macaroni21

Ah, that would explain the mystery. Thanks.

Not so. I am not discouraging use of apps. What I said was "I've hardly ever used apps in the Philippines, so I have no experience to share." There's a reason why I haven't used the apps beyond surfing though them. I don't visit Manila for leisure. I visit for business and stay in hotels which will not let me bring guests back. Without a place of my own to host, it's not viable to get dates through apps. The reason why I don't feel any need to visit Manila for leisure should be pretty obvious from my description of the venues! One small factoid: Manila has quite a few "love hotels" where you can rent rooms by the hour. If I really, really wanted a guy off the app or off a macho dancer bar (such an occasion hasn't happened yet) this would be an alternative to the no-joiner-allowed hotels I get stuck in. But none of the straight and probably clueless-in-bed macho dancers have ever made my heart flutter.

Although I've been to Manila few times, I can't much help the OP with his questions. I've found the gay scene quite frustrating. Perhaps that's because I've become so used to Thai business practices. To take the last question first (Where in Manila should I stay?). There will probably be no good solution since the (few) gay places are scattered. With the caveat that I've only been there a few times and even then I found that busnesses open and close quite rapidly, the hotel search should focus on Quezon City's Cubao and Timog areas (they're about 2 km apart and perhaps 30 minutes by Grabcar given the traffic situation day and night). Personally, I end up walking between the two areas. It's faster than by car. There is a third area with macho-dancer bars, and that's way to the south in the Baclaran area and along Roxas Blvd. Allow 90 minutes by car from Quezon. But this area seems to have no massage businesses, and so I don't prefer it. I've hardly ever used apps in the Philippines, so I have no experience to share. The two types of venues which I can describe are: 1. Macho dancer bars. The first thing to do is to jettison everything you know about Thai gogobars. Macho-dancer bars operate on a completely model (and if you think Thai bars can be a rip-off, wait till you see Manila's). Macho-dancer bars tend to have just one guy dancing at any one time, and in a dreadfully boring way too. Between dance numbers, the boys are available to sit with you, but the point of sitting with you is to make you drink up more and buy more. Offing doesn't seem to the business objective. It seems to me that bars don't even allow their hosts to leave early, and there may not be an "off fee" rate. Instead, the objective is/was to entice you to a "private dance" in some rat-hole at the back of the bar, where clothes come off... but what else can you do in 20 - 30 minutes in a large-ish closet with peeling paint and sticky faux-leather soafs? It's been at least ten years since I enquired about the rate for a private dance (duration=3 songs, if I remember correctly) and even then it was a ridiculous price, something like 80 - 100 euros. I have never observed any customer to take a host for a private dance. I've had hosts try to fix up a "date" with me on a different day while sitting with me. They say such and such a day will be their day off and they can go on a date. Then they talk about dining, and shopping... and when I ask what else, they go quiet. The problem seems to be that the guys are mostly straight and homophobia is never far from the surface. They don't have the language or latitude to discuss/negotiate sex sessions with clients. I have yet to successfully take a host from any macho dancer bar because I have never managed to get any meaningful communication on this issue. In other words, I really don't have much information to offer. These macho-dancer bars target women as much as men. In fact, I think they average more women patrons than men, so the bars do not have gay vibes. One more thing, the hosts speak even less English than most Thai gogo boys. 2. Massage There are/were several tiny establishments in the Kamias Road and Kamuning Road areas midway between Timog and Cubao, All are little more than slum shacks. I've come across one that had no running water for days and yet still tried to open for business. Some have airconditioning, others don't. Most are fire traps. The common practice is for the masseurs to line up behind a one-way mirror, and you pick one. Massage skills are almost non-existent. Lacking skills, they progress quickly to play, so getting 60 minutes out of them might be a small miracle. In this, aptitude and skills naturally vary a lot from one guy to another. Tips in the region of 2,000 pesos (about 30 euros) should suffice -- in addition to what the shop charges for "massage". -- There are other places like "O bar" in Ortigas area, "One 690 bar" on Don A Roces Ave, and one more in the Cubao area -- I forget its name -- that really are show bars, again targetting women as much as men. But getting there is time-consuming and in Manila, the shows are very very late.

They are completely off-putting, I agree, but I don't think they're botched circumcision jobs. I've read that that is the traditional way circumcision is done in the Philippines; it's a different procedure from the Judeo-Muslim way. Apparently, a slit is made in the prepuce and the skin is just left to hang loose like flaps or like wattles under a turkey's throat. I've seen a few (thankfully not too many) but they were so disgusting, I never could bring myself to take a closer look (for my education). Apparently, the same method of circumcision is/was common across Polynesia, I read, but whether slit-circumcision is current or has died out, I don't know.

Will the carpet survive the rainy season and the inevitable flood? Is that the right marketing strategy when, ultimately, they're still bordellos? Never underestimate sleaze... More crucially, whatever new marketing strategy these bars are trying to come up with, it must not include straight women or coach tourists. What I think it must include is a good digital advertising budget on various online platforms that serve the gay male market in neighbouring Asian countries. Boyztown cannot depend on the European market too much. A marketing package that includes Sansuk Sauna -- does it still exist, will it reopen? -- tie-ups with beach concessionaires who fly the rainbow flag and maybe some joiner-friendly hotels should be the way to go.

On dear, do we have to change the lyrics of the song?

Here's what the boss of Air Asia, Tony Fernandes, said recently: The above is from the BBC article https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60411616. Further down the same article, I concur with both. Scrap all restrictions. Omicron is no more than flu.

I'm a little gobsmacked how open he is... though at 1 minute 43, he is still a little coy about what customers mostly want when they off a boy. What I am curious about is this: Does anyone recognise the bar he is standing in (at around 1:43)?

Well said. I have had similar thoughts. Unlike luckier members of the forum, I'm not a retiree and do not have the luxury of being able to take 90-day vacations. The longest I can squeeze in may be 2 or 3 weeks and the risk of testing positive and then having to stay a further week or 10 days is precisely the poor risk vs reward equation that has held me back from making any firm plans so far. It's not just the extra days, but also the complication of missing (or having to rearrange) appointments that would have been scheduled for my return....

What if it's a visitor/tourist who is category 1 or category 2A? He has no home in Malaysia. Where does he stay? And what happens if the poor guy is positive only on his last day in malaysia while doing the pre-departure test? Assuming, of course, that even after reopening, these rules do not change.

Thanks, z909, for the clarification. Doesn't Thailand have a nationwide health pass? In many other countries, one has to have a health pass (proving that one has either been vaccinated or recently recovered) to enter restaurants, etc. There's no need to do ART at the door unless one doesn't present a health pass.

Agreed! The rule is far too onerous. Although the article was about the situation in Pattaya, I assume the same rule applies throughout the country. I simply cannot imagine the hundreds of thousands of restaurants and eateries all over Thailand implementing this.

Am I missing something? I thought the Test & Go scheme had already required a PCR test on Day 1 and Day 5 -- we have discussions on other threads about this -- and yet this news article seems to say that it's being newly imposed on such tourists in Phuket. Then this other part is also baffling: Bearing in mind that the sample size is small, two out of 17 Test & Go tourists tested positive -- that's 11.8%. From the Sandbox programme the ratio is 104 out of 2,439 -- that's 4.3%. Both percentages seem rather high considering that both schemes require pre-departure PCR negative tests.

There have been times when I could visualise myself dying on a massage table. It wouldn't be caused by choking, but by suffocation. What I am referring to are those massage tables that do not have face cradles. (Or they do have face cradles, but the estalishment insists on plugging and covering them up.) When you're asked to lie face down, you have to turn your face 90 degrees in order to breathe. After a while, the neck starts to hurt and so you turn your head back to its normal position, but then you find that your face is buried in the bed linen. Why can't establishments respect the value of face cradles and use them? By the way, face cradles have one unintended benefit. When the masseur is standing at the top of your head, e.g. to work on the neck and shoulders, his crotch is just 15 - 20 cm from your eyes and nose (through the cradle's lacuna). Bringing one's hands forward, the crotch is within easy reach and can be investigated for interest. Almost always the interest is soon apparent. 😂

