Ninety minutes. That’s how much time separated us from the Christopher Street Day attack in Berlin on July 25, 2026: one woman killed, twenty-nine people injured. Karl grew up in Eastern Germany and lived in Berlin for years before moving to Amsterdam for his Dutch husband, Daan, whom he met in Berlin thirteen years ago. In July 2026, that history brought us back to Berlin for Pride for our gay travel blog, Couple of Men. Three days after the Berlin Pride attack in 2026, we took the stage at Homomonument in Amsterdam for the Berlin CSD attack commemoration, answering the question we keep getting asked: Do we still need Pride?
Berlin CSD, July 25: Before the Attack
Sunshine from the first morning coffee, hundreds of thousands of people filling the streets, first-time Pride visitors next to drag artists next to rainbow families, allies who’d flown in from every corner of the world. The kind of loud, unguarded joy that made this the biggest Pride Berlin has ever seen.
That was Berlin CSD on July 25, 2026, right up until 10 p.m., when a post from CSD Berlin announced the Pride events at the Brandenburger Gate had to be canceled. Everyone still in the park was told to evacuate toward the main station, away from Potsdamer Platz and the Tiergarten.
We know exactly why that instruction came. Ninety minutes earlier, we had walked that same stretch of the Tiergarten hand in hand, past people picnicking in the grass, laughing, singing, and chilling after a happy, proud day on the streets together. We were already back at the hotel after dinner when the news came out: a car had driven into the crowd, and the driver had gone on to attack people with a machete before fleeing.
Daan put words to that moment days later, talking to The Advocate: “I remember my initial reaction was confusion. It didn’t compute that such violence could happen in a space that just moments before had felt so safe, full of love and community.”
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What happened that Pride night in Berlin
Here is what the Berlin authorities have officially confirmed, not secondhand reporting. At around 10 p.m. on July 25, 2026, a 21-year-old man identified by the Berlin prosecutor’s office as Abdul B. drove a vehicle into the crowd in the Tiergarten and attacked others with a bladed weapon, then fled. Twenty-nine people were injured, several critically. One woman was killed. She had come from Poland to celebrate Pride with her daughter.
The exact location of the Berlin Pride Attack 2026 was confirmed a little later: Tiergarten Park, near the exit of the Tiergarten Tunnel along Lennéstraße. The precise path we had walked an hour and a half earlier.
Just one day later, the German police tracked the accused to a garden colony on Ruhlebener Straße in Spandau, Berlin. The Berlin police say he attacked the special forces officers who found him with a stabbing weapon. They opened fire in response, and he died at the scene.
Karl broke down in the hotel right next to Daan when he heard that. Earlier that same afternoon, his mother had called him during the parade. She was worried, the way mothers are when their kids are traveling. He’d turned his phone around to show her the crowd and the joy in it. “I love you,” she told him. “Take care of yourself, promise?” He told her he was doing his best.
We’re not going to describe more of that night than this. The facts carry enough weight on their own, and we’d rather spend the words on what came after, together, as a community.
The driver in the car missed us by 90 minutes
What if we’d been further back in the parade? What if we’d danced for just a few more songs? What if we’d chosen to eat at the Pride grounds instead of walking back to the hotel first?
“I am not ok. And many of us are not ok. It is understandable to feel shaken, angry, hurt, and deeply saddened after what happened in Berlin, a place that should have been safe for us.”
From our speech at Amsterdam’s Homomonument, July 28, 2026
None of those questions have answers. We’ve asked them anyway, more than once, in the weeks since.
The hate in our comments after the Berlin 2026 Pride attack
In the days after the attack, our posts filled up with comments and our inbox with messages. Most of them were love, support, and people checking in to make sure we were safe. Some of them were something else entirely: comments carrying a political agenda dressed up as concern and hate directed at the queer community from one side and at Muslims and the wider Islamic community from the other, everyone convinced the attack proved their point.
