Ichgola Androgyn

Bernd Bossmann (in German Boßmann) was born on 21 October 1960 in Appeldorn, a village on the Lower Rhine. The Schwules Museum notes that aunts and cousins in the village inspired an early interest in performing femininity. His parents lived on the Lower Rhine; in 1994 he visited them there before moving to Cologne for six years. Their names have not been made public.

Bossmann first trained as a general and psychiatric nurse. After moving to Berlin in 1984 he studied acting and acrobatics, financing the training by working as a carer for the dying, which brought him into contact with people with AIDS very early in the epidemic.

Under the names Ichgola Androgyn and Theodor van den Boom, and in the role of Kläre Grube, Ichgola performed at the Kaiserhof-Theater in Cologne, the Theater des Westens, Schillertheater and Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, the SchwuZ, Die Wühlmäuse, the Bar jeder Vernunft, the Traumtheater Salomé and Circus Roncalli. Ichgola was a member of the drag ensemble Ladies Neid (founded around a 1985 Berliner Aids-Hilfe benefit), the troupe Gosh with the show Cirque des hommes, and the O-Ton Piraten, whose productions included Come-Play-Back (1999), Liebe ist... (2002), Gross in Fahrt (2005), Geschnitten vom Stück (2007) and Roemisch Fuenf (2009). In 2009 Ichgola and the O-Ton Piraten founded the unsubsidised theatre O-TonArt in the Kulmer Straße in Schöneberg, upstairs in the building that once housed the first SchwuZ. The troupe disbanded in 2014.

On film Ichgola worked mainly with Rosa von Praunheim: Ein Virus kennt keine Moral (1986), Anita: Tänze des Lasters (1987), Feuer unterm Arsch (1991), Ich bin meine eigene Frau (1992, as the young Charlotte von Mahlsdorf), Neurosia (1994), Pfui, Rosa! (2002), Tunten lügen nicht (2002), Charlotte in Schweden (2002), Ichgola Androgyn (2012), Rex Gildo: Der letzte Tanz (2022) and Dreißig Jahre an der Peitsche (2024). Other credits include Drei Drachen vom Grill (1992), Michael Brynntrup's Plötzlich und unerwartet (1993), Das Manifest (2003), Heisses Blut oder Vivienne del Vargos' letzter Vorhang (2005) and Die Prinzipien von Serendip (2015).

From the mid 1980s Ichgola used drag shows to raise money and awareness for people with HIV and AIDS, together with BeV StroganoV, Ovo Maltine and Tima die Göttliche, and took part in the ACT UP movement. In 1987 Bernd Bossmann co-founded HIV e. V. with nurse friends to care for AIDS patients, bringing them home from hospital; a large benefit in the Tempodrom tent provided start-up money. In 1990 he organised a benefit for Pluspunkt e. V., the first AIDS self-help group in East Berlin. On stage he satirised discrimination against people with HIV, once handing out syringes, condoms and plasters to the audience.

In September 2006 Bossmann opened finovo ("end and beginning"), the first cemetery café in Germany, on the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof in Berlin-Schöneberg, where the Brothers Grimm and more than 100 queer people are buried. He kept a folder in the café with names and stories of the queer dead, cared for the shared historic grave he and Ovo Maltine had sponsored, and was a member of EFEU e. V., which restores historic graves. As a volunteer he looked after EFEU's Garten der Sternenkinder, where parents can bury stillborn and miscarried children, including those below the legal burial threshold. He later stopped running the café himself but remained at the cemetery almost daily. The documentary Garten der Sterne (2016) tells this story.

Ichgola lived in Berlin from 1984, apart from six years in Cologne from 1994, and for a time shared a flat and also a houseboat with fellow drag artists, including Ovo Maltine (Christoph Josten, 1966 to 2005). Sources use both he and she for Ichgola; Bossmann used the male civil name and the female stage persona side by side. No spouse or children have been publicly reported.

Ichgola believed care must adapt to the patient, not the patient to the care, and that people should live as fully as possible until the end. Bossmann spoke openly and cheerfully about death and remembrance, and was sceptical of romantic myths: in 2022 he said a tightly knit gay community had never really existed, and that it was fear of the virus that created a sense of togetherness.

Ichgola Androgyn represents a West Berlin scene of the 1980s and 1990s in which self-ironic drag performance was tied to political action, above all in the AIDS crisis. In July 2026 Ichgola gave the Schwules Museum a pre-mortem archive of photographs (including original prints by Jürgen Baldiga and Annette Frick), posters, flyers, handwritten notes, emails from Rosa von Praunheim, lyrics and albums. The museum also holds a 2020 oral history interview recorded for its oralHIVStory project. finovo continues to operate under a new tenant.

Tunten lügen nicht (Rosa von Praunheim, 2002) portrays Ichgola, BeV StroganoV, Tima die Göttliche and Ovo Maltine. Rosa von Praunheim's Ichgola Androgyn (2012) is a film portrait. Garten der Sterne (Stéphane Riethauser and Pasquale Plastino, Switzerland 2016, German cinema release 18 January 2018) follows the café and the Garten der Sternenkinder. Ichgola is also a witness in Markus Stein's Baldiga: Entsichertes Herz.

Ichgola Androgyn died of cancer in the night to Monday, 9 November 2026, aged 66, as Siegessäule reported the same day. The place of death and funeral arrangements have not been made public. In 2022 Bossmann told Der Tagesspiegel that his place was reserved in the historic grave he shared with Ovo Maltine on the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof.