PeterRS

@daydreamer may recall that there was a thread back at the end of 2018 started by @abidismaili titled The Men of Thailand magazine. This posts a considerable number of photos from various publications, including TMOT and Spartacus. And for me it perhaps illustrates the point made above by @bkkmfj2648. For example, in the 1991 Spartacus Guide much more information is given about Silom Sois 2 and 4 than to Soi Twlight on Suriwong. I am reasonably certain there was more than one go-go bar on Twilight in that year. But I was much more into visiting Barbiery bar and Babylon in those days. Does anyone recall: was Twilight the only go-go bar in that soi in 1991 and did the others all just begin to appear after that?

Quick question. Do you get an annual 'flu shot? I had this recommended years ago and take a few minutes each year to have it done. Never had 'flu since.

And @khaolakguy continues to try and be funny! He has a thing against my posting and so it's not unusual for him to say so!

Thankfully we are all diflerent. I generally loathe live music when I am dining and chatting with friends. Actually, that's not entirely true. In the original Babylon, the restaurant would usually have a flute and harp or a solo acoustic guitar playing very softly at the week-ends. Anything louder and I find another eatery.

When I was a kid, almost everyone smoked or tried to. My father was a 60-a-day man and although he was a doctor and thus slowly becoming aware of the dangers of smoking, he died of cancer. Thankfully I never smoked more than one cigarette in my life and found I just coughed and coughed when i tried to inhale. I cannot imagine how the dangers of smoking resulting in death often earlier than the normal life span has never reached so many young people, especially the bar boys. The eCancer website points out a lot of disturbing facts that I am sure are echoed in other similar publications.This from 1 May 2024 A large new global study published in The Lancet reveals that cancer-related deaths rose to 5.6 million in 2019 from 2.8 million in 1999 in Asia . . . Among males, smoking, alcohol use and ambient particulate matter (PM) pollution were the leading risk factors. https://ecancer.org/en/news/24659-smoking-and-alcohol-leading-cause-of-surge-in-cancer-deaths-and-cases-in-asia-global-study-finds

In principle I agree with the sentiment. But I think it is important to remind ourselves that businesses like this are in fact a business - and as such part of that business is to attract customers. If supporting a charity or a cause helps and the charity/cause also benefits, then some will say that is close to a win-win. Obviously some will disagree but I imagine quite a number of charities are perfectly happy with the extra cash. I do think there is a major difference. I would hate it if any cashier asked me for a donation at the desk when paying for a product I wanted to buy. The point about @khaolakguy's post is that the addition of the donation is advertised well in advance before purchase. In my view that is hardly the same.

I think most gay guides can be useful - indeed are useful. But most are incomplete, no doubt because of the enormous difficulty in updating. So I think it is best to check 3 or 4 sites. The one I have never liked is thegaypassport.com as way too much of its material is out of date. For example, Hans Mens Sauna in Taipei is still listed as being a small 1st floor sauna. But as I posted here on May 30 2023, Hans moved to a much bigger location on the 8th floor of a shopping mall more than three years ago! In the hot springs section, it does indeed mention the gay friendly Huang Tzu, but also lists the very gay unfriendly Kawayu Hot Spring virtually next door. Under Hong Kong, it lists just two of the several gay saunas, and the popular Hutong is not one of those two!

I almost gave up last night when just connecting to the site took almost two minutes. Logging in and posting was also very slow. Yet this morning I was on the site in about 4 seconds and logged in in just 2. I thought maybe it was just my internet connection, but had no problem with other sites.

