At the age of 14, Aviv – not his real name – came out of the closet. He grew up far from the center of Israel, in a home that observed Jewish traditions. He says that, until the day when he decided to embrace who and what he knew he was and to come out, his parents “knew but didn’t know” that he was gay. He continued to live with his parents for the next four years until, on his 18^th birthday, his father called him and told him to pack his bags and leave. “Don’t come back,” Aviv was told. “You no longer have any reason to come here.”

“For years before that, we were always at war with each other. They would call me a pathological liar because I had to lie about where I had been; I was always running away from home and going to Tel Aviv. I always had exes who were older than me and used to take me out partying. Then, he gave me that push and I embraced it. I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ As if he had given me the okay to get the hell out of there? So, let’s go.”

Within a few months, Aviv found himself in Tel Aviv, living with friends. One of them worked as a stripper at a well-known club. “She was the same age as me and we really got along,” Aviv says. “She took me to the club. Now, I’m gay, so you could ask what I was doing in a strip club. At the time, it was like an excursion. At the club, you could buy vouchers. Each voucher costs 20 shekels and would get you a dance. She gave me a whole bunch of their vouchers and that’s where I started to get an understanding about give-and-take relationships. Suddenly, I realized that if you look good, you can make money from it.”

Through an acquaintance – who later became a partner – Aviv met another group of people who became like a family to him. Drugs and prostitution were very much part of that family. “That was the period when I just started to become familiar with drugs and I was smoking a lot. Then, suddenly, I was introduced to heavier drugs. And, slowly but surely, it all started to feel normal – this whole way of looking at prostitution as well.”

Aviv’s first time was almost by accident. “I was working as a waiter in a fine‑dining restaurant and I was making tons of money. I was starting to look a little more mature; I was looking good, working out, investing in myself. And suddenly I also had my own apartment. And, one day, I don’t remember how exactly, somebody sent me a message on Grindr asking if I wanted to make 3,000 shekels and whether I would come to an apartment. I thought to myself ‘Why not?’ and said that I would be happy to go.”

His relationship with that client became regular. He organized sex and drug parties and Aviv was one of the stars of the show. “I would make sure to bring the men, from the clubs, from websites that are like dating apps for sex services. Because there was never a problem with the budget, he always paid very generously and there were always loads of drugs – so everybody would always come.”

The next change in his life came about because of a transgender friend. “She liked my charm, the fact that I have chutzpah, and she always told me I could be a woman. ‘Take the hormones,’ she told me. ‘You can make a lot more money that way.’ We always used to laugh about it. And that was how, for the first time, I had an ad as a woman.”

“There were periods when I was super masculine and I’d get a rush from it; I felt like things weren’t going so well with men, so I needed that sexuality with straight guys. I would dress up as a woman and work in [prostitution] because the money was great. A man isn’t like a woman. As a man, I’d spend one or two hours with a couple, get paid $2,000 and go home. Something like that. (As a woman) I could have binges with a single client for four days, who would pay me 40,000 shekels.”

Aviv’s story moves in waves. Between man and woman. Between working as a waiter or a courier for a food delivery service and working in prostitution or for a drug dealer. “All of the money that I made back then has gone,” he says. “Drugs, clothes, parties. I spent hundreds of thousands of shekels on online orders in just a few years. A fortune. I ordered everything: clothes, underwear for when I worked as a woman, lubricant, sex toys for customers. You name it. I would order food four times a day, but I wouldn’t really eat. It was all just excess, excess, excess. Life in Tel Aviv was lived in such a high gear that you always want to be seen, you want to sit in restaurants and you never want to skimp on yourself in any way. You want to have cigarettes, you want to snort cocaine and you always want to have another baggie in your pocket. You’re always inside that story.”

Aviv recalls that his customers were “everyone. If we are talking about the period when I was ‘presenting,’ there were doctors, there were very young guys and there were even 17-year-olds who were very curious. And when I worked as a man, there were aging gays, rich guys or couples who wanted to bring in an extra person – or just people who really liked my look. There were men trying gay sex for the first time and people who genuinely found it hard to find sex out there. And they’re willing to pay.”

