The KCR, short for Kommunikations Centrum Ruhr, is Dortmund's gay, lesbian and queer centre and by its own account the longest-running one in Germany. It was founded in 1972 and has been in the courtyard of the Langer August, a sociocultural centre in the Nordstadt, since the early 1980s.
It runs on membership fees, donations and volunteers, and the programme is a list of groups rather than a bar calendar: a choir, a card-playing group, Gay & Gray for older gay men, a lesbian leisure club, a queer meet-up, an intergenerational queer evening, a Sunday café, a games night and a dance tea. There is counselling as well, and rooms are used by other Dortmund queer groups.
For a visitor this is the place to find out what is actually happening in the city. The centre keeps a queer directory for Dortmund and puts on a queer street fair.
The people in this picture are AI-generated.