I agree I may have come down too hard on TMOT. 7 editions is no mean feat, that's for sure. Clearly some gay visitors did indeed benefit from it. But I really do wonder how many actually used it to go outside the Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Pattaya and Phuket areas. I suspect that taking away these four, as @daydreamer suggested above the number who travelled beyond was extremely limited. Just my view. I can only go by what I have seen on my own travels within the country, although the two I will mention came after TMOT's demise. Yet both events are widely publicised as two of the major events to see in the country. Earlier I mentioned the Ubon Ratchathani Candle Festival. This is one of Thailand's major attractions, a simply stunning day or two that you cannot see on that scale anywhere else virtually in the world. When I was there in 2007, during the whole of the main day - the Saturday - in all the crowds of Thais I saw just two other westerners - and they were ladies! I also wonder: have any of our existing readers actually been to that Festival given that there used to be a gay sauna in the city (I have no idea if it is still there now)? I can ask the same of the amazing Dansai Ghost Festival. I know many cities have their own ghost festivals but Dansai is the biggest and the most impressive. When I was there for three nights in 2014, I saw not one other westerner - true! I do accept that Dansai is just a small countryside town and there is really only one decent hotel on the hillside above. But most visitors fly into nearby Loei and get a hotel there where there certainly used to be more than one gay-friendly bar. Buses ferry viitors to the Festival. Bordered on the Mekhong, being hilly and with a major vineyard, Loei Province itself is well worth visiting. But as with Ubon, I wonder how many existing readers of this Board have ever been to the Dansai Festival? I have posted before photos of both events. As there is one member who seems to resent photos being posted even after a dozen or so years, I will refrain from reposting. I agree Utopia can be a useful resource. But it is not just the readers who contribute. The owner also does and he has his own whims as to whether or not venues are included. As a regular visitor to Taipei, I once wrote to him a few years ago asking why he had not included two Taipei saunas. He wrote back basically stating that he objected to the pricing policy of one and alleged racism in the other. Well, my view is that he was perfectly entitled to include these as his opinions in the descriptions, but deliberately to omit two popular saunas in an alleged gay guide was unfair. I do not recall any reply. As @bkkmfj2648 has rightly pointed out, keeping information on a very large number of gay venues up to date is a near impossibility. On Utopia-Asia, there is a very long entry on the Huang Tzu Hot Spring (Emperor). This was great because it was the most popular such facility for gay guys since the really raunchy one further up the hill Huang Ding was closed about 5 years ago. But the site still states it has a "steam room (some discreet action)" and that there have been "reports of activity after midnight until dawn." Yet the steam room was pulled down more than a year ago and the owners do not tolerate any action whatever! I hate to complain too much about this site, but it also states in the section under the sauna most popular with twinks and younger guys Soi13in "busiest between 6:30 and 9:00 with happy hour prices." Yet westerners have all but given up on this sauna as there is a dual entry price with foreigners paying four times the price of Taiwanese all day (that's NT$1,000 - US$32) and there is no happy hour for foreigners! Under Hong Kong's Kowloon District it lists just one sauna named Star. Yet other sites name five or six including one that used to be compared favourably with Babylon in Bangkok - Hutong. Utopia does not even mention it! So in my view Utopia is good but like all such guides it has to be taken with a decent sized pinch of salt. At the same time I have no idea how anyone can obtain so much information about so many countries and keep it anywhere up to date! 👍

It was the pre-Paul IV days that I enjoyed more 🤪

I am sure it was valuable and not only to you. But I respectfully think your post kind of backs up what others have been writing - "Maybe TMOT didn't entice visitors to other cities" This is all history and so it is impossible to back up comments with figures. I am sure TMOT was very useful for some. But in all my many, many dozens of visits to Bangkok during which I chatted to many hundreds of western visitors enjoying Bangkok's nightlife, I never once chatted to any westerner who was planning to visit or who had visited any other parts of the country apart from Phuket, Samui, Chiang Mai and Pattaya - and Ayuddya. Most had no clue if a town/city was in Isaan, in the far north or in the south. Mention of Ubon Ratchathani, Sakhon Nakhon, Phitsanulok and other cities brought questioning looks! Let's just agree to disagree.

In half a dozen visits to Honolulu, the only Japanese I ever saw were a gazillion young couples either on honeymooon or about to get married, with some others surfing on the rather shallow waves! I was once taken to a gay bar but we are talking about the start of the 1990s and I do not recall one Japanese being there.

