What 200+ queer women, trans & non-binary people told me about connection, friendship and desire in a big city.
Two months of conversations. Here's what came up.
Published on May 27th, 2026
I spent the last two months talking with queer women, trans and non-binary people about connection. Relationships, sexuality, dating, friendship. The whole tangle.
Surveys, one-on-ones, small focus groups. Some were friends, some were friends of friends, some I’d never met before.
I did this because I’m a little obsessed with connection. How it forms, why it doesn’t, and what we keep mistaking it for.
Here’s what kept coming up.
Everyone is here. Nobody is reachable.
This was the Berlin chorus.
It’s not exactly the “everyone’s busy” thing you hear in Paris, where work eats the week and people are tired by Friday. In Berlin it’s that there’s too much going on. A thousand things happening on any given night, and everyone trying to be everywhere at once. A lot of people are also hustling across two or three small jobs to make it work in the city. The result is the same. Catching people can sometimes be hard.
And then there’s that specific moment almost everyone described. You want to do something. Maybe a drink, maybe an event you saw pop up, maybe a slow walk. Your close friends aren’t free. You open Instagram and see what people are up to. None of it really feels like an invitation.
You can always go alone, and honestly sometimes that’s the best version of the night. But sometimes you just don’t feel like doing the thing alone.
“It’s hard for me to find intimacy in Berlin. So many options that people are everywhere, so they become avoidant.”
A full city isn’t a connected one.
Paris has a different problem.
In Paris people are also hyper busy, but in a different way. Work takes up more room and leaves less energy for being out all the time. And honestly, there isn’t that much going on for queer women, trans and non-binary people in the first place. A few bars, a few parties, and that’s mostly it.
So it becomes a visibility problem more than anything else. Where do we even find each other. A lot of people I spoke to said they often feel like there just aren’t many of us at all, which isn’t true, but the city makes it feel that way.
Berlin gives you everyone and asks you to navigate it. Paris asks you to look for something that’s barely signposted.
Same room. Still strangers.
There are more queer people in Berlin than in any city I’ve lived in. Same parties, same apps, same events.
And we still mostly leave from the event with the people we came with.
“At FLINTA* nights, people don’t talk to new people. We’re just sitting with our own friends and lurking at each other.”
Lurking is the word that did it for me.
Almost everyone described the same figure. The person you see at every event. You’ve nodded at them six times, made eye contact across three dance floors, you don’t know their name. They could be a friend, a date, a whole thing. And they’re going to stay a person you nod at.
And there’s something else I keep thinking about.
You don’t need to know everyone in the city. That’s obvious. But there’s still a real question here about what it means to have a queer community at the scale of the city you live in, and to actually want to socialise inside it, whether that’s friendly, romantic, sexual, whatever shape it takes for you.
Right now it doesn’t feel like that’s really available. It feels like a series of nods.
Queer desire doesn’t follow a calendar.
Berlin is genuinely trying. More bar nights, more events, more parties that are actively prioritising the people who tend to get the least space in the queer scene, i.e. queer women, trans and non-binary people, versus gay men who already have a lot going on. That’s good. That matters.
But events ask a lot of you. You have to be in the right mood, on the right night, ready for a loud room and a queue.
“As a queer woman, I feel like my desire is constrained in time. There are specific events in the city where I could explore it. But if I’m not in shape that night, I have to wait weeks until the next one.”
Right night, right place, wrong mood. Or the other way around. And there’s a whole register of wanting that events don’t really hold. Quieter, more intimate, more spontaneous, more in the middle of a Tuesday.
What people are actually looking for.
When I asked what people wanted, almost nobody framed it as more dates. It was something softer than that, and broader.
Someone to go to a specific event with. Someone in the neighbourhood you actually see, not just text. A last minute drink that turns into a night. Another queer couple to hang out with on a Sunday.
It’s the texture of a life with people in it.
So.
What I heard, across two cities and two months, is that there’s no shortage of queer people, and there’s no shortage of desire to meet. What’s missing is something in the middle. A way for the people who are already around each other to actually connect. A way for the wanting to land somewhere.
Berlin has the density. Paris has the wanting. Both end with people staying in on a night they would have gone out, if they’d known with whom.
What came up the most, in different words from different people, was lighter than a date and broader than a night out. Someone who wants the same thing you want, on the same day you want it.
I’ve been working on something. More soon.
In the meantime, I’ll keep writing about queer connection, desire and the cities we live in. About what’s working, what isn’t, and what I keep figuring out as I build Pulp.
Naomi
*FLINTA: Frauen (women), Lesben (lesbians), Inter, Non-binary, Trans, Agender. A German umbrella term for anyone who is not a cisgender man.