”

And a changing audience? Pretzel also described the space as having a "young crowd." SO FUN. That means you'll always meet new folks...and sadly not make that steady community, which Rolling describes in other nightlife spots. The audience would get steady later on though: Pretzel noted that Klub Monbijou – the 600-member lesbian club formed as "a strictly closed society accessible only by introduction" per Rolling – had its first meeting there, and claimed it as its clubhouse in 1933.

AND! THIS IS THE MAGICAL PART! 🎈

The rooms could look very interesting. It is intentionally ensured that visitors who come from the gray of everyday life enter an almost exuberantly colorful world - because we know the child's addiction in women for the dazzling, fairytale-like... 'And takes it into account. - All the luminous flames are softly dimmed in an almost artistic tone by colorful hangings or Chinese umbrellas, fluttering tissue paper garnishes hang from the ceiling, slightly moved by the wind created by the whirlwind of the dance. Couples sit on the high stools at the bar or watch in the dance room and listen to the music, which is nowhere as good and atmospheric as here.

HOLY MOTHER OF HERA, THIS IS THE SPITTING IMAGE OF THE CUBBYHOLE, Y'ALL!

When I finished translating this section, I shouted and jumped up and down in my den, exclaiming: I've been there! I've been there!!! Had Berlin 1920s dykes seen their 21^st-century New York City future?? Café Dorian Gray was alive in New York City at Cubbyhole Bar! It is the same design! Plus, such an events schedule, it's very reminiscent of dyke bar* culture today with ceaseless events to get people in the door.

But then I reread the paragraph I skimmed...

The violinist knows his subject perfectly, he sometimes goes from table to table while playing - and you have to have heard him sing the melancholy song of the Volga boatmen to know what mood means in these strange rooms. Sounds, light and flowers, such as those found here in the cozy club, could without question create something like floating above things - everything is there to bring a little beauty into everyday life - there, a shrill discordant tone - a Woman - probably a regular, gets going, wants to be funny, makes jokes - and is unbearably common and intrusive, perhaps because the alcohol is already starting to work on her...

So. Not the Cubbyhole. So far, so close.

I asked myself: why would I want to be there? I admitted to myself that I need this trace of the past woven over time and in my spaces and present and me. I feel connected to and inspired by these dykes of a century ago. They were different but also me and also much more themselves.

In Conclusion. The Number of Times I've Heard on a Second Date: "Take Me to Your Rhenish Wine Festival"

But sometimes it's different. The management tries very hard to maintain the old reputation of the house, offers good Viennese cuisine, organizes all kinds of entertainment evenings, the Bavarian Alpine Festival, the Rhenish Wine Festival or "Three Days in the Wild West" - the festivities are always adapted to the season, even if that D.G., as they say for the sake of the abbreviation, is no longer quite as up to date as it used to be in recent years, but it is at least an interesting place that should not be overlooked when listing the lesbian bars in Berlin.

Not quite the dildo race of Pearl Bar in Houston, but it'll do. Notably, some UMichigan students did some research on "Gay Berlin Institutions" documents, and wrote: "It has also been claimed that the male clientele at Dorian Gray was limited, but that every Wednesday was 'Sadomasochist Night.'” Well, huzzah, for some action packed Wednesdays!

Tragically and likely violently, Café Dorian Gray closed in 1933. Nazi Socialists shut down the major queer bars, clubs, parties, and even people that year, around the same time as the book burnings. It is likely that the rise of the Nazi Socialist party to power soon thereafter lends itself to few records.

Still, that we know anything about CDG is beautiful, and we have Cubbyhole to bring a violinist into should we need a reenactment.