Before considering @macaroni21's point, let me add another example of my own. From what I can deduce, The Men Of Thailand went through several editions starting around the mid-1980s and ending around the mid-1990s (give or take a year or so). What I also see is that this publication was for western men of a certain age. While most will have been stuck in Bangkok or Pattaya, some certainly will have enjoyed travelling around Thailand. But how many? Not many IMHO. Although I never read any edition of that book, when I went to the stunning Ubon Ratchathani Candle Festival in 2007, I found the one gay sauna in town close to the river. I cannot now recall where I found the information and I did not know about it till I arrived in the city. Mind you, finding the sauna itself was a real expedition which had me on the point of giving up largely because road signs were not in the correct order. For example, Prommarat Road was numbered 1, 3, 2, 4! But was it in fact instrumental in driving gay business to most of those cities? I really do have to wonder. In my view there has to be more than a gay bar or a gay sauna to attract a gay tourist. I was going to Ubon Ratchathani simply for the Candle Festival. The fact that there happened to be one gay sauna I did not even know about till I got there would certainly not have influenced my decision to make the trip. Similarly when a friend and I went to Khon Kaen, we could not even find the in-town sauna. We had more luck finding willing gay students in nearby Maha Sarakham. As for Chiang Mai I do not know what has happened to that city which used to be so gay. From my early days there at Coffee Boy the gay scene just seemed to explode. Staying at the then relatively new D2 hotel, we wanted to find a new gay massage spa. So we just asked the concierge and he pointed us to an excellent one near the river. For me, Chiang Mai is now basically dead, although there are still some gay venues. But it has completely changed and the gay scene is a fraction of its former size. Honestly, I do not beieve what the TOT would like us to believe: that gay tourists come here for the culture, the food, the sun, the beaches and so on. These may be on their lists, but top of the list is unquestionably sex. So back to @macaroni21's very valid point. Thailand can no longer be regarded as the place where gay western expats come for 2 weeks holiday or to retire. The market has changed. That change has come relatively slowly at the outset, although most venue owners shut ther eyes to it until after covid, but it happened and it is continuing. Many westerners have found other more fun destinations which, frankly, are now less expensive than Thailand. I mentioned South America and should have added Central America. For my first 12 years in Hong Kong, it was against the law to be gay. So, many gay westerners like me would fly to Bangkok for long week-ends. They wanted as much sex as possible - go-go bars, massage spas, discos etc. After 1991 when the law changed, so did the gay scene. Saunas opened, bars opened and there was less need for locals to travel. At that time very few Japanese went anywhere except Hawaii, and that was definitely not for sex. It was for sun, sea and relative freedom from the boredom of everyday hard working life. Besides, they had their own gay ghettos in Shinjuku ni-chome, in Ueno, some in Shibuya etc. I once met a Japanese gay tourist in Bali and another three in Kathmandu. But sex was not high on their lists. Try as I might, although a very frequent visitor to Seoul in the mid-1980s, finding gay bars and saunas was like the proverbial needle in a haystack. Martial law did not help. In comparison, Seoul is almost a gay paradise now. Taipei is the same. Martial law and one park for cruising in the mid-1980s; now one of the gayest cities in Asia. To my thinking as one who first visited Thailand in 1979, take away the burgeoning massage spas and gay Thailand has gone backwards. The answer of venue owners to the reduced number of gay tourists is close establishments and increase prices. It has always been that way. The very fact that this Board has had a considerable number of threads and posts on The Philppines, on Vietnam, on Taipei, some on Malaysia and some on Japan, for example, surely points to the fact that readers of this forum generally don't want the same old, same old. They want some variety. Agreed, variety in the form of visiting Japan where one canot speak the language can be challenging. But as more than one series of posts has made clear, that country has a vast amount to offer the gay tourist primarily after sex. And the Japanese ¥ exchange rate remains extremely attractive. How to solve the Thailand problem? One book that offers details of gay venues in multiple cities is not going to achieve it. And frankly I don't believe TMOT or Spartacus ever did achieve it! Apart from Bangkok, Pattaya, Chiang Mai, Phuket, Hua Hin and to a certain extent Samui, no book ever enticed visitors to other cities. That was 6 locations and Samui barely scraped in. How many gay tourists actually took in Korat, Udon Thani, Khon Kaen, Songkhla, Hua Hin, Loei (even for its amazing Ghost Festival), Chiang Rai, Sukhothai . . . and so on. Precious few I believe. I believe it is going to take a new breed of venue owners before Thailand changes tack and becomes seriously attractive to new markets. But hold on - don't Thailand's laws make this all but impossible? I cannot believe the government will ever make sex for cash legal. I cannot believe it is ever going to change its immigration laws to give sex workers long term visas. It's not in their interests because they know there is a thriving Thai sex market which foreigners never see and which so far perfectly satisfies their own needs. So foreign tourists are well and truly f--ked!

One Spartacus warning that was applied to some of Thailand's entries was AYOR. It was also quite a common abbreviation seen against venues in less gay accepting countries.

I would love to have met Jackson. He is the Emeritus Professor of Thai History and Cultural Studies at the Australian National University's College of Asia and the Pacific's School of Culture, History and Language (I wonder how he gets all that on to a business card 😵)! He is also a member of the Hong Kong-based editorial collective of the HK University Press' Queer Asia series of monographs. The histories of Buddhism, gender, sexuality and globalisation in Thailand have been his primary research. His books include Queer Bangkok and The Language of Sex and Sexuality in Thailand. A more recent book is Desiring Thai Men: Asian Gay Media and Transforming Masculinities. He has frequently made the point that rather than being "traditional", the country's queer communities only came into being in the latter decades of the 20th century. He has also written books about other countries in South East Asia.

