It is conducted not through ringleaders and brothelkeepers, but over the bar counters of a dark and cobbled alley called Paardenstraat at an average of pounds 50 a trick. A slow but steady post-Cold War influx has enabled the rentboys from Romania to take over what was once a placid backwater of Dutch sexual laissez-faire.
Never before exposed to gay sex, the Romanian boys, aged between 17 and 22, are in it only for money. Europe's belt of sleaze, stretching through the traditional centres of Amsterdam and Berlin, has carved out new notches in Prague, Warsaw and Bucharest. Most of the boys arrived via Germany, where they failed to get political asylum, and then heard of an easier life in the Netherlands.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dutch tolerance has backlashed on itself; the dark shapes in the Festivalbar convey a picture of mutual parasitism, with East and West feeding off each other. The customers are mostly men in their 50s and 60s, from all over the West including America. Under the lanterns of Paardenstraat, Corneliu swings nightly between indolence and violence. A beautiful and volatile year- old from Maramures, northern Romania, by the Ukrainian border, he lost his job when the local textile mill went bankrupt.
He is a regular visitor to the packed, all- male Festivalbar, where Romanians form the largest single contingent and the boys easily outnumber the men. I never let them fuck me. What kind of video enables him to perform the act? I like that. I like women, not men.
Corneliu has been here over a year but has learned only a smattering of Dutch. His Dutch counterparts avoid him when he is drunk. Before it was really easy to get a job. But the foreigners are younger and the younger you are, the better you are. There was a terrible fight last week with a Romanian boasting he had made 3, guilder pounds 1, in one night. Even the customers get upset.