Drag icon Jennifer Hopelezz moderating the commemoration of the Berlin Pride Attack victims © Maksim Gutsu 
Queer folks from all over the country showed up with flowers © Maksim Gutsu 
Showing up in solidarity: Stronger together! © Maksim Gutsu 
Love is love AND Protect the Dolls! © Maksim Gutsu 
Femke Halsema, the mayor of Amsterdam, giving a touching and strong speech © Boy Hazes 
Myrtille Danse, Vorzitter COC Nederland, giving a touching but strong speech at Homomonument © Boy Hazes 
Holding up the rainbow flag up: Stronger together! © Maksim Gutsu 
All ages, genders, identity and sexuality gathering for a free society together © Maksim Gutsu 
Jennifer Hopelezz on her way to lay down flowers at Homomonument © Maksim Gutsu 
Hand in hand, deeply moved by the events, we sit and listen to the words of Femke Halsema and Myrtille Dance. © Maksim Gutsu 
Hand in hand: STRONGER TOGETHER, ALWAYS © Maksim Gutsu
We honestly don’t know how many of those accounts belonged to real people. Some of it read like the coordinated noise that shows up under any headline built to divide, the kind bot networks and troll farms churn out by the thousands. But some of it almost certainly came from real people too, people frightened and intimidated by what had just happened, lashing out at whoever was closest because they didn’t know where else to put it. We’re not interested in sorting the bots from the genuinely scared. Either way, giving that reaction a stage helps nobody but the people who want us divided.
Speaking to the big Dutch newspaper Volkskrant that week, Karl put it plainly: “I found the reactions incredibly shocking. They’re using our own pain for their agenda.”
We’ve decided early on to keep those comments away from our followers and ourselves. We wanted to put our energy into the messages that mattered: the ones offering solidarity and support to victims. You know, the ones reminding us we weren’t alone.
Because we’re 100% convinced that if we let hate set the terms of the conversation, the people who attack queer lives and queer spaces win twice.
Why the LGBTQ+ Community Still Stands Up
German authorities have said that the man responsible for the attack on Christopher Street Day 2026 in Berlin was radicalized within Islamist circles. Apparently, he was also inspired by the Islamic State. We are being straightforward in this article because tiptoeing around it doesn’t help anyone.
What we won’t do is let one radicalized man stand in for an entire religion or for the refugees and asylum seekers who keep getting dragged into this conversation despite having nothing to do with it. Two billion Muslims did not drive that car. Most of the people being blamed for it in our comment section are themselves fleeing the same extremism, in some cases fleeing it for the same reason we’d have to: because of whom they love. Redirecting that anger at refugees isn’t justice for the victims in Berlin. It’s just a far-right talking point wearing a Pride flag for the week, and we’re not interested in carrying water for it.
Berlin also wasn’t the first time queer spaces have been targeted by any single ideology. Extremists have gone after us before: the 2016 attack on Pulse nightclub in Orlando, the 2022 shooting at a gay bar in Oslo during that city’s Pride week, a neo-Nazi shooting at a gay bar in Bratislava the same year. Dutch intelligence agency AIVD has rated the risk of a terrorist attack in the Netherlands as “substantial” since 2023, and Amsterdam Pride itself was reportedly on a target list drawn up by an Islamist terror cell based in Arnhem back in 2018. The threat comes from more than one direction. Hating an entire community back has never once made us safer from any of it.
VU Amsterdam professor Rik Peels told the Volkskrant that the queer community embodies the opposite of the rigid gender norms extremists want to impose. This is precisely why Pride becomes a target for them, regardless of which ideology is targeting it that particular year. That’s an uncomfortable subject to read about your community. It’s also, we think, the clearest explanation for why showing up in public, visibly and together, still matters as much as it ever did.
Speaking at the Berlin Memorial at Amsterdam’s Homomonument
Three days after the attack, on July 28, we stood in front of thousands of people at Amsterdam’s Homomonument. Mayor Femke Halsema opened the evening by calling Berlin “the city of freedom” and telling the crowd, “We will win if we loudly and clearly keep hope alive.” Candles went down the monument’s steps. Flowers kept arriving past nine o’clock. Nobody rushed anyone to leave.
We closed our own words that night with the line we keep coming back to:
“Fear won’t stop us. Hate won’t stop us. We will celebrate Pride.”
Daan Colijn at Homomonument Commemoration, July 2026
Gay Travel Index 2026
The Berlin-based Spartacus informs LGBTQ+ and queer travelers about how gay-friendly a holiday destination is, based on several ranking criteria.
Which country ranks first? Where is it safe to travel to as a gay and LGBTQ+ traveler?
You can use the GTI to prepare for your gaycation and to guide your choice of holiday destination.
WorldPride in Amsterdam: Joy as the answer!
WorldPride Amsterdam’s Canal Parade went ahead on August 1 as planned, roughly eighty boats and hundreds of thousands of people lining the water. We were two of them, and it didn’t feel like a city performing bravery. It was more like our city had actually decided something.