Many ancient statues not only had small dicks, they ended up with no genitalia at all! Go to the Vatican Museums and there is hardly a dick in sight. In the mid 1500s, the decrepit, severe, rigidly austere Pope Paul IV, tormented by rheumatism who had been elected to office at age 79 decided anything that looked immoral would just have to go. Paul was universally disliked. In his book Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy Peter De Rosa, an alumnus of the Gregorian University in Rome, says of Paul IV, ”His massive head was shaped like Vesuvius in whose shadow he was born. He, too, erupted without warning, spewing out destruction and death. His shaggy beard and craggy brow gave him a savage look; his cratered eyes, red and blotchy, shone like burning lava. His cracked voice, seldom free from catarrh, rolled and thundered, demanding instant, blind obedience.” Paul determined that dicks on male nudes in the Vatican were out and plaster fig leaves were in. Not to be too hard (sic) on the male figures, the decision eventually extended to all genitalia and woman’s breasts – the fun bits, as one blogger nicely put it. Thus began the great cover-up. Paul’s determination was subsequently incorporated into the ‘Fig Leaf’ Campaign formalized in the Council of Trent’s 1563 decree banning “all lasciviousness” in religious imagery. Fortunately most of the nudes in the Sistine Chapel remain in their natural state. Michelangelo had deliberately disobeyed the Pope's orders!

I just checked and it is Peter Jackson who has digitised around 2,000 of these magazines under the title The Rainbow Project. They cover the period 1982 to 2009. Being based in Thailand it seems to be impossible now to access that website - https://southeastasianlibrarygroup.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/thai-rainbow-archives-project-a-digitised-collection-of-thai-gay-lesbian-and-transgender-publications-now-online/ Posted too quickly. This link should provide 46 pages with 15 magazines per page of some of the old Thai gay magazines once you have proved you are human! https://eap.bl.uk/collection/EAP128-1/search?page=0 But after a very quick check there are a lot of titles that seem to be missing. For example, I cannot see Heat or Door anywhere, and these were very popular gay photo magazines in the 1990s.

There were many of them. I remember searching for one particular magazine with some photos I really liked around 15 years ago. There were no street vendors selling the magazines any more. I finally got it from a seller who sat on the pavement outside the 7-11 at the end of Soi Twiight. He went into his iron box and found it for me! It's the only one I still have. Someone in Australia (the noted author on things gay in South East Asia, Peter Jackson?) started a vdo collection. I'm sure it's still there but it is far from complete.

Although not being on most of these social media platforms and being a relatively rare visitor to Pattaya, I am sure you are correct. The question I think needs now to be posed is: who are these ads aimed at and who actually reads them? Are they, as were the freebie magazines, primarily aimed at the Thai and local expat market or at an international one? My guess (and it is just that) is that the primary readership will be local with not many aimed at gay guys in other countries. The exception may be some guys in East Asian countries who may have already visitied once or more. But will they actually attract those who have never been to Thailand? No doubt some, but then using @vinapu's description, I am more of a glass half empty kind of guy! LOL My personal view is that the gay venues in Japan generally do a far better job at advertising their services. But then again, I suspect having lived there I am aware that they, too, are primarily aimed at the huge number of local patrons, but do it in such a way that they are sufficiently tantalising for non-Japanese. Japan also had, and may still have for all I know, The Tokyo Pink Guide. It was a small publication but it listed all the bars and gay venues in the city, provided a short description of facilities, types of bars, each one's target market - twinks, chubs et. - and all the information you'd need to know for a night out. It used to be only in Japanese but now there is an English version. It makes it so easy to find out where you might want to spend an evening. Respectfully I do not think the ending of the magazines had anything to do with the decline. As referred to above, they were aimed primarily at the local and largely expat market rather than tourists. More pertinent, the Social Order Campaigns of the first Thaksin government probably had a much larger negative effect since they were widely publicised on a worldwide basis over several weeks. I have no doubt that some potential gay visitors were definitely put off from visiting the country. I still believe that in the pre-Social Order Campaign years days it was some form of word of mouth - bush telegraph, call it what you will - that encouraged people to visit. I once had two friends visit from England around the mid-1990s. They had been a couple for some years and one had been a close friend for nearly 20 years. I had told them all about the delights of Bangkok but lack of cash for travel had significantly delayed it. When they finally did get here and I took them around, they were literally gobsmacked. They had no idea that what I had described in the go-go bars actually existed. They loved their visit. But never returned. In their case the cost of air fares for two was always the problem. As always, I think @macaroni21 hits the nail on the head. The paradox of Thailand is that the TOT may wish to encourage more gay visitors but the venue owners realise they are operating in a sort of twilight zone. The TOT never mentions sex. Besides, selling sexual services is still illegal and the employment of immigrants, few of whom have any form of valid longer-term visa and who now staff most of the venues, - unlike 25 and more years ago when almost all in the gay sex industry were young Thais - can make any type of formal advertising outside Thailand extremely risky. So they are virtually stuck with the status quo. Lastly, although my first visit to this country was in 1979 on a short stopover from Europe, I regret I never read The Men of Thailand. On the other hand, after the first couple of visits, I don't think it would have been so useful as I already knew a lot of the gay venues, at least the ones that I enjoyed a lot.

