‘A step away from hell’: the young male refugees selling sex to survive

Photographer Heba Khamis spent a year and a half documenting the lives of 'black birds': the male Afghan and Iranian sex workers in Berlin's Tiergarten

• All photographs by Heba Khamis

The allure of romance is never far away in Berlin's Tiergarten park, a vast 520-acre expanse home to manicured lawns, dense forest, a picturesque boating lake and the city zoo. As families lay out picnics and millennials fire up barbecues, those seeking something more illicit head to the park's wooded north, where young male Afghan and Iranian refugees can be found selling sex to the hundreds of buyers who pass through Tiergarten each day.