Localise Yourself: A Manifesto For Indigenous Subcultures

Introduction

Hello. My name is Lianna, and I am a 24 years old nonbinary linguist from Germany. I have always lived in this country; my family is ethnically German and my native language is German, as well.

And yet, my social media presences, all my numerous hobby projects, my fan-fiction and video essays, my websites and indie games, most of my online interactions and in large parts, even my very own queer identity, take place exclusively in English.

How did this happen, and what does it mean?

If you spend any time interacting with the neurodivergent or queer communities of a certain generation in Germany, you will notice that inexplicably to outsiders, a lot of them only ever speak English with few exceptions. Whether they're at the shops, talking to their friends, posting on social media or playing tabletop RPGs, they are conversing in English.

It is not like they do it only when people who cannot speak Germans are present. Even when among only German friends, they will talk English or some freely varying mixture of both languages. Their vocabulary will be filled with anglicisms and either outright English or literally translated idioms. They will often be uncomfortable using German when talking about certain topics, especially those related to their personal identity, like sexuality, queerness, kink, or neurodivergency.

Why is that?

Due to many factors that most of us experience, especially the bullying, the alienation, the sense of being different or broken, and the lack of others' understanding around us, a lot of us were socialised on the internet from an early age.

The World Wide Web, and not our schools, neighbourhoods or homes, was the place we found likeminded people, acceptance, and resources helping us find out what was really "wrong" with us. For many of us, it was the internet that we first met other people like us and could learn and talk about our experiences on. Often, our only friend groups or relationships existed online, since they would be the only people truly understanding and embracing us as we were.

Here in the West, the internet is predominantly an English-speaking place. A lot can be said about the origins of why this is, and in the first few drafts of this article, that exploration inflated the post by several magnitudes to the point it was unreadable, so I will keep that to the little side excursion for today.

So, what happens if some people's identities develop almost exclusively on the (anglophone) internet, and if the only places they feel accepted, loved and understood are in English? They will naturally start associating the English language with their friends, self-discovery, relationships, hobbies in short: with their happy places, their authentic selves. And the German language with their often-abusive families, the people harassing them on the street, conservative coworkers, work, school, bureaucracy, bullying, in short: with trauma.

In the very same way that some people will use their native dialect when talking to their families and so-called 'standard language' when in a formal context, we learn to code-switch. It only feels natural to talk about our kink lifestyles in English, because that is the language we learned our jargon, made our first experiences and were socialised about topics like consent, safewords and the psychological and emotional effects of kink in. If we switch to German, the jargon is alien to us, and we associate it with the only other places we heard German sex talk in: objectifying ads, stilted and outdated sex education, really bad local pornography, or even our creepy uncles making inappropriate comments about our bodies.

As a silly comparison for the sake of monolingual English-speakers' understanding, it feels just as wrong as dirty-talking like this: Good heavens, shall thee perchance sticke thy magnificient lust rod into mine? Probably not very much, thank you.

So, existing as queer, neurodivergent, or even having new or niche hobbies like retro technology or the Web Revival, often pushes us into subcultures that are American English-speaking spaces, and that are heavily influenced by US culture. A large part of our existence is alienated from our physical surroundings and the culture we grew up in, and compartmentalised into a largely online, intangible anglophone world of escapism.

It feels like living two parallel lives. One is your mundane life, filled with bills, work, dishes, harassment on the street, landlords and family issues. This is where you use your native language. And then you live your authentic, real life: your partner(s), your identity, your self-realisation, your friends, your hobbies, your sexuality, your safe places. And that takes place in English.

The far-right in non-American countries have for a long time argued that cultural developments like queerness, alternative self-expression, mental health-related identities or anti-racism are somehow 'imported', artificially imposed upon us by the USA. It is a pretty thinly veiled attempt at another variation on the good old antisemitic 'Jewish conspiracy'/'cultural bolshevism' pattern, where some shadow organisation forces an alien culture on us in order to weaken and invade us.

In the eyes of many if not most conservatives, visibly queer people and other 'misfits' are products of typical American woke nonsense, something that hadn't existed before American cultural influence turned our kids weak, gay, effeminate and trans. Through this narrative, they turn us from fellow German people into an "other", into an invader, into a foreign threat. This is already part of the state narrative in countries like the Russian Federation or the People's Republic of China, where the LGBT movement is classified as a foreign actor and something inherently alien to their culture.

In doing that, they are attempting to control a monopoly over defining what exactly is and what isn't part of 'our culture'. If they succeed in the heads of the people, they will cause even 'allies' to see us as a special minority, as something that we need to tolerate as an addition to our 'normal' culture, not as an inherent, natural part of it.

I am not writing this article to affirm this chauvinistic, hateful world view, much less to propose some kind of assimilation to 'be more German' to stop making conservatives angry. That is the opposite of my intention. Instead, I am proposing that we should not let them define a 'real German' by their arbitrary, bigoted criteria. Our existence as queer, non-nationalist, progressive Germans is proof that being German is not somehow at odds with being queer or progressive. And the same thing goes for all other cultures.

