PeterRS

I cannot find the research article I mentioned. But there are two recent news items in newspapers and magazines that point out the fact that many BL stories are written by women and are primarily aimed at the young girl/teenage girl market. "Boys’ Love, also known as Yaoi, is a fictional genre originating from Japan and focusing on homoerotic relationships between male characters but its target audience is women." https://dizi-mania.com/the-other-far-east-the-thai-boys-love-series-sweeping-across-asia/ An article in Bangkok Time Out dated June 11 last year makes the following points regarding many being authored by women as well as being purchased by girls and women.. "Traditionally, yaoi is created, consumed and favored by women." "PhD researcher Ronnayuth Euatrirat, who’s studying the Thai Boys Love phenomenon, explains that this may be due to the fact that many Boys Love novels are penned by female authors. 'We find Boys Love characters reflect the desires of a young woman. An engineering student, for example, is a typical desirable personification of a dependable man. These characters also have a manly appearance and come from well-to-do backgrounds. These standards respond to women’s needs.'” https://www.timeout.com/bangkok/lgbtq/thai-boys-love-culture

As I think you pointed out, that study is purely related to manga. It also does not touch on readers/audiences in Thailand as far as I can see on a quick flip through. It does refer specifically at certain points to the USA, South Korea, Taiwan, China and Indonesia in Asia and a few European countries. I will try (hopefully) to find the Thai study which illustrated that these movies and TV series are primarily aimed at the teen and young female market much more than the boy/young man market.

I have visited several parts of Vietnam, mostly in the last three years. Among the young people I have met, I find a much greater openness to discussing gay and LGBT issues than in some other countries in the region. Several had friends whom they openly told me were gay even though two I met did not even know that i am gay. I found this very refreshing.

That commentary omits one important point. Bangkok's main airports BKK and DMK have in fact been closed before. During the massive red shirt/yellow shirt demonstrations in 2008, the pro PAD yellow shirts blockaded and shut down both airports for over a week. That certainly gave many in the country and many tourists an inkling of what it would be like if the country was totally closed off. Outside observers will have difficulty disagreeing with the summary I re-quote above. The article's comment on the country being "hellbent on idealogical zealotry" is also hard to argue. A lot of the military and the elite in the country must still harbour not merely concern but close to anger that there was the change from absolute monarchy to supposed democracy around 90 years ago. That is obvious given the short life of most governments and the constant round of successful military coups. But it does not get to the heart of the problem, one that has recently been aired in another thread. The endemic corruption so deeply embedded in all aspects of Thai society from the mega-rich to the poorest of the poor ensures that there can never be anything like the sort of changes the article's writer proposes. Thailand is stuck in a time warp. Physically and economically the country has changed dramatically over the last 40 years. Socially visually nothing has changed. The vast majority of the people in the country would still accept Thaksin back as Prime Minister despite the fact that he only got the job as a result of major corruption on his part and his bribing one or more members of the Constitutional Court to turn a blind eye to his attempts to hide massive assets which was totally against the law. Indeed he would never have become PM without the handing out of huge amounts of cash to tens of millions in the countryside, all overseen by village leaders. Not that some of his reforms were not beneficial. They were. But Thaksin was head of a kleptocracy, a leader in the Trump mould who permitted no criticism. Journalists and even editors were fired during his tenure. He actually changed almost nothing. He only further developed the culture of idealogical zealotry. And as a result Thailand remains an even more dysfunctional democracy, even more wedded to and mired in the outdated beliefs of the past. Until someone comes to grips with the rot of corruption and acts fast to change perceptions, the country can not change.

How can I become a priest overnight???

What a dreadful experience! I hope you are feeling better and the police catch those guys.

20 years? I reckon non-existent is more like it!!

Thanks

Yet again the government has brought this on itself. If it had listened to the medical experts and cracked down early with testing at the fish market, locked down during Songkran and been 100% compliant in its quarantine laws without permitting a child of the rich elite to get back from Cambodia without quarantine, THAI might well have been able to resume more of its schedule many months earlier than will be the case.

I can no longer find that survey but I frankly believe it referred more to TV series and movies - live action rather than cartoons! LOL Certainly if you see a BL movie in a cinema, there will usually be a lot more girls than boys in the audience.

Since the forum has become more international, it would be nice to know where the bars have opened. Thank you.

"Until social attitudes change?" I always find this the most ridiculous argument, one that is continuously trotted out by the Singapore government whenever any discussion of the dreaded Section 377A rears its head. The fact is that it is all but nonsense! The demographics of Singapore are roughly 76% Chinese, 15% Malay and 7.5% Indian. In the 2015 census, 18.8% of the population professed to be Christian, the vast majority being Chinese. Let's compare this with other nearby countries with a majority Han Chinese population. Roughly 92% of Hong Kong now are Chinese. For decades the colonial government refused to change its version of Section 377A. It claimed that Chinese society was too conservative and did not accept homosexuality. After a series of scandals and an extensive consultation led by the Law Reform Commission, the law was finally changed in 1990. In 2006 the High Court lowered the age of consent for consensual gay sex from 21 to 16. Has there been any challenge by Chinese community leaders? Has there been any legal objection to the change in the law? Nope! Apart from a few religious sects, the Hong Kong public accepts homosexuality as part and parcel of life. Taiwan's population is between 95% and 97% Han Chinese. As Taiwan moved towards greater acceptance of an LGBT community, there were occasional protest movements against a change. But most of the anti-change movement was led by Christian Evangelical Churches. Christians make up all of 3.9% of the population according to the 2005 census and the numbers have been decreasing since 1970. Christians led the movement against gey marriage. They failed! It is interesting that the anti-gay movements in Singapore are led mostly by a community of sometimes scandal-ridden mega-evangelical Christian Churches. There is rarely any anti-gay public movement from the Muslim and Indian communities. So yet again, it is a very small minority of the population dictating what the government does. Yet increasingly, people in Singapore feel it is wrong for the LGBT debate to be led by religious leaders. In October 2019, a Report by the Institute