Real Men:
Taxi zum Klo
By Willow Catelyn Maclay
Much of the low-budget queer cinema of the 20th century has a documentary flavor; everything feels authentic and real even when fictionalized. In many of these films, a liberated, explicit representation of active queer spaces is still informed by the reality of the closet. The divergent qualities of exposure or hiding imbues these films with a multifaceted authenticity that makes the anthropological elements hum with danger and excitement. This cinema of the gay banal may reside in the documentation of the St. Mark’s bathhouses in Andy Milligan’s touching and troubling Vapors (1965), or across the Atlantic in any number of Rosa von Praunheim’s deconstructionist tableaus of West German Gay activism, such as It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives (1971). Praunheim had plenty of gay counterparts in the blooming fantasia of the New German cinema. Of course there was Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who, with his ravenous appetite for filmmaking, sometimes cranked out multiple movies per year. On the flipside of Fassbinder’s trenchant, affecting miserablism, there was Frank Ripploh’s Taxi zum Klo (1981), or Taxi to the Toilet, a sensual, charming autofiction that has stayed relevant for its questioning of the gay male conundrum between cruising and settling down.
Ripploh hadn’t planned on becoming a filmmaker. He was a secondary teacher in Berlin, disciplined by his employers after coming out as gay on the cover of a 1978 issue of the leftist magazine Stern. While on probation, he took revenge by making a movie about all the rollicking fun he had experienced living a proud, gay lifestyle in the Berlin underground. Ripploh wrote, directed, and stars in this picture as fidgety schoolteacher Frank. (Some refer to him as “Peggy,” referencing Ripploh’s own drag persona Peggy von Schnottgenburg.) Ripploh’s eye for the minutiae of the gay world invites the audience into the familiar nooks and crannies of his erotic interzones. Frank’s appetite does not discriminate. There are a number of provocative encounters, and Ripploh immediately shows his gift for finding sticky, tactile images. He’s seen picking up a gas station attendant on the way to school one morning, and Ripploh embodies their exchange by concluding the scene with a close-up of a vaporous handprint on the hood of the car.
In another of Frank’s sweaty misadventures, he’s admitted to a hospital after he experiences an episode of anal warts. The situation might make one shudder with the foreshadowing of AIDS imagery, but it is enlivened with the delightful cinematic grammarof a prison escape movie as Frank slips into a taxi en route to a leather daddy in the woods. One of the more uproariously funny sketches involves an incident of multitasking at a glory hole. Frank places a slip of toilet paperover the opening, and while grading his students’ tests, he’s visited by an erect, curious penis shyly saying hello. The notion of what might be considered pornographic about this benign, ultimately farcical scenario sent censors into a frenzy in various countries, including Britain, where it wasn’t classified with a rating for theatrical exhibition until 2011. One can amusingly imagine their outrage after seeing what is surely one of the longest golden showers ever filmed.
The sweaty mise en scène of Frank’s life is refreshingly multidimensional. The brash documentation of hardcore gay rendezvouses onscreen is intoxicating to watch, while also showing viewers the full complexities of Frank’s characterization. All the sex has meaning and gives weight to Frank’s central problem: he has fallen in love with a warm-hearted, selfless, monogamous bear named Bernd (played by Bernd Broaderup). In a standout scene of intimacy, they share a bathtub—indulging in each other’s scuzz—while they pick bubbles out of each other’s beards and let their bathwater slip between their lips when their romance escalates. Frank adores this man, who is his polar opposite, but he’s worried that he’s doomed to repeat his habits of wayward flings. The travails of their predicament speak to larger philosophical questions in the queer community about leading an outwardly explicit life with multiple partners or settling down with one true love. Ripploh believed they were both dead ends: one being a bourgeois entrapment where one suffocates in pillows and cakes, and the other a life of pseudo-freedom, in which one uses gay sex to blur the boundaries of life without eliminating them.
Ripploh’s seamless interlacing of his semi-fictional characters with real places of queer experience decorates the film with a bustling anthropology of lived-in sexuality and culture. Frank and Bernd’s complicated relationship comes to a head at a West Berlin drag ball, where the artificial qualities of the plot intermingle with the vérité documentation of the event. It’s a technique that is still being used in micro-queer cinema, such as the protests in Jessica Rovinelli’s So Pretty (2019), or the run-and-gun style of concerts, or real medical appointments in Louise Weard’s Castration Movie (2024). Taxi zum Klo’s legacy is built with the elements of memoir and is part of a broader tapestry of great queer films from that era which capture a moment in our history, when repression was thought to be giving way to a better sense of liberation.
Or is it the other way around? Near the end, onlookers gawk at Frank’s pink Arabian dance costume when he’s walking to work after the ball, and he finds himself back at the scene of Ripploh’s real-life crisis: the classroom. Standing in glitter and lace, he talks to his students, and they have their fun jeering at their strange-looking teacher, but they accept him in their meager way of childish egging on. Ripploh’s queerness is extremely visible in a place that he has been told it should not be. It is an image of risk and reclamation, one which still echoes in the decades since, especially in the wake of attempts to keep queerness out of the classroom with book bans and attempts to slash federal funding due to outlandish concerns of “indoctrination.”
Ripploh didn’t believe that he was pursuing any political goals with Taxi Zum Klo, but it became political through his targeting of the school board that ousted him for being openly gay. His desires were simple. He wanted revenge. His career as a schoolteacher was ruined, but he became a filmmaker whose work mattered a great deal to many queer people, including myself. After Taxi zum Klo, he appeared as an attractive hunk in Fassbinder’s decadent Jean Genet adaptation Querelle (1982). He made a sequel, Taxi nach Kairo in 1987, in which Frank was caught in a love triangle and some of the same figures returned, including Bernd Brauderup. The film did not make it out of Germany, speaking to how queer cinema wasn’t afforded the same international spaces following the spread of the AIDS crisis. It proved to be his final film, and it remains worth rediscovering. Ripploh lived until 2002, when he passed away from cancer. In his final days, he created his preferred director’s cut of Taxi zum Klo, the one currently in circulation.