| February
1998
The microcosmos of boy a-go-go
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Bangkok's a-go-go bars -- there is nothing like them anywhere in the world.
This article will take you through some thoughts I have had about them,
in particular about the boy bars, since, of course, I have not spent as
much time in the girlie bars. I will form no judgment about the rights
and wrongs of the business -- for a business they certainly are. To
properly understand something, one has to remain dispassionate. Premature
judgment obscures rather than elucidates.
This essay assumes that you have been in some of the Bangkok bars; I will not detail what goes on in there. Since I am primarily writing for a gay Singaporean readership, I think my assumption is safe. There are very few gay Singaporeans over 25 who have not "seen the sights". If you're not gay and the boy bars are not your cup of tea, an experience with the girlie bars would do just as well, for the dynamics are more or less similar. Having said all that, let's get to it.
The boy bars, like the girlie bars, are set up to sell sex. More specifically, they are set up to sell sex to a male clientele. Which means the way they sell is tailored for male customers, with the stress on casual one-night-stands, and a very physical display of bodies. The boys (or girls) are almost always between 18 and 25, young enough for me to refer to them as "boys" and "girls" just the way the customers do. All bars display their wares by getting them to gyrate in their underwear on some sort of stage, hence the "a-go-go" label. The more skin they show, the better. Sometimes, the underwear is nowhere in sight. To relieve the boredom, and to attract a bigger crowd, the bars also put up shows, involving foam, frocks, fire, full erection and fucking! Then again, the shows hardly ever change, and so they too become boring. The objective is to get the client to book one of the boys (or girls), pay the bar the "take-out fine" and go off to "get to know each other better". At the end of the tete-a-tete, the client tips the boy (or girl) according to some sort of going rate, adjusted for performance incentive. Cash only, thank you.
"Gay and Straight" can refer to the distinction between the boy bars and the girlie bars, but they also refer to the divide within the gay bars themselves. The service providers (the "boys") are majority straight, while the customers are, of course, homosexual. In this insulated world of the bars, the power equation is turned around. The homosexual customer, with his purchasing power, is the top dog; the heterosexual guy the supplicant. This reversal of power can happen in other businesses too, like a mainstream hotel or café that serves a mainly gay and lesbian clientele, but in a boy bar, this reversal is carried to an extreme. The service that the straight guy provides is plain undiluted sex, virtually the very thing that defines gay from straight. The first remarkable thing that one notices is how, with experience, the straight boys have learnt to attract the eye and the interest of the gay customer. The smile and the gestures are all acquired. When they are sitting next to their prospective customer, hoping to be taken "off", they know where to place their arms and hands to lower the guest's resistance to a sale. Even when "off"ed, some of them prove surprisingly good in bed. They know what to do to please the customer. I can only attribute that to intelligence since no training is ever provided by the bar-owner. The boy learns on the job. The fast learner picks up through a few months of work, all the right moves, and figures out all the right buttons to press. When you think about it, it is quite a feat. Here is learning without much of a feedback loop. Being straight, he doesn't feel the same pleasure that the customer feels, so it is difficult to appreciate what a particular stroke does. It's like a deaf person learning to speak normally. It's a feat.
It used to be that the customers were mainly Caucasians, called "Farang" by the Thais. By my unsystematic observation, I think the last few years have seen an increasing percentage of Asians -- and by this I mean East Asians, which is how East Asians tend to use this term -- and this evolution is interesting in its own way. The typical Farang customer is a relatively older man, about 40 to 65, and typically for Caucasians, overweight. He generally prefers the smaller-built, almost waif-like, boy with a relatively darker complexion. So when he offs a boy, the pair is very noticeable: the older white gentleman with a paunch and a dark boy half his size and less than half his age. Generally speaking, of course. The Asian customer tends to be younger than the Farang customer. Typically he comes from Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. Sometimes, they are not much older than the boys themselves. They prefer the medium to light-complexioned ones with medium to larger physiques. How do I know this? The boys themselves tell me. They know where their target market is.