Even if queer culture in Germany as it is observable today mostly did originate in the USA, it would not 'prove' them right. It would merely be an interesting footnote in the biographies of individuals. Their intention is to once more establish the nation as a focal point of identity: we are all German and that is the one thing uniting us. It is an attempt at using that national identification later on to justify persecution of 'non-German' elements and to establish the German state apparatus as the representative of our collective interests on account of its German-ness.

They are trying to establish a normative idea of what it means to be German, especially in contrast to other nations, and international subcultures like ours are obviously counter to that idea.

So, what are the consequences of all this?

The answer is that this is an incredibly personal question to ask yourself. There is no right or wrong reaction to it. Nobody should be expected to artificially limit themselves or leave their established comfort zone. Some kind of subculture boycott would only hurt those weakest among us who are dependent on their escapism, or who are uncomfortable or even traumatised with their native culture.

For me personally though, I realised that I would like to stop contributing to this state of affairs. I am a creative person and something of an artist. I create content and contribute to my subcultures: through developing little indie games, writing fanfiction, participating in social media, recording videos, publishing long blog posts like this one, working on my website, maintaining resources and so on.

Right now, I am contributing to the fact that if you want to interact with my niche hobbies and identities, you need to enter English-speaking, American-dominated online subcultures. All my stuff so far is available in English only.

If I begin working on a new project, my natural instinct is to start writing it in English. You simply reach the biggest audience, and you want to contribute to the subculture you know and like. Indie games, fanfiction, video essays, websites, social media accounts and so on to me have been 'English by default'.

But I would like to live in a world where you don't need to speak English or interact with American culture in order to watch content on retro technology, find resources on more obscure queer identities, read saucy kink fanfiction, or participate in the Web Revival. I don't want US culture to permeate every facet of our identities. Just like the vanguard of German hip hop developing from merely copying US rap to carving their own unique style and space, I want to break out of the self-imposed prison of just endlessly imitating US-centric online culture. I would like to start representing myself, and that includes the fact that I happen to be German, unapologetically and authentically.

Right now however, this is not what my actions represent.

All the above is why I made the decision to prioritise the German language when starting future projects. I would like to contribute to all of my subcultures in German, too, to do my part in filling in the gaps. If possible, I will maintain a bilingual presence everywhere; right now for instance, I am working on adding quality, handmade German subtitles to my ages-old video essay on GTA Online.

Libre.Town itself will remain as it is for now on account of being so huge, but I am looking at the idea of at least creating a German sub-section of the site.

Switching to German (or at least working on slowly making all my projects bilingual) will come with a lot of drawbacks and compromises, but I am willing to take that risk.

First of all, if I create German content I will artificially limit my potential audience by a lot. Almost all Germans online can and will interact with English content, but very few non-Germans, of which there are way more, will be able and willing to interact with German content. Hobbies and niches that have very few people in it might have an even smaller, if any, potential German audience.

Perhaps almost nobody will read my German post about, for example, my detransition experience, or about some obscure late-90s laptop. But I am glad that I am contributing to society's collective cultural wealth in some way. That there will no longer be no German posts about this obscure topic, but one, even if nobody reads it right now. Who knows – if some critical mass is reached, perhaps my humble content will play a small role in the establishment of some previously English-only subculture in Germany?

But I also see a lot of positive potential. In my subcultures, there are a lot of English-speaking household names: for vintage computing for example, Clint Basinger of the YouTube channel LGR. Many niches are already saturated. There is a ton of English-language fan-fiction in all of my fandoms. Almost everything, every idea has been done to death already. Video essays and deep dives about gaming? There's so many these days I can barely count. Web revival websites, like on Neocities? Even this subculture is getting very crowded nowadays.

But all those niches are only really saturated in the anglophone world. I could not name a single creator who produces German long-form high-quality video essays about gaming. I cannot name a single German-first fan-fiction author that I read, let alone in a specific fandom, genre or pairing. I have never seen a German Web Revival-adjacent web page.

There is a lot of opportunity for German content in all of those niches. Instead of viewing the idea of creating German art as limiting accessibility, I would like to instead turn that thought on its head: I would like to make content accessible to people who can speak German, but cannot or don't want to speak English. Instead of adding to the plethora of content already available in English and reaching tens of thousands of people, I might end up being someone who created something in German that only half a dozen people will ever see – but for those people, I will be the first and only source.

And hopefully, just maybe, I will contribute to a world where subcultures for all us misfits exist in German too, not as pale imitations and translations, but as a symbiosis of our culture with the subculture in question. Something new and fresh, something authentic to our lives; something that is not just a gentrified equivalent of our real, lived experiences.

So that perhaps, future generations of queer and neurodivergent people won't have to feel the alienation to themselves and escape into US English subcultures anymore just to be their authentic selves.

After all, the best antidote against bigotry is actually interacting with the minority. If there is no decent German subculture and we all just show our real selves in inaccessible English spaces online, there is no chance that people like our parents or neighbours will ever get the opportunity to see us for who we are, understand us, and perhaps learn that we are just people trying to live our lives.