On 25 July 2026, a van was driven into the crowd at Berlin’s Christopher Street Day, one woman was killed and many more were injured in a terrorist attack. Nothing in this post is meant to diminish that loss, or the very real danger the queer community still faces. It is a terrible tragedy and I am sad this happened in a city I call home. This post is about how social media has encouraged us to be less political and weakened the messaging around the event, not about the attack itself.
The Stonewall riots began June 28th 1969 on Christopher Street, Greenwich Village, New York. Police raided a queer friendly bar, and it descended into chaos. Those apprehended and passers-by took a stance against the police for their persecution of queer people. The police came away worse than the protestors; they were outnumbered and humiliated by their own disorganisation and incompetence. The next evening the police returned, this time with a vengeance, but a greater crowd had gathered and there was a more expressive, openly queer mood. The riots mark a significant turning point for the queer community. They stood up for something they truly believed in.
“Haltung ist Hot” translates to taking a stand is hot. This slogan adorned every bus in Berlin during the Christopher Street Day parades, from Deloitte, MAC, the FDP to Deutsche Bank and ImmoScout24; the slogan unified disparate organisations. A position that one of the Big-Four auditing firms, a make-up brand, a centre-right political party, a bank and a property marketplace can all agree on must be compelling, but I was left feeling confused about what we are really standing up for.
As the Siemens bus passed by, “queers gehen wählen” (queers go vote) was now a visible addendum to the slogan of the day, a timely message for the 20th September election in Berlin. Voter turnout among lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals is higher than that of their heterosexual counterparts in Western Europe, one hypothesis being there is a greater motivation to exercise your voting right when you feel marginalised in your society. Targeting the audience of the Christopher Street Parade with such messaging, when it would be more pertinent delivered to a less LGB demographic, distills our apathy towards taking a stand. Who would object to queers voting? The illusion of inclusion, the rainbow-washing and the irony of the messages not actually taking any stance at all are not lost on us. However, the question of what we are taking a stance for remains unanswered.
Audience is everything, and companies systematically optimise their own marketing to reach as many customers, or prospective customers as possible. Having a bus cruise through a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people is not a bad price to pay to get behind a politically benign message. We share pictures and videos online ourselves, amplifying the message, drawing attention to the Sparkasse bus. The next morning we see the buses again, just this time on a screen, not in their own enormity.
Through the lens of the cost per view, it must have been an excellent day. Such a tempered slogan, “Haltung ist Hot”, mitigates any risk of getting flagged and censored for posting political content, as Meta actively limits the amount of political content we see on our feeds. Those in the Stonewall riots risked much more than a shadow-ban as the threat of incarceration paled in comparison to the cause. Yet it feels unfair to blame the corporate machine, when really it is just a reflection of the mood of our own timid posts. So as we are here, moderating our messages, unable to pick a side, we can rest easy, in fact proud that we stood up at all.