Oh damn. For a brief moment I had hope that prices have been discounted from their pre-pandemic level in order to boost business. I totally forgot about the google camera translate function (it hasn't always proven useful). Using it now, I get a similar but slightly different translation. The 200 baht is desribed as "car per day", but the 150 baht is described as "drinking garden". Nonetheless, I reckon this is what it really means: 1. "Receptionist" is the boy who parades around in his shortest of shorts. He gets 200 baht for showing up and a 150-baht commission on any drink bought for him by a customer. 2. "Waiter" is as stated, he gets only 200 baht a day for showing up at work. Geez, if the latter works 26 days a month (i.e. only one day off a week), he earns only 5,200 baht. Furthermore, as shown in this chart, the minimum wage for Bangkok is supposed to be 331 baht per day. I guess that's why the 200 baht is not described as salary but as transport money. I can understand if the gogoboy is treated as a freelancer (since he can go off duty at any time once a willing farang is found, ibut it really doesn't pass the smell test to treat the waiter as a freelancer too, and not as an employee. I should remember to tip the waiter more than the mamasan. Then again, does the mamasan get 200 baht too??? Hmmm...

I am curious about this from their twitter. Can anyone who can read Thai translate for us? Are these the new drinks prices? I couldn't use Google Translate because it's an image not inline text.

Funny you should mention the Philippines. Just a few days ago, someone (work-related) was mentioning similar hopes, but was disappointed when he fould out that besides the usual pre-flight PCR test, the visitor is to be quarantined until anther PCR test on the 5th day of quarantine gives a negative result. And even then, he told me, there would need to be home quarantine for 2 or 3 more days. I haven't researched this myself but merely reporting what I heard. Nor have I any idea how home quarantine is to be enforced. I see you're hoping for rules to be looser by March, but somehow I doubt it. This story 5 days ago from Bloomberg says it is now Southeast Asia's worst Omicron surge. This will take tme to come down. It also puts you at risk for failing the PCR tests when moving on to Thailand.

I can see that happening more and more too -- for jobs that are "above board". I don't know how the government will be issuing work visas for sex work and related trades. To your question posed rhetorically above, "Will gay venue owners be prepared to continue operating with boys from neighbouring poorer countries"?, one should factor in legal risk. Now, one might make the point that many establishments already operate with majority (if not 100%) foreign staff, so why not in the future. That is one possibility; indeed the most likely possibility so long as the astonishing number of people doing pointless work in the immigration department continue the glorious tradition of being ineffective (or perhaps being on the take). In my view, such would be the best outcome, keeping Bangkok on my list of holiday spots. However, this will not mean that prices will remain where they are now. As the cost of living in Bangkok goes up, as Thai themselves (those still doing sex work) charge higher prices, so will the migrants. It's instructive to note for example that the Cambodian working in Thailand does not charge the same price as the Cambodian in Phnom Penh. The one is Thailand is charging similarly to the Thai guy.

We may be using the word “desperation” a little differently. I wasn’t referring only to abject penury, though there is that unfortunately, but to what might be described as relative desperation. By this I mean wanting a certain standard of living or lifestyle but with no other way to attain it except through sex work. The lads may indeed have options such as back-breaking work in the ricefields or as servers in humble provincial food shops, or pushing a cart around selling bananas. Such work may even provide an income that keeps body and soul together, and many young people will accept the wages that go with them. However, those that aspire to a better lifestyle and not adverse to selling their bodies may rule these humble options out, choosing the path of stripping on stage night after night, the risk of social shame and having to suppress their gag reflexes when customers, old enough to be their fathers, pick them. My point was that as wages for planting rice, waiting on tables and selling bananas rise in tandem with a tightened labour supply and generalised prosperity, the reward for stripping, social shame and suppressing gag reflexes must necessarily go up to be worthwhile. The "demographic doomsday" notwithstanding, Thailand’s sex scene may continue well into the future, but with quite different price points. This then raises the question whether that pricier sex scene will remain a draw for visitors; whether Thailand will remain a destination. After all, Japan has sellers of sex and massages at first-world price levels, and they have their buyers, mostly other Japanese. But it’s very hard to make a destination out of the Japanese scene. So, I was musing: what would be the price level for Thai (and migrant sex worker) sellers that would begin to turn off visitors? I don't know the answer; I was just thinking aloud. I agree we shouldn't overstate the success rate. I think we're likely to agree too that far more visitors to Thailand come as butterflies than as potential husbands, of both gay and straight kinds. This observation is even more pronounced when we look at the Asian segment of visitors which now forms the bigger portion. Secondly, your point is just putting my original point in a different way. The hope of landing a farang husband is simply a variation of the sex-work choice. It’s when they want a certain lifestyle but cannot attain it through regular work that they choose the sex work route. This can then lead to a fork in the road. Either, with luck, end up with a sugar daddy so that one does not have to strip on stage every night and suppress the gag reflex too often, while turning social shame into social capital, or - in the absence of luck - persevere at sex work for years on end, which must have been the case for the 40-ish gogo”boys” I have seen in several Patpong bars. I also wonder whether the farang husband species is disappearing. We’ve heard plenty of reports of the demise of Pattaya due to reduced farang traffic (Pattaya has never managed to attract enough gay Asian visitors to replace the vanishing farang). Bangkok survives because of the Asian traffic, but somehow I’ve yet to hear of an Asian sugardaddy for the boys. Such a species may well exist… I don’t know.

