After the Future

THE STORY

Time, more precisely lifetime, feels strangely out of alignment, breaks out of its order and unravels – that becomes palpable again and again: at home, Ortwin Passon once says, sitting at the counter of a Berlin pub with his beer, he sometimes looks at himself in the mirror and talks to himself – about the future that’s behind him. How does this present day that you thought you’d never see feel? Ortwin is HIV-positive, buried his last boyfriend in 1995 (“nursed to death”, he calls it) and has been working on a thesis on barebacking for a while – the political and penal relevance of unprotected anal intercourse between men in Germany. For Ortwin and many of his friends the issues of freedom and self-determination, of the relationship between sex and the law, of the present and the future, of death and excess are particularly existential.