Emotionally, too, these were tempestuous years for Aviv, between addiction and attempts to get clean, between endless parties and the downs that inevitably follow. “I suffered,” he says. “I was taken advantage of and used. When you go into it thinking the person coming to you just wants a little attention – but that isn’t really true. The clients are smart too, and they can take advantage of you in all kinds of ways. And they did. I had clients run out on me and I had clients who beat me. And there were... I don't know if I’d call it rape, but when you’re having sex with someone you don’t actually want, it’s a form of emotional rape.”

In Aviv’s case, the ‘downs’ also meant suicide attempts. “I felt totally alone in the world and that really hurts,” he says about the last time he tried to take his own life, some two years ago, by taking an overdose of pills. “It’s impossible to be happy when people are using your body all day, when your body is nothing more than a way for other men to reach satisfaction, when you don’t love them and when you have even started to hate them.”

In the end, Aviv extricated himself from that world thanks to October 7. He left Tel Aviv and started to rebuild his relationship with his parents and the rest of his family. “When you work in prostitution for many years, especially when you play a role that isn’t really who you are, you realize that you very much want to distance yourself from yourself as a person. And you want to run away.

“I always felt that no one wants me; that even my parents didn’t want me. And then came that slap in the face at the age of 18, that telephone call from my father. And I realized that the very fact of using drugs, the prostitution and my desire to assume a role of some kind, to run away and to escape to sex – I was addicted to so many different things at the same time. I was addicted to everything. Everything I did, I became addicted to. And when I rebuilt my connection with my family, I understood that I don’t have anything to run away from anymore.”

Shomrim spoke with Aviv in his home, which is no longer in Tel Aviv. He’s only 30, works part time and gets a mental disability allowance from the National Insurance Institute. “I believe that if it weren’t for the National Insurance Institute, I would be living in the street,” he says. “Really. They saw an injured person. Never mind that it all came from what I have told you here; in the end, I was an abandoned and wounded child who sought to make money through sex – and they saw that.”

It’s important to mention the Lo Omdot Me’negged NGO, which gave Aviv financial assistance during his most challenging times. But, above all, he says, is his mother. “Over the years, I rediscovered her as a mature person to a mature person. She has taught me a lot about humility, modesty and making do with very little.”

Prostitution from the age of 12, violence against the LGBT community 

Karin Zarfati Roy-Shapira is the director of the Levinsky Clinic’s Be’er Sheva branch, which offers psychosocial services, counseling, and prevention tools to people in prostitution and other at-risk groups. The branch operates under the auspices of the Israel Public Health Association and treats around 200 people, around one third of whom are men.

“We are seeing a pattern – which also exists with women – in which there is some kind of lived reality that is hugely complicated, which leads people either into homelessness or poverty – and from there to prostitution,” Shapira tells Shomrim. “In the LGBT community, there are young people who come from very insular communities and sectors – some of whom were abused or harassed because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. In some cases, exposure of somebody’s sexual orientation can lead to the family and the community rejecting them and even kicking them out of the house.

“For men, the age that they start in prostitution is younger – around 12 or 13. They reach us at a later stage, because we don’t accept anybody under the age of 18. Apart from us, in southern Israel, unfortunately, there is only one other safe place for people in this situation, in Ashdod. So, people come from all over the region: from Eilat, from the Bedouin communities, from Dimona, Ofakim, Ashkelon, the kibbutzim and the ultra-Orthodox communities.”

Experts in the field say that the situation in the Arab sector is particularly sensitive. “For some male members of that community, prostitution is also a way of expressing their sexual identity,” says Shapira. “Sometimes, it’s a combination of poverty, neglect and a desire to live as a homosexual in a very closed society. Others are Arab men who are married to women but who are living a double life. And, in order to live this double life, to express their sexual identity, they are also forced to work in prostitution with other men.” She adds that “around 95 percent of the people in prostitution are victims of incest or sexual abuse within the family. That is a particularly important figure, which sends a lot of people into the world of prostitution and sexual violence. Women and men.”

