2023-12-20 16:17:08
By Martin Pieper
“Sauhund” is the debut novel by Lion Christ, a young German author who immediately made it into the top 3 of the FM4 short story competition Wortlaut in 2021, albeit under a different name at the time. “Sauhund” tells the story of a gay youth that begins in the Bavarian countryside and ends in Munich in the 80s.
Hanser Verlag
“Sauhund” by Lion Christ was published by Hanser Verlag.
Anyone who automatically thinks of the great hedonistic debauchery of the Munich disco glamor VIPs from Freddy Mercury to Rainer Werner Fassbinder will not be entirely happy with this pig. Instead of a glittering retro nostalgia, the book takes us into a much more realistic gay world of the early 80s, in which personal ads always end with sentences like “… 100% discretion is a given,” and the AIDS crisis via sensationalist press (“The gay plague! “) enters mainstream society and doorbells at most relevant bars ensure what today would be called a safer space.
From the provinces to Munich
The first-person narrator Flori has just finished his community service. His life takes place between the fire brigade festival, Bronski Beat and his parents’ house with its Thujenhecken idyll. He works as a salesman in the Bavarian province, more precisely in the Bad Tölz-Wolfratshausen district, and begins a bumpy affair with an old school friend, secretly of course.
Jimmy Somerville and his band Bronski Beat turned a similar scenario into a perfect synth-pop anthem in the song “Smalltown Boy.” While Jimmy Somerville’s small town was still a nest in Scotland and the vital destination was London, for Flori it’s time to go to Munich. Plush discos, toilet sex, bell bars, shameful personal ads, police persecution and lots of alcohol await him there. For almost 400 pages we stay close to Flori, who staggers rather than walks through this almost lost queer world.
Stories of self-discovery
How precisely the author Lion Christ, who was born in the 90s, describes gay life in Munich in the 80s is astonishing. The Bavarian idiom is also made virtuously audible in the text, without falling into blue and white “Bulle von Tölz” clichés. The pop culture markers of that era, from Fassbinder to Bronski Beat, are always accurate and yet never push themselves into the foreground of these actually timeless ones Stories of self-discovery. Lion Christ describes the coming of age of his main character with great tenderness. This Flori is not a political fighter, sometimes he betrays his best friends, he recognizes the love that is shown to him far too late and when nothing works anymore, he helps still a little shoplifting. In any case, heroes look different. Or to put it another way: This bastard is just to be “busted”.
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