Leck My Buttons Open Air, Oxi, 22 June 2025
the event of the season!
apocalypse, meow.
with the world afire, we go in heat.
we'll be keeping it real
sticking to our innate drive.
all welcome!
... except you, karen.
here kitty kitty
cos u know as long as we’re still flapping around,
time turns in a loop and
this togetherness feels like
some sort of purrmanence.
Indrani and I rounded the corner onto Wiessenweg on Sunday afternoon to find several clubworn queers fleeing in the opposite direction, tumbling back into reality. For a moment I worried that Leck my Buttons may not be well attended this year.
Then, under a railway bridge, we saw the apparition of a straight couple, walking unsteadily from Oxi.
‘Well, look who it is,’ I said, amused to bump into our friends S— and R— here. They promote bass music parties and I didn’t expect to see them in this context. They were equally dumbstruck to see us arriving.
They deliberated. ‘We have to go back to the party,’ S— insisted. ‘We have to.’
R— made no reply. Then, she muttered in her low German husk: ‘For just one more drink.’
Indrani and I have made Buttons our regular thing we do together, but it was nice this time to bump into our friends. As we walked to the queue, R— told me that the last time she’d slept was Thursday night/Friday morning.
The tale of their weekend was a garbled one. I had had a beer with S— on Friday night before going to the new party mur.mur at Zur Klappe. After that, he said, he and R— had stayed up all night drinking absinthe, then on Saturday evening, after catching Overmono’s set at Club der Visionaire for Fête de la musique (‘weird’), they had somehow ended up at Else (‘shit’), where they had befriended a gay Irish couple (‘lovely’), who had whisked them off to Oxi for Buttons.
They had seemingly made friends with half the club. ‘It’s such a good party,’ S— said. ‘Everyone is just up for the craic and mischief.’
As with last year’s Leck My Buttons, the scene was delirious queer joy. The open-air dancefloor was mobbed with bodies and decorated with the same coloured ribbons as last year’s party: red and yellow and pink and green. The ribbons also segmeted the dancefloor internally into three areas, and it was funny being caught on one side or other of this ‘great divide’ made by ribbons, as bodies playfully appeared and vanished.
We sat in the shade on the wooden decking by the dancefloor. I bought us four beers, 300ml bottles for five euro a pop, pricey. Indrani and I took the chocolate we’d brought and waited for it to kick in, and as usual I felt nervous.
The Mexico-based artist Paurro was grooving through the last hour of her set, a mix of breakbeats and bass music and house. An orange-haired woman who looked like Leeloo from the Fifth Element was go-go dancing on the wooden podium in front of the DJ box. Nude people and tattooed people and colourfully clad people sweated it out in the 35-degree heat. Near the end of her set, Paurro dropped Big Dope P, Ride with Me (Bastiengoat Remix).
After some shots of Berliner Luft, the four of us retreated to the back of the garden, facing the promenade. Various people wandered up to us curiously.
‘Can I interest you in this shoe?’ said a scantily clad man called Ovidiu, holding up a sandal. [NB. I’ve changed people’s names.]
‘Eh, I’m not sure. Just one shoe?’
‘In this heat, do you really need two?’ he rejoined.
‘That’s a good point,’ I said, coming round to his thinking. ‘True enough, when it’s this hot, you really only need one shoe.’
A quieter man shuffled over wearing a yellow argyl pullover.
‘This is Johannes,’ S— said, making introductions. ‘When myself and R— arrived at six this morning, Johannes was beside us in the queue, and ever since then, we bump into each other every few hours and continue our conversation.’
‘Yes, that’s nice,’ Johannes said, a shy and retiring type.
‘Is Buttons a favourite party of yours?’ I asked, making conversation.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t go partying much nowadays. This is a one-off.’
‘Well, excellent choice,’ I said.
A few moments later, the impression of Johannes as a shy retiring type was dashed when the Leeloo woman and another glamour-type—the two most arch glamazons at the party—ran up and put their arms around him, before twirling away again.
A long sofa on the platform beside us was perfect for people wanting a bit of recovery time. A twink slumped over it and, lying prone, his mesh body suit leaving nothing to the imagination, addressed S—. ‘Is it OK if I lie here? I’m just so tired.’
‘Yeah. But be honest, really you just want to show off your ass, don’t you?’
‘That too.’
Things went on nonsensically like this. Buff men wore pink tartan skirts and cowboy hats. FLINTA people wore camo shorts. A man wore a multicoloured lego shirt. Bodies staggered towards the toilets indoors, then fifteen minutes later, rushing down the garden path, rejuvenated.
By this stage I was woozy and had to keep moving my body. I was grateful of the sunglasses masking my face as the sun kept pelting down, saving me from the sensory overload.
I soon regretted not wearing a mask at the United4Gaza the day before. An English guy with a mohawk told me that his German residency or visa application had been rejected after he’d attended a Gaza demo several months ago: plain-clothes police were going around taking photos of everyone to keep in file.
‘The bar was super busy,’ I said, returning with more drinks.
‘One of the bar women fainted, so they’re a person down,’ S— said.
‘That’s terrible. I hope the awareness team was on hand.’
‘To be honest, I’m not sure how “aware” the team is at the moment.’
‘They’re blissfully unaware, you’re saying?’
We were just taking the piss in an Irish way, of course. An hour later, I saw S— hugging someone, an old friend of his. Naturally, she happened to be working on the awareness team. By which stage, S— was probably in need of the awareness team himself.
Musically, the range was splendid. For the close of the party, the tempo and hardness increased as Jacob Meehan and Dirty Daddy Don started their b2b. I have mixed feelings about b2bs. Often, the alternation of different talents can fail to amount to a cohesive whole.
This was the total opposite: two complimentary talents in synergy, a distillation of surprises and classics and diverse musics, from recent Ostgut Ton to Latin music to jazz to 1990s remixed to queer classics. In terms of music, crowd and vibe, Leck My Buttons blew away anything I’ve experienced at Panorama Bar recently.
When the b2b dropped Daft Punk, Rock’n Roll, everyone lost their shit. Hot and delirius, I was surrounded for this monstrous jacking music by pumping muscular bears. It felt like a fitting climax to the party.
S— and R—, wilting, bailed at last. Indrani and I danced on for another couple of hours, before, hungry, we left too.
At which point, near the station, we bumped into our two friends again having a pint of Guinness outside Home Bar. Their weekend still hadn’t ended.
‘My God,’ I said, ‘the stamina!’
Jacob Meehan b2b Dirty Daddy Don, Some tracks
Bran Van 3000, Astounded (feat. Curtis Mayfield)
Warnung, 2009 (VIP)
Jinjé, Idiome (feat. Yolanda Wyns)
Technasia, Force (Mixed)
Zombies In Miami, The Rhythm (Cani Remix)
Infinity Plus One, I Broke Your Solar System
Mawn Lower & ysheso___, Tom Tom FM
Cloud 69, Sixty Nine Ways
Paurro, Yico Yico
Daft Punk, Rock'n Roll
Villager, Need Right
Groove Armada, I See You Baby (feat. Gramma Funk) [Austin Ato Remix]
I. JORDAN, DNT STP MY LV
SLACK 1NE, 360 Edit
Angel Moraes, Dancin Wit My Baby (Darius Syrossian Remix)
octa, Nuevayol (Tech remix)
Dino Lenny, Washington Street (4Am Mix)
Shanti Celeste, Bounce
Nelly, Hot In Herre (Andrew Mathers Afro Remix)
Sem Jacobs & Tagmann, DC Ten Thousand Dreams