Besides direct observations of the customer mix, one of the clues that I am going by when I say that the percentage of Asian customers is increasing, is that whereas the boy bars used to stock mainly the small dark kids preferred by Farangs, more and more, they now stock the fairer, bigger boys. Some bars still specialise in the skinny dark-complexioned boys, but they tend to be the fringe outlets with smaller business volume. It used to be easy to accuse Westerners of exploitation, not that that was ever the full story, after all, the bars were opened by Thais, and throughout, the Thais themselves have made up a steady percentage of customers. Now, however, the picture is very complicated. The rise of Asian sex tourism, whether leading to the girlie bars or boy bars, breaks up the myth of Westerners as devils and Asians as lost innocents. The Japanese and Chinese -- the word covers Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore -- are becoming the main buyers. In fact, over the recent Chinese New Year period, the 2 Bangkok bars that I stepped into had about 70% East Asian tourists, 15% Thais and only 15% Farang. It's not typical for the year-round ratio, but it shows that at least for certain times of the year, the Asian presence can be very heavy. I mentioned earlier that the Asian customers tend to be younger than the Farang and that some of them are not much older than the boys themselves. I wonder whether this adds to the resentment that the boys feel towards their customers. First of all, it may surprise some readers that I take it that there is resentment. Many visitors to Thailand somehow leave with no more than a superficial view of the country and her people; the practised smiles of the boys and girls and the eagerness to please (for your money) are mistaken as genuine enjoyment. But why should Thailand be different? Anywhere else in the world, anyone in a job which society looks down upon but from which little escape is possible, which involves having to be nice to people you don't particularly like, would of course resent the situation he finds himself in, and the customer is the most convenient object of that resentment. So, take it from me: there is resentment. The little thought I had while surveying the crowd of youngish Hongkongers, Taiwanese and Singaporeans over Chinese New Year was whether their relative similarity to the go-go boys in ethnicity and age, might intensity the resentment. You see, it is easy to divorce the alien-looking guy -- the Farang -- from yourself. He is so different, colour, size and age-wise, that he is in a totally separate category, and the human mind doesn't make comparisons so easily between things of different categories. The Asian customer, especially one that is mid or late twenties, why, he may even be mistaken for a Thai. It is easier to compare. The boy may think, "Shit, he is only 4 years older than me, and also tanned like me, eats with chopsticks like me, yet he has the money and I don't. How can the world be so unfair?" Or am I imagining all that? The boys won't admit being resentful, not to me at least, nor do I even know the Thai word for resentful, so there is no easy way of verifying my intuition.
When you look at the goings-on in the bars, the casual tradeability of sex, the pretence of liking a customer even when he reeks of body odour and the norm that homosexuality is within that confined space, you know you're in an absurd, almost unreal bubble, divorced from the outside world. Things go on in there that has its own logic, oblivious to the culture, the law, spouses and families without, and for the customers, almost in defiance of the respectable jobs and all the social status they have in the regular world. The bars are a microcosmos. Yet, the microcosmos has externalities, connecting it to the world outside. I shall briefly mention two. These bars are, strictly speaking and quite incredible to many visitors, illegal under Thai law. Yet they operate very openly, with flashing neon signs and minimal door control. Clearly, someone somewhere is paid off. These businesses (boy bars and girlie bars) are very important components of the black economy of the country. The boys themselves usually come from the poorer rural areas. They are here because they have no skills, and their family farms have no need for their extra hands. Yet the family can barely make ends meet, and the boys are urged to go out to work. They go into dead-end jobs in the nearby town that pays a pittance for a wage. But one day they meet a friend or a distant cousin who seems to be bringing home quite a bit of cash, and find out that he is a go-go boy. Soon, a bus journey later, a "new boy" is added to a bar. The boys and girls almost always send money home. After paying the rent, and putting aside money for meals and some nice clothes -- pricey by village standards since they have to now live in Bangkok -- a reasonably successful chap will be able to send about a third of his earnings back to father or mother. For a hardscrubble family, it would make him the main breadwinner, paying off the mortgage or sending the younger sister to school. Of course there are exceptions. There is the occasional boy who is a university student, doing this during his vacation for extra pocket money, and to practise his English. There is the competitive body-builder who finds this kind of work the optimum solution to his needs for vitamin supplements, steroids, training equipment and a costly meat diet.
But whichever way it is, the money from this microcosmos flows back into
the real world, supporting real lives and real families. It's a
remarkable conduit for foreign aid from the West and from richer
Asian countries right into the outback of Thailand. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes On a similar vein, see also the article Prostitution and Morality Addenda None
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