One float in particular everyone was talking about: giant inflatables of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Trump’s balloon wore a blouse and skirt, and Putin’s wore overalls. Both balloons were locked in a kiss, sailing past under a banner reading “Kiss for peace.” Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten, the first openly gay head of government to ride a WorldPride boat, waved to the watching crowd from another. Madonna and Kylie Minogue performed during a concert.
A community survey taken in the days after the attack found that 65% of LGBTQ+ people worried about their safety at WorldPride, and 13% considered skipping it altogether. The same survey found that 70% believed Pride mattered more than ever. Both numbers came from the same people.
We did not feel particularly brave in a movie-poster kind of sense. The fear didn’t go away because the boats were pretty. Being brave that day just meant not letting fear direct where we stood or who we stood next to. It is a smaller, less glamorous kind of being brave than the word is usually used for. It’s also the only kind that actually gets hundreds of thousands of people back onto a canal a week after a car drove into a crowd during a Pride event.
All our articles for WorldPride 2026 in Amsterdam
Do we still need Pride?
Yes. We were standing on the exact route the attacker’s car would take 90 minutes later. But our answer is still yes.
Pride never really is about a parade or a festival. It exists because people marched when marching was illegal and dangerous, long before any one attacker made a single night in July dangerous again. It’s about refusing to let a few people decide, through violence or through law, that queer people don’t get to exist in public.
Every year someone asks whether Pride has become “just a party.” An attack like in Berlin answers that question for us. We are peacefully celebrating our achievements and diversity, inviting everyone to join. Not because we enjoy demonstrating in our spare time. No, Pride and its connected festivities are not just a party. It’s proof that we’re still here.
Because showing up publicly in everyday life as who we are has always been an act of bravery and protest. As long as we do not accept everyone for who they are, we are not all equal.
Read more about Pride – The LGBTQ+ Rights Movement here!
But we do understand the anger, the desperation. We’re angry and desperate at times, too. But anger aimed at each other, at fellow queer people, at allies who show up imperfectly, at anyone who doesn’t grieve exactly the way we think they should, only finishes the attacker’s job for him. We are convinced that division was the goal and remains the goal of all anti-LGBTQ+ projects.
So we’ve decided that refusing to divide is the win. Together, we are stronger than hate.
We keep thinking about a peaceful version of that night in Berlin, though. Where we all could have just enjoyed the night after a successful day on the streets with each other. When the main message would have been about the unparalleled size of the event and political changes coming from our protest.
And maybe one or another queer person would have felt the strength and safety to come out of the closet. Or would just know that they are not alone in being different from a heteronormative societal worldview because they live in a country where being queer is still forbidden by law.
We are also writing it for you, the people who can’t show up (yet), like a teenager who is still in the “safe” closet. You’re not alone in this, and you’re not wrong for dreaming about the life the rest of us get to live. But even for us, it is not safe all the time either.
Is it still safe to go to Pride events? No large public event is risk-free, and it’s only logical to feel unsettled after Berlin. Cities have visibly increased security at Pride events since the attack, including barriers at Amsterdam’s WorldPride March, and organizers are taking threat assessments more seriously than in past years. Go if you can, with whatever precautions make sense for you, and don’t let anyone shame you for staying at home if you genuinely do not feel safe.
What can allies actually do? Show up in person when you’re able to. Say something when a colleague makes a low-blow joke. Don’t let “thoughts and prayers” be the whole response. By being present and visible, we are showing support on the one hand but also making us stronger together on the other.
How to be an LGBTQ+ ally? Our Guide for Supporting Queer Folks!
We walked away from Berlin holding hands a little tighter than usual, and we haven’t really let go since. Three days later, on a stage in Amsterdam, in front of thousands of strangers, it was still true. And it still is today.
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What stays with us after the Berlin Pride attack in 2026?
Fear won’t stop us. Hate won’t stop us. We will celebrate Pride in Berlin, in Amsterdam, and wherever it’s still needed. That’s not a slogan we borrowed for this piece.
It’s the last thing we said out loud before we stepped down from that stage, one corner of the pink triangle forming the Homomonument in Amsterdam. And we meant every word of it.
Did you find this piece meaningful? We’d love it if you shared it.
Feel like more of our LGBTQ+ travels, queer outdoor adventures, or Pride trips? Then browse our travel guides or write to us if you’re looking for personal tips. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram. We look forward to connecting with you! Karl & Daan.
Photos by: Boy Hazes and Maksim Gutsu