NEWSLETTER

BY THOMAS KLEINHOLZ
ADDITIONAL INTERVIEWS: PATRIK ZBORIL & BARBARA DABROWSKA
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAURA PARK

The Motzstraße is the epicenter of Berlin’s gay sex scene. Here you can find dildos, poppers, S&M gear, S&M videos, S&M magazines, chokers, masks, harnesses, cock rings, anal lube, anal beads, those dildos that have fake horse tails on the end so you look like a horsey when you have it shoved up your ass, leather caps, leather chaps, leather vests, blindfolds, cat-o’-nine-tails, mustache wax, and lots and lots of different kinds of condoms.

It’s also a great neighborhood for sex cinemas, gay bars, dark rooms in which you can fuck strangers, and, sadly, Eastern European male child prostitutes. You can’t help but notice the older German and Turkish guys strolling around with their gray hair, dirty hands, ill-fitting pensioners’ suits, and a predilection for sex with underage boys.

When asking locals from the neighborhood about the prevalent child-sex business being run on the streets outside their windows, the only acknowledgments are blank faces, averted looks, and quick exits. The same goes for the shop owners. No one is willing to confirm the open secret that everyone in Berlin knows—those well-dressed foreign guys shuffling young boys around the park and ferrying them into and out of sex cinemas are pimps, and the kids are prostitutes.

On Martin-Luther-Straße is one such sex cinema. It’s frequently visited by pimps and boys alike. They solicit dates from bored customers who want something more than a cheap strip show or a dirty chat. It’s loud inside and it stinks of cum, sweat, and disinfectant. Greasy guys wander aimlessly around, never looking anyone in the eye. You can hear the sounds of live grunts and DVD pornos from the booths that line the walls. The guy behind the counter, on condition of anonymity, tells us that the boys often come in looking for clients. “They hang around in the foyer, sometimes approaching older guys,” he says. “They chat for a few seconds, then disappear together into one of the private rooms.” This place is ideal for the young whores. There are no cops and there’s a constant stream of desperate, sick men. But it’s a small place and can only be worked by a couple of boys at a time. The other kids hang out by the park on the corner of Ecke Fuggerstraße and Eisenacherstraße. They stand out there, day and night, leaning on park fences and waiting for customers. And yes, the painful irony of the fact that these boys, aged between 9 and 15, are touting for sex while standing next to a playground is not lost on us. Most of them are from Albania or Romania. They don’t really speak English or German. They chat to each other in their native tongues while their pimps look out on the street. Business isn’t done here, of course. It’s more like a base of operations. The kids are picked up elsewhere, while walking around the block. When one kid comes back with money, another is sent off for “a walk.”

We went for an actual walk with one of the boys. He told us to call him Petre, but that it wasn’t his real name. “As long as my boss gets the money, there is not trouble,” he said. He wore tight jeans, a short black jacket, and earrings with fake stones in them—a style cynically tailored by the pimps to attract older gay men. Petre is small in stature and well groomed. “I don’t really like these clothes,” he tells us. “I would not wear them normally, but it’s like wearing a uniform, you know? I wear it when I’m working.” Petre was brought to Berlin by a friend of his father’s after his dad lost his job. He traveled to Berlin in a minibus with some other boys. All he was told was that he was going to get a job in Berlin from his dad’s friend. Now he lives in a tiny, unheated room with five other boys and works as a whore. “It’s comfy. We each have a space to sleep. It’s how my bedroom was at home,” he says. The sex isn’t a big deal for Petre. “It’s just a job, like anything else,” he tells us, and he seems to mean it. “I get hurt sometimes, but so do construction workers and truck drivers.”

We couldn’t get to Petre’s head pimp, who keeps himself hidden, but we met one of his lieutenants, who fills in “looking after” the boys. He never told us his name or any other details about himself. He just talked about the business. “There’s lots of sex here,” he said. “Lots of prostitution. Lots of gays. If you’re gay and looking for sex in this city, you come here.” We walk along with him. He doesn’t want to be seen talking to us in a group. As we stroll, different boys appear at his side, exchange a few words and leave.

He continues to talk: “Look, it’s really simple, right? You come here, go up to a kid, ‘Hey, how’s it going? Blah blah. D’you wanna fuck?’ and then you go off together. That’s how it works. Men come here and fuck boys. It happens all day, every day.” We overhear a really young boy dealing with a fat, gray-haired German guy in an old brown suit. “No, no, no,” the kid laughs, “not for that much.” The guy mumbles something back to him and the kid replies, still laughing, “No, I’m not doing any special party for you tonight.”

The nameless pimp tells us that two main guys control the whole area. Each is the head of a different “clan,” which then employs smaller local gangs and their guys to work as pimps. The business in the area is shared between the Albanians and the Romanians, with smaller Bulgarian groups sprinkled among them. The boys have been shipped in from abroad to make money to send back to their families at home, but of course their pimps take the lion’s share. “Some boys try to keep the money away from the pimps,” Petre tells us. “But if the bosses find out, they have no mercy. Boys just disappear all the time.”

In many cases, entire Romanian families have been brought to Berlin by criminal syndicates over the last ten years. The youngest kids go begging with their mothers on the Kurfürstendamm, Berlin’s main shopping district. The other children go busking, playing accordions with their dads and uncles on the subways. From age nine onward they generally end up in the sex trade, fucking strangers in cinema booths and city parks. During the day, the boys live with the pimps in small rooms with up to 20 people sharing a single floor. Petre often pays his rent in the form of free sex.

The scene around Nollendorfplatz is punctuated with the occasional German boy, most of them thrown out by their parents and now living rough or in state-run social homes. Selling their bodies is a way to make quick money, which is usually spent on booze, speed, and pills. Lutz Volkwein, the head of Subway, an organization offering support and information for homeless kids in Berlin, tells us, “The sheer mass of children on the streets and in need of help is overwhelming for the very few projects that try to address this growing problem.” Subway offers free showers, beds, and condoms to kids living on the street, but this service is often abused by Romainian boys, who check in for food and a bed, then use their stay as an opportunity to steal from other kids. “You have to be wary of some of the kids,” Volkwein says. “They only come here to steal from others who are even worse off than them.”

One of the most worrying things (in this whole heap of worrying things) about Berlin’s sex-with-little-immigrant-boys industry is how unbelievably blatant it is: Big slimy layers of indifference and even acceptance crust over the never-ending stream of child abuse, infanticide, and terminal poverty, creating one big depressing pedophilia casserole. This is what six-year-old Dimitri can look forward to in the “autumn years” of his life, while he’s crammed into a van next to dozens of like-minded chums, on their way to a better life in Berlin. Good fucking luck.

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