Dr. Na’ama Goldberg, CEO of the Lo Omdot Me’negged NGO, stresses that “sex for the men is often about survival. We get a lot of people using our services from the Palestinian population or Arab society, who fled their village, and for them it absolutely is a case of sex in order to survive. And if he’s young, there are older foxes who will take advantage of him. And the same can go for a young Haredi man, who may not be facing threats to his life but could be ostracized by his family and his community. And here, too, it’s sex for survival, simply in order to exist.”

“Once a week, we get together to decide who will get the very little money that we have to distribute,” says Goldberg. “The men’s stories repeat themselves: this one is in mortal danger, that one escaped from his village; one is sleeping in the street, another is sleeping around and yet another has been sexually abused. You never hear about someone from a wealthy family who had a happy childhood and just ended up here by accident.”

Sivan (not her real name) is a transgender woman working in prostitution. She is 30 years old, but her story began when she was an 8-year-old boy growing up in an Arab community. “There was one man who raped me. I went to see him with other children to study and that’s where it happened. When I told my parents that something was happening, they punished me for even speaking out. I was shackled to my bed for almost 20 days, without food.”

“I was terribly abused,” Sivan adds. It was only a decade later, she says, when something happened to the man who had abused her, that she dared to confront her family. In response, however, they beat her almost to death. She left home and moved into an emergency shelter.

“From there, I found myself in a closed psychiatric ward. I tried to kill myself several times but I was saved at the last moment. Unfortunately. Nobody wants to live through what I have lived. Neither did I. The fact that I am breathing doesn’t mean anything. I’m nothing, zero. Even a stone on the ground is worth more than me.” After moving into the shelter, Sivan found herself working in prostitution to make money. “I did it in order to have something to eat,” she says. “I bought a wig and I started to work.” Later, she started taking hormones, but has not undergone full gender reassignment.

Members of the transgender community in prostitution are separate and different from men in prostitution. And still, Sivan’s case highlights the path that men can sometimes take in order to reach the same situation. “A man does not engage in prostitution out of choice. Why did I want to change myself? Because I don’t love myself. I wasn’t born with this desire to be a woman. I wanted to be how I am. But people made me this way. The world made me this way.”

At one stage, Sivan says, people from her past discovered that she was working in prostitution; some even fired shots at her apartment. “The life story of someone like me is very complex, very convoluted. For a man to turn to sex work, he’s sold his whole life away. It’s a circle that we can never get out of. And that is a culture that came from Islam, our religion. That if we are gay, lesbian or trans – the only thing we deserve is death. We don’t deserve anything else.”

Sivan fled to a different part of Israel. The interview with her was arranged by a professional counselor who has been by her side for years and who knows her story. In order not to expose her to any danger, her identifying features, including her current and previous places of residence, have been omitted. 

“I just want to live a good life, with dignity, and to stop working in prostitution,” Sivan says. “To end this daily rape. I’ve had enough. Once a man has finished, he never wants to look me in the eyes,” she says, fighting back the tears. “It breaks me every day. I swear, I never decided to be like this. I didn’t want this. I never looked at myself and knew that I was a prostitute. This country is full of male prostitutes. And I understand that they, too, didn’t decide on that. Life made them like that. It’s not easy,” she adds. “It’s not easy to say to a man, ‘You’re a prostitute.’ I’m talking about myself. I see myself, wearing a wig, in the mirror and I say to myself, ‘Wow. You’re a whore.’ Think about that and understand how hard it is.”

The two rounds of fighting with Iran over the past two years have been particularly difficult for Sivan. During the first of them, she was homeless. “They wouldn’t let me into a shelter. They spat at me just because of how I looked,” she says. Today, she has an apartment, but had to fight with the neighbors to be allowed into the communal bomb shelter. On most occasions, she simply gave up.

“It’s because I was wearing make-up, because I didn’t look good enough for them. They’d keep their children away from me.” That’s not the only problem. “Just imagine that you’re at home with a client and there’s a missile siren. How could you leave the house? You need to get dressed, take off your make-up. How can you do all that when you’ve got 10 minutes? A missile fragment fell right next to my apartment and no one asked after me. No one spoke to me. I saw neighbors knocking on each other’s doors – apart from mine. Why?”

