All photos courtesy of Jordan Tannahill and AA Bronson.
On an afternoon in early August, two Canadian expats, artist AA Bronson and writer Jordan Tannahill, recline naked on a blanket on the shore of Teufelssee, an ‘FKK’ lake in Berlin’s Grunewald forest, and the setting of Jordan’s forthcoming novel, The Living Realm. AA is a renowned artist and sole surviving member of the legendary art trio, General Idea, whose subversive and often macabrely humorous sculptures, photographs, and installations stand as some of the defining artworks about the AIDS epidemic. — JORDAN TANNAHILL
SATURDAY 2:30 PM AUGUST 22, 2026 TEUFELSSEE
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AA BRONSON: My voice is very soft, so make sure the phone isn’t too far away. [Jordan moves phone closer] That’s good.
JORDAN TANNAHILL: [Both laugh] I feel so fortunate to be here with you at Teufelssee.
BRONSON: Thank you for inviting me.
TANNAHILL: Do you remember the first time you came here?
BRONSON: Well, Mark and I first moved to Berlin on Valentine’s Day, 2013. And one of the first things we wanted to do, of course, was come to the forest here to visit the Teufelssee, and I also had it on my checklist to visit the Cemetery of the Nameless, in particular to visit the grave of Nico. So, it was quite early in the season, I think May, when Mark and I first came here to the lake. I remember it was a beautiful, beautiful day. And then somehow, from camping out here, and having little swims, and going for walks, we ended up discovering all of the other areas, and we shifted more to the cruising grounds, and eventually we’d just go straight there and forget about the lake.
TANNAHILL: [Laughs] Have you been here much this summer?
BRONSON: No, this is my first time, it’s been a busy summer. I recently celebrated a big birthday. My eightieth. Scary. [Both laugh] It’s very different from other birthdays. Like, at forty you feel like…well I shouldn’t even say it out loud, everyone has their own experience—
TANNAHILL: That’s my next threshold.
BRONSON: But your twenties and your thirties you feel like that’s your real adult life, and once you’re in your forties you’re into old age. But actually, in my experience, life kind of begins at fifty and doesn’t really get going until sixty. And the stuff in your twenties and thirties is just part of your education, in a way. Turning eighty is like staring death in the face. You turn a corner, and you’ve got this death mask looking you in the eyes. It’s a very different experience, it’s so weird. I have no peers my age, not here anyway. And the couple I do have in Toronto are all women, no men, they’re all dead. I don’t know anyone my own age, and I don’t have any friends my own age who I would hang out with.
TANNAHILL: Mmm.
BRONSON: I often wonder what it would be like to have friends my own age. But they all died. Of AIDS of course.
TANNAHILL: How do you think your life would be different if they were still here, and you were aging with them?
BRONSON: Well, I think the whole world would be different. Basically, the people who died were the risk-takers. And they’re the great artists, and the great writers, and the great—everything. And once they were all gone, what we were left with—including me, I guess—[Both laugh] In my own case, what I will say is, I’m pretty sure I’m immune. I don’t even know how that’s possible, but I seem to be immune.
TANNAHILL: Berlin is one of the cities where I can best see a vision of what it is to be an older gay man with an active sex life, I mean there are just so many sexual spaces where older gay men dominate.
BRONSON: Most spaces here are age friendly, like this one. Not all of them. Not if there are too many tourists.
TANNAHILL: When you come to a cruising ground like Teufelssee, is there something you’re looking for in particular? Do you have a certain routine?
BRONSON: At this stage in my life, parking on a blanket where one has a good view and isn’t at the absolute center of things. I tend to like to be along the edge. And then going on little walks, and watching what’s going on.
TANNAHILL: Is the dildo tree still there?
BRONSON: Oh, it’s still there. And of course, it plays such a memorable part in your book!
TANNAHILL: Yes, well I remember when I first found it, this must have been about four years ago now, it was this eight-inch, rounded stump with waxed dripped on it—
BRONSON: Somebody was busy there.
TANNAHILL: Like intentionally coated with this wax so it would be smooth to ride.
BRONSON: I’m not sure I ever saw that.
TANNAHILL: It fit inside of me so perfectly. Like almost no store-bought dildo could.
BRONSON: [Laughs] I had wondered if the book was autobiographical at all.
TANNAHILL: Yes, well that part certainly. [AA laughs] My boyfriend at the time was straddling the log in front from me, and I was basically fucking myself on the tree while jerking off, and had a really explosive orgasm. And the thing that made me cum was the thought that I was being fucked by the forest. [Laughs]
BRONSON: Yes. That’s the wonderful thing about it, being fucked by the forest. It’s very special. Sort of dark and wonderful all at once. I don’t know how to describe it for someone who hasn’t experienced it. That’s the whole thing about your book: the darkness of the forest. Its own special life that bleeds through into everything and everyone. Your book captures that so perfectly.
TANNAHILL: I think when I am most ecstatic in a cruising space is when there is that sense of shapeshifting that’s happening, where I sort of lose track of where my body ends and where another’s begins.
BRONSON: Yes—
TANNAHILL: Of course, most of the time you don’t know who you’re having sex with, you don’t know the person, you don’t know their name, and sometimes you don’t even know whose hand is touching your body.
BRONSON: Hmm-mm.
TANNAHILL: There’s this kind of dissolving of boundaries between bodies, which I find very erotic, and sometimes profound. And the novel imagines—well, what if one of those hands touching your body is not among the living? What if we are making love with every body that has ever passed through those woods and felt pleasure there?