I had not realised any of these free magazines were available outside Thailand. I thought those in English were purely for the local expat market. I can't imagine any of the publishers paying for them to be distributed outside the country. None of them really made any money. There was certainly quite a big range of larger-sized gay magazines with full page photos mostly of naked guys. These were quite openly on sale from street vendors at the top of Suriwong and a few other places. These included K, Hunt, His, M, Door and others. One or two could certainly be subscribed to from overseas. But the publication of most was stopped after the first Thaksin government's social order campaign at the start of the century.

I wonder if any gay business owners actually bother or have in the past bothered with any international marketing. I frankly doubt it. Only with the advent of the intenet have some individuals started posting about Thailand's gay businesses. But as far as I know, the guys who post these videos are not Thai and with only the odd exception perhaps does anyone actually own a Thai gay business. The fact is that for a good 30 years or so Thailand never really needed to advertise itself. The gay businesses took off largely as a result of word of mouth. Thailand was the gay paradise that everyone wanted to visit. Most were older westerners. All knew about Soi Twilight. All knew about Babylon. And once they were here there were several free gay magazines in almost every gay venue which provided advertisements and comments about where to visit. These magazines are dead! But with the price of airfares now much higher than 20-30 years ago and many other countries having developed their own gay tourist scene (eg. South America), Thailand has a great deal more competition. And let's be honest: Thai gay entrepreneurs have never been good at joint efforts. Re @a-447's comment and China, I suspect the demise of Sunee was too far underway before Chinese gays really started visiting Thailand. Besides, for years there was a visa problem for individual Chinese getting into Thailand and Chinese gays in general don't like travelling in groups. My Shanghai friends have told me this many times. It's true that I have seen quite a few very handsome Chinese guys in pairs in a Hong Kong sauna, but as they have told me they go to Hong Kong primarily for the shopping with sex as an add on. So it's no doubt different for the Taiwanese, Singaporeans and Hong Kong guys. Then with the new Chinese censorship of internet sites, I wonder where Thai gay businesses would now try to market themselves on mainland China. The other issue is: does any Thai business owner really know what Chinese gay guys want for nightlife? East Asians frequently have different tastes to ageing westerners and not all have the same tastes. Chatting to Singapore friends some years ago, it was clear that in general at that time they wanted to visit Babylon or have a really good massage, pop briefly into a bar to see a gogo show but then spend the rest of the evening dancing. I wish I could believe this. The decline of Pattaya has been going on over quite a few years. I have a feeling that 2030 will be too late. Pattaya was particularly attractive to the older generation of westerners. As they die out, I believe the businesses will just continue to decline - perhaps slowly, but I honestly cannot see World Pride changing many gay guys existing habits. I really hope I'm wrong.

Agreed.

Yes, a long time. But I never read Dreaded Ned's site. It was the late 1990s before I was hooked up to the internet. By then I already knew from Spartacus or more often from friends and personal visits where I wanted to go. I never read any book with references only to Thailand. My travels were taking me to so many different places and a book just on Thailand was never high on my personal list.

Agreed. The point I was trying to get across, however, is that even if you take the above atrocities and put them all together, they do not amount to anything like the depth to which the Nazis sank.

Sunee Plaza crops up in quite a few posts even though the place is virtually dead as the proverbial doornail. But physically it still exists. The wrecking balls have not arrived and Mrs. Sunee it would seem has no plan yet to redevelop at - at least any that I have seen. For those who continually lament the passing of its gay bars and gogo bars, can you come up with any viable recipe for getting it back onto its gay feet again? Would there in fact be sufficient demand? Or has the end well and truly arrived.