According to Goldberg, the war exacerbated the problem. “There was a massive spike in the number of people calling our hotline – men and women alike. Most of them were asking for food vouchers, public transportation and help paying rent.”

“Marginalized populations do not have emotional or financial reserves,” Goldberg explains. “We are all worried about the state of the economy because of the war, but they are more worried. Let’s say that you’ve just started your rehabilitation process and your boss puts you on furlough because of the war. You don’t have reserves. We all also feel anxious, but they feel it more because they don’t have emotional reserves. Everything is in survival mode and everything is a trigger, everything is threatening.”

Ads in Telegram groups with thousands of members: ‘Looking for a sugar baby’

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Maya Kogan, director of the Roim Shakuf support center for men in prostitution, describes the population of men in sex work as diverse. “There’s a little of everything,” she says. “Sephardim and Ashkenazim; religious, Haredi and former Haredim; settlers and leftists. Truly, the whole spectrum. Some people came from very underprivileged backgrounds and some grew up in good homes. There are Arabs, Bedouin and Druze here, too.”

Through the Elem organization, the Ministry of Welfare runs Halev, a program in Tel Aviv and Haifa aimed at people under the age of 21 in prostitution. In addition, there is the Levinsky Clinic and its Be’er Sheva branch, which also help men in prostitution. The Roim Shakuf center in Tel Aviv and its hostel in the Sharon region, which are operated by the Keshet NGO for the Ministry of Welfare, are the only two frameworks specifically for and specializing in men in prostitution.

Having said that, there is still no emergency solution for men in prostitution that offers an immediate solution and a safe place to sleep. The Welfare Ministry hopes to issue a tender to run such a center in the coming months.

Shapira and Kogan both stress the element of shame and denial. “No woman would say that she is proud to be in prostitution,” says Kogan, “but it is usually easier for women to admit it than men. When I opened the center, I dreamed of therapy groups, but for men in prostitution, a group setting is exceedingly difficult. They find it hard to open up to one another. The fear is that others will find out about them and that ‘he’ll have something on me’.”

Denial also makes it harder to gauge the extent of the phenomenon. A survey conducted more than a decade ago for the Ministry of Welfare and the Ministry of Internal Security estimated that there were between 11,000 and 12,000 people in prostitution in Israel, of whom just 550 were men. Professionals and counselors who talked to Shomrim agree that this was a massive underestimation, even if they find it hard to give a more precise figure themselves. A government official involved in the subject also admitted that no one really knows the true extent of the phenomenon.

“550 is a figure that doesn’t make sense – even for back then,” says Shapira. “Over the past decade, we have seen an increase in people reaching out to us. If you were to take a survey of the clinics and the places that offer help to men in prostitution, you’d likely find that the number has tripled at least. We are inundated with requests. Every week, I receive between four and six new patients. It’s just growing. It’s a phenomenon.”

In the past, prostitution was very much an activity that focused on the street. Today, it is mainly conducted online. “There are dedicated websites,” Shapira says, “but it also happens on the normal social media apps. People publish photos on Instagram and from there others contact them. It happens less on websites that look like a ‘menu,’ where you pick someone.”

“It happens everywhere,” says Kogan. “The street, apartments, hotels, back alleys and also online.” One prominent scene is Telegram, where there are groups with thousands of members. The word “prostitution” is replaced with the word “support.” Posts like “Generous benefactor looking for a smooth boy or girl for payment” and “Looking for a young man, up to 20, who wants support for nighttime meeting in Petah Tikvah (2000 shekels in cash)” appear uncensored in the chat. “Prostitution has changed,” Goldberg adds. “As far back as 2011, people were saying that there had been a decline in street prostitution; nowadays, the street is your smartphone. There are pros and cons to this: because the street is terrible and, on the other hand, it’s hard to help people like this and digital devices are so accessible to young men and women.”

