Lindenstrasse - Carsten and Various

[lolaruns]

I don't really watch the show, but I thought I should mention them since they are had the first German gay storyline. I hope the picture links work.


Carsten marrying Theo in July 1997, before gay marriage was legal in Germany.

Openly gay actor and activist Georg Uecker (Carsten) with his castmate Claus Vincon (Käthe)




Lindenstrasse.de has an extensive summary of Carsten's role on the show, which I hope to translate eventually.

[kyle]

Gay marriag is legal in Germany? Or is it a form of marriage like civil unions.. not quite the full rights of marrige like our gay marriage in Canada?

[lolaruns]

No, no, you are right it's civil union.

Looks like lindenstrasse won't let you link to their pictures. They actually have a lot of good ones. I will download them and put them on another server so we can see them here.

For example, here is the story of Felix the HIV positive boy Carsten and Käthe adopted. It's pretty funny because apparently Lisa from Verbotene Liebe played his girlfriend!

[lolaruns]

Okay, here my picspam attempt.

As far as I can tell, Carsten is a doctor. He meet Theo, a lawyer. They fall in love and get married.







Theo leaves Carsten and they have a very nasty breakup.

[lolaruns]

The eccentic Georg alia Käthe is a friend of the family and an actor. He helped organize Theo and Carsten's wedding. After Theo and Carsten break up he comforts Carsten.




They adopt a kid together.


Eventually they too get married:








I think what makes them so different is the characters get to be a lot more normal, that they also don't have a problem with portraying some of the guys as quirky and nutty, but still lovable. They have a long term relationship, deal with various realistic and unrealistic things.

The show also wasn't afraid to show them going to a drag party for New Year's Eve.



Let's be honest. Could you ever imagine Luke and Noah doing anything like that? Sometimes I feel the shows try too hard to make the characters too clean cut as to not offend anybody. I think that fact that in this case both actors are open and out gays plays a lot into why they can give the characters some realistic touching without running into the danger of being seen as stereotyping and why they probably just have a better sensitivity in how the characters are portrayed, because in a way they can take a lot from actual real people. I particularly liked reading that apparently they even let the characters comment on current political event. Like when a politician made a particularly stupid anti-gay remark they had the characters bitching about him and the comment on the show.

[babylondancer]

The Lindenstraße has always been a show to state political opinions from the left side. They also work actual events into their filmings. For example you can see the results of an election on the same day.
And from the beginning Lindenstraße was about social problems like HIV (the first one to die of it was a heterosexual who got it through a blood transfusion), drug abuse, child abuse, matrimonial violence, deseases, alcoholism, racism (and every other problem you can think of).
So it's quite normal that they want to show gays how they really are. As much as we want to make heterosexuals believe that we are just like them, that's not really true. Sure, there are monogamous gay couples who live a happy family life, but there's also the other side of being gay which is about parties, drugs and sex. And as much as I want straight people to accept gays, they should accept every shade of being gay, not only the 'normal' neighbour who happens to like men instead of women, but also the drag queens and the bears and the party boys and the Kampflesben and whatever else there is.

[lolaruns]

Anybody who might be curious about Lindenstrasse, the official website put up a few episodes in streaming format. This one has a scene with Carsten and Käthe. It's around 23:40. The couple has dinner together, Käthe is sad because he's an actor but the only job he can get is as a telemarketer. Hubby Carsten comforts him and tells him that he should quit and that he can find a better job. Käthe says no, he has to face reality, he's never going to amount to anything.

I don't know whether there is a way to capture it and put it on youtube

And as much as I want straight people to accept gays, they should accept every shade of being gay, not only the 'normal' neighbour who happens to like men instead of women, but also the drag queens and the bears and the party boys and the Kampflesben and whatever else there is.

That always bugged me too. It's one thing to say that the "swishy" gay is a stereotype and that not all gays are like that. But at this point it seems that pretty much all gay characters on television that you root for can never be swishy at all. That just feels wrong as well. It's not like being swishy or silly sometimes makes you a bad person.

[lolaruns]

Okay, my very first attempt at capturing a video and subtitling it:







I'm confused why no picture shows up even though I chose "Create Profile Icon" and selected one of the screen caps in edit video properties.