Part 5 will be available soon.
Part 5 will be available soon.
Being 20 in West Berlin
6 Parts
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Part 5 will be available soon.
Tom B., call boy and ex-heroin addict: 'In West Berlin, everyone mixed and chose their scene'
Profile'Being 20 in West Berlin' (4/6). Tom B. came to West Berlin as a young gay man in the mid-1980s, became an escort and fell into drug addiction, just as AIDS began to strike. Now in his sixties, the sex worker and social worker has come a long way.
Let's call him Tom B. He is tall and slim, with a smooth face, brown hair, and glasses. Until a few years ago, he would never have shared his story, because, "for people, it's just too much to take in." At 63, he divides his time between two professions: sex work and social work. When he was young, he used heroin and would spend time at the Zoo train station, which was then West Berlin's hub of hard drug use. After recovering from addiction, he studied educational sciences and now supports both people who use drugs and those trying to recover.
He also turned to sex work to pay for his studies, and he performs erotic massages because he enjoys sex. "You fulfill the bodies of men, so what's the problem?" a psychoanalyst once told him. She helped Tom B. come to terms with his past, which he told us in a gentle, almost distant voice over a long afternoon in a friend's apartment in the Kreuzberg district.
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