1980 | 95 min.
Taxi zum Klo

By Wieland Speck

The following year, Frank Ripploh strikes a completely different note. If TAXI ZUM KLO (1980) is the first “gay film” to show gay life as normality, it’s not because in the meantime it had become socially acceptable but because the protagonists don’t care about repression and sanctioned morals. Since von Praunheim’s It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives, no film had been so radical in its authenticity. When the sexual appetite of a teacher puts patriarchy to the test, society may not be ready for it but takes a big leap forward. Popular cinema has always pushed boundaries with ever more violence, more sex, but not towards actual social change. TAXI ZUM KLO is a piece of contemporary history about the first free moment in gay life (still no trace of the AIDS crisis), produced in the same year as William Friedkin’s Cruising ...