The last couple of days, after returning from my vacation, I was busy catching up with a lot of things – sleep, my e-mails at work, my e-mails here at eurOut, and of course what’s been going on with lesbian and bisexual women all over Europe during my absence. I read the stories that had been posted here on eurOut, watched the soccer game Germany – Switzerland that I had taped, watched the new episode of “Tatort” with Ulrike Folkerts (brilliant and heartbreaking), and also watched Ulrike Folkerts’ appearance on the German talk show “Beckmann” together with her partner, Katharina Schnitzler.

It was only a few years ago that watching Ulrike Folkerts in interviews made me cringe. She seemed so uncomfortable with herself and her life, used to complain about being identified with her character, Lena Odenthal, about not being offered good roles and about not wanting to be a role model or a poster child for the gay community. Luckily, all of that has changed since she started her relationship with Katharina Schnitzler. Nowadays, she seems at ease with herself and her career. As she says it herself in her interview with German magazine “Stern”, she has started to become more involved with shaping her character, Lena Odenthal, and with the stories for the “Tatort” movies, and it shows. There have been some very good ones lately, the one last Sunday being one of the best and most impressive ones. She has played other roles in movies and theatre. Even her look has changed, she now appears much softer and more feminine. And she seems to finally have accepted to be a lesbian role model, even though she told “Stern” that she would like younger women to take over now.

But there was also something else that I think was remarkable about the “Beckmann” interview, apart from Folkerts’ transformation: that they were being treated like any other couple, and that them being lesbians was never an issue. It wasn’t like it was something nobody wanted to talk about, like the big elephant in the room nobody dares to mention. It was more that there just was no need to talk about it, because it’s not a big deal.

That’s something that I have been observing for a while now – that being a lesbian isn’t scandalous anymore, and it’s not what people are interested in when it comes to celebrities.

When Folkerts came out in the 1990s, German newspaper BILD tried to treat it as a scandal. Too bad they couldn’t find ANYONE who was actually shocked by the news or who thought any less of Folkerts afterwards. Her ratings didn’t suffer, and in 2002, she was still voted “favorite female police inspector” by the readers of a German TV magazine. The outing of popular German journalist Anne Will made headlines only for one day, and I think it was mainly the lesbian community who made a big deal out of it, because she had finally come out and – as Charly put it in this article – there are still not enough famous women who admit to love other women. The ratings of Will’s TV talk show did suffer, though, but not because of her being out, but because it just isn’t very good.

In fact, in Germany the only ones who seem to think that a celebrity being gay or lesbian is big news is BILD and their Sunday edition, Bild am Sonntag, respectively, and even they have adjusted to the new trend. They don’t even try to create a scandal anymore, but focus on the celebrities’ love life with their current partner, like they did when German TV host Ramona Leiß came out.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’ve made it, that we’ve finally arrived at a point at which homosexuality is being accepted. We’re still light-years away from acceptance and from being treated as equals, with equal rights. Still, I think that it’s a big step in the right direction, and it’s something that can be built on. The more people think that being gay isn’t a big deal, the less it actually is.

We’re not there yet, but we’re on the right track.

Read more about Ulrike Folkerts and Katharina Schnitzler’s appearance on “Beckmann” in the October 9th edition of “We Are Everywhere” and about her new book in Charly’s article “Found Happiness Yet?”

(Posted on eurOut on October 11th, 2008)