BRONSON: You know one place where I experienced something like that was not in the wild, not in the woods, but during the very height of the AIDS crisis in New York, there were a couple of cruising bars in what was called The Triangle Building in the West Village. Back then, it had this sex club in it, and on the other side was this kind of cruising bar on the ground floor, and it had a basement. So there were these two sex clubs adjacent to each other with a brick wall between them. And one of them pretended to be the kind of place where you played pool.
TANNAHILL: [Laughs] Right.
BRONSON: During the epidemic, we weren’t allowed to touch each other, but there was this pool table, and I remember one night I suddenly realized that as many people that could fit were standing around the pool table with their cocks right out on the table, jerking off, as tightly as they could fit all the way around it. So it must have been about twenty guys? It was a lot of guys. And anyway, they all ejaculated simultaneously. [Both laugh] And it made me think of that thing about women having their periods together.
TANNAHILL: That synchronization.
BRONSON: The synchronization.
TANNAHILL: Like one body.
BRONSON: It was amazing. And then another group stepped up hoping to replicate it, but the magic was over. It just went whoop, boom, and then it was over.
TANNAHILL: It sounds so primal and ritualistic.
BRONSON: Mmm.
TANNAHILL: Pleasure as a kind of collective rite.
BRONSON: Yes. Pleasure as a kind of force that almost moves through us, that does not even belong to us, just like in your book.
TANNAHILL: Wow, yes.
BRONSON: Cruising— it really comes down to that shared intensity between strangers. It can be quite profound. You don’t know the other person’s name, their story, what they’re bringing to an encounter, and yet they’re completely intent on eating your ass, and you are equally intent on having your ass eaten. [Both laugh] And probably, most of the time, you’re not even conscious of having that intent as you’re walking into the woods. It just sort of arises in that moment, between you and a stranger.
TANNAHILL: Right, exactly.
BRONSON: It can also take a form of violence in the moment, but it is also a form of tenderness.
TANNAHILL: Yes.
BRONSON: And I think that’s ultimately what I’m looking for is tenderness. That kind of profound tenderness you can share with a complete stranger.
TANNAHILL: Mmm.
BRONSON: Of course, the presence of nature is so much physically a part of the sexual experience while cruising at a place like this. The smell of the earth. The brushing of leaves against your skin. I found that quite striking, quite moving really, about your book, the way you write about the human body being a kind of extension of nature.
TANNAHILL: Thank you. I’m interested in this kind of overlapping of ecologies, like, how our human sexual ecology coexists, however uneasily at times, with the plants and animals here at the lake. I remember watching as two men were fucking each other in this grove, and then hearing this rustling sound, and turning, and being startled to see these two wild boars just sort of sauntering past in the near distance—
BRONSON: [Laughs] A true Teufelssee experience.
TANNAHILL: Just different kinds of pigs, carrying on with their business. Each with our own strange social habits and mating rituals. [Bronson laughs] And it’s a delicate ecosystem. Just as too much attention and human traffic can disrupt animal life, it can disrupt the cruising ground. One of the things the novel explores is the precarity of these sites. Like how here at Teufelssee, during the COVID lockdown, a lot of young people were partying in the cruising grounds—
BRONSON: Yes.
TANNAHILL: And having bonfires here, and obviously it was a space of refuge for them too, but it drew a lot more police attention to the area.
BRONSON: Yeah, it wasn’t good. The problem here is that a young crowd took over, and got so invasive that people who had come here for twenty, thirty, forty years started to feel uncomfortable being naked. Because all of a sudden you have people sitting there in their Adidas and sort of staring at you. But it’s really my duty as an eighty year old to hang out nude in these places and drive away the tourists. [Tannahill laughs] As an older person, in New York, or wherever, you always feel like you’re the wrong person. That you’re not welcome. It does happen here on occasion, but not to the same degree. Especially with tourism. I’ve actually been instructed by someone to leave in an outdoor situation.
TANNAHILL: Oh my god.
BRONSON: With people circulating, and nothing actually happening yet, and somebody spoke up and said, “I want you to go.”
TANNAHILL: Wow.
BRONSON: So I did. That’s the only time that’s ever happened.
TANNAHILL: That’s really shameful. I remember moving from Ottawa to Toronto at the age of 18 and going to a bathhouse for the first time, and that being the first time in my life where I was in a sexual environment with men of different ages and body types than me. It immediately broadened my sexual horizons, because prior to that the only encounters I had had were with other teenage boys. But there was also this vision of how one could age as a gay man. What my sexuality might look like through time.
BRONSON: I always liked older men when I was young. I didn’t really like younger guys, I don’t know why.
TANNAHILL: I found it so hard at that age to find guys my own age who were comfortable enough in themselves to have sex, and so when I went to that bathhouse for the first time, I lost my anal virginity to this muscle daddy in his fifties,and it was incredible. It was the first time I had a prostate orgasm. And I’m sorry, but another 18 year old would not have been able to do that to me.
BRONSON: No. [They sit in silence for a long moment, observing the lake, and the comings and goings on the other blankets.] I love how time seems to slow here.
TANNAHILL: It’s true. Cruising sometimes reminds me of fishing.
BRONSON: [Laughs] It’s a lot like fishing.
TANNAHILL: Like, I think cruising invites a lot of the same rewards of patience that fishing does—
BRONSON: [Laughs] Yes.
TANNAHILL: Spending time learning a landscape, knowing which path a man might wander down, and how long it might take for him to find you if you take another route.
BRONSON: It’s the act of being with time.