Unlike in the world of female prostitution, it is rare to find men in prostitution with pimps. “They aren’t so much acting as pimps as they are banding together. It hasn’t reached the level of organized crime where one of them would set up a brothel and keep men there,” Shapira explains. Kogan has a different interpretation: “It’s also connected to the male self-image – control, power. They find it hard to be in a situation where someone ‘manages’ them. There are cases of pimps, but they are extremely rare.”

According to Kogan, the same traditional male approach also explains the silence. “When we talk about men in prostitution, there are stigmas and stereotypes that we simply have to get rid of. It’s very hard for any society, but especially for Israeli society, to accept the fact that there are men in prostitution. It severely undermines the narrative of masculinity, of what a man is in general and what an Israeli man is. Especially now, with the war, the soldiers, the reservists… People are afraid to see men as weak, vulnerable, exploited. But reality is a lot more complex and that’s okay. A man can be weak, vulnerable, hurt, sad, pained, tearful – and can ask for help. And yes, there are men in prostitution – and they are being exploited.”

The damage, professionals in the field stress, is severe and long-lasting. This includes physical harm – such as sexually transmitted diseases, violent assaults and genital or anal lesions – alongside deep psychological and emotional scarring. “There are no boundaries. You’ve been abandoned. You’re an object – and it’s evident in even the smallest things,” Kogan says. “There is a total lack of protection that drags them into a recurring loop of risk.” The damage also manifests in their interpersonal relationships. “When we try to help them find work – in a café, for example – extreme fears surface: that the manager will touch them, or that a customer will ask for more than just coffee. The world is perceived as unsafe, and they come to see themselves as nothing more than an object.”

Alcoholism and ads in local newspapers: ‘I felt it was my fault’

Roni – not his real name – is in his 50s and knows this only too well. He was raised in a religious home in the center of the country. “It was a violent home, without emotion. I was apparently a child whose emotional needs were not met, so I looked for them elsewhere,” he tells Shomrim, adding that the first time was when he was 17 years old and saw adverts in a local newspaper. Roni decided that he would respond to one of them. “I can’t really explain what it was that I was interested in. Maybe I was just trying to be difficult, or maybe it was my sense of adventure, a desire to take risks. I remember that it was disgusting; it really wasn’t fun. But it gave me a kind of sense of control. I had done something…

“I tried something new and went against the tide – or against what was accepted,” he adds. “I think it’s also some kind of feeling that maybe, at last, I am worth something – because somebody wants me.” Later, Roni began publishing his own ads. “Every time I posted an ad, a few people would respond, and I’d maintain those relationships over time,” he says. “These weren’t just one-off encounters. Whenever things started to fade a little, I’d post more ads.”

When Roni moved into his own apartment, he became more deeply involved in prostitution and, at the same time, developed a severe alcohol addiction. “I remember always feeling like I was to blame, because I was the one posting the ads, I was the one seeking these people out,” he recalls. “But so many things happened there that I clearly didn’t want to happen. Alcohol takes over that space of guilt and shame. I’m talking about a horrific addiction. As soon as they would leave, I’d drink a bottle, a bottle and a half – and not beer, either. Until I was completely wasted.”

That was Roni’s existence for some 15 years. He charged between 200 and 1,000 shekels for each meeting and lived under layer upon layer of denial. It was only when he moved to another town that he managed to leave the world of prostitution. He came out, but could not overcome his addictions. He replaced alcohol with drugs. Even when he managed to form relationships, he always hid his past.

It took Roni another decade to get clean and start treatment. The Roim Shakuf support center helped him get a disability stipend due to his emotional condition, which now allows him to work in the same field, helping addicts. “It’s been a long path,” Roni says, “and I still have many challenges to face. Even my job today, which I genuinely love, is only part-time and the pay is terrible, but it just gives me so much. I’ve gone back to where I started.”

And still, he adds, “I’m dealing with a lot. It’s not something you just strip off and move on from; it’s a slow process. I still have a very strong tendency to detach, of dissociation – of not feeling. Sometimes it sounds like everything is fine now, so why not just get on with it? But I’m still paying a heavy price for that time in prostitution, whether it’s in terms of the intimacy I am incapable of enjoying, or in terms of trusting people, or even sexually.”