On Saturday 12 September we had a stall of our own at the Folsom Europe street fair, right in the middle of Schöneberg, surrounded by people who had come to Berlin from all over Europe and beyond for it.
What actually happens at Folsom Europe
If you have never been, picture it roughly like this. Fuggerstraße and Welserstraße in Berlin Schöneberg get closed off and from midday onwards they belong to leather, latex, rubber, harnesses, uniforms and whatever else people have put together for the occasion. The main stage runs at one end, bars, food trucks and traders line the street in between, while a little further along the Animal Farm gives pups and furries a space of their own.
This year was the 23rd edition. The street fair is a private event for over 18s, which takes nothing away from the atmosphere, quite the opposite. More than 20,000 people fill a few hundred metres of residential street, neighbours watch from their windows, somebody walks their dog between two rubber suits and nobody thinks any of it needs explaining. A community that spends most of the year behind closed doors takes over public space for a weekend as if that were the most natural thing in the world, in broad daylight in the middle of a residential area.
How we ended up in the middle of it
Our job that Saturday was probably the easiest going, because nobody needed convincing that sex is worth talking about. We told people who we are and how Every Health works, which is to say that the whole journey happens online with us, from advice through treatment to the products, with no waiting room and no small talk with a receptionist about things that are nobody else's business.
Mostly, though, we listened, far more than we had expected to. At a fetish festival people talk to you differently than they do almost anywhere else, which is to say directly and without much of a run-up.
At our stall it kept coming back to the gut
Which sounds like the least romantic topic imaginable for a day like that, though with this crowd it turned out to be the thing plenty of people had on their minds. Anyone who bottoms knows the prep, the uncertainty beforehand and the questions you only ever half ask your friends. That is where our conversations kept landing, sometimes in passing between two spins of the wheel, sometimes in a lot of detail.
Our answer to that is Gut Feeling, a daily gut routine we developed together with experts. The thinking behind it is simple. A gut that has found a reliable rhythm makes a lot of things easier, in everyday life as much as during sex.
The rest of our stall was honestly mostly a playground. We had a prize wheel, a buzz wire game and a short sexual health quiz, you could collect points at each of the three stations and at the end we added everything up and turned the total into a voucher. The buzz wire got the loudest reactions, with whole groups of friends queueing up to take their turn between the laughing and the swearing.
You could take home caps, shirts, fans and dog tags that we engraved on the spot.
Packing up the stall
We packed up in the evening and realised how good a whole day feels when shame plays no part in it at all. That is why we show up at a festival like this instead of only at conferences. Conversations about sex, bodies and health get easy the moment nobody pretends the subject is somehow awkward.
Thank you to everyone who spun, swore, guessed, talked and brought us their questions. And thank you to Folsom Europe for a weekend that makes Berlin a little more open every year.
We will be back next year.