This labour shortage problem is a long time in the making. Falling birth rates need a 20 - 30 years to produce its effects on the labour force. 1991 was the year in which Thailand's Total Fertility Rate fell below the replacement level of 2.1 births per woman, and the TFR has fallen steadily since. It's exactly 30 years since that cross-over year, and now the effects will begin to show. With the gradual reduction of new entrants into the labour market, coupled with the steady economic progress the country has made, it cannot be surprising that job opportunities (or business oportunities for those prepared to venture out on their own) are aplenty, as the news story above says. With that, we can expect wages to rise. Sex work is the one area that is extremely sensitive to labour shortage and rising wages. Sex work tends to be performed by young men (and women) who have no other viable alternative for a livelihood; it is what in economics might be called a leading indicator for a tightening labour market and rising wages. To put it bluntly, there has to be a degree of desperation for a vibrant sex market to develop. That desperation began disappearing among young Thais at least 15 years ago, which was when I began to notice the appearance of Cambodians, Burmese and Vietnamese into the industry. Those of us making regular visits to Thailand will also have noticed the price inflation over the years. But a more interesting comparison can be made between the 2019 massage parlour prices in Phnom Penh, Manila and Bangkok. In Phnom Penh, they were asking for US$10 - U$20 as tip for one hour's service. In Manila, about US$20. In the same year, a typical massage parlour worker in Bangkok would have been asking US$30 - US$50. Go to Japan, and it's at least $150 (likely more -- others with more up-to-date information, please correct me if I'm wrong). The price spread says a lot about unemployment or underemployment in each country. If Thailand prices rise to approach Japanese or European levels, will Bangkok still be a destination? I doubt it, though it may be a while yet before Thai prices go that high. What I will find interesting to observe in the years ahead is whether Bangkok remains a destination but staffed mostly by lads from neighbouring countries, or whether other cities in the region with native supply of labour become the new destinations. Of course, political and moral climates will play huge roles too. The double whammy will be if Bangkok prices rise thus dampenng its appeal, but the scene in neighbouring countries does not take off because of regulation.

Not at all. I read every word. In fact, I looked forward to each installment. Thank you for brightening up these dreary, chaotic times with these wonderful tales of adventure.

Just curious about the ripped, muscly model-quality boys you have hired. You don't have to be specific but could you share a ball-park figure as to the rates they charge?

Not only have your reports gven me much vicarious pleasure, leaving me breathless at times, but I can only marvel at the stamina you have. Day after day, you do your utmost to contribute to Thailand's economy via what looks like an average of two or three boys a day. And you go on like this for over twenty days in a row! If it were me, my batteries would have run down long ago.

Here's hoping some old-timers can help me out here. Over the weekend, some friends and I were reminiscing about old times in the gogo bars of Bangkok. We recalled the really strange item on a bar's progamme where, in between displays of male flesh, often accompanied by foam, fire, glow paint and baptismal glory (hurray!), an elderly lady would appear, dressed in traditional silk finery, to perform a classical dance. My friends and I couldn't agree which bar it was that had this item. Anyone remember? One of us said she -- well into her seventies -- was an aunt of the bar owner and there was no way the owner could ask her to retire, however risible the mismatch of her dance was to gogo entertainment. Don't know whether there was any truth to that.

He directed Saint Jack too, filmed in Singapore in 1979, about hustlers making a living off American GIs having their R&R in Singapore during the Vietnam war. Kind of Patpong-ish, though somewhere in the middle of the film is a gay cruising scene. It's on youtube. Post-Vietnam war, you know the rest: Patpong flourished for decades more, the Singapore scene died. RIP Peter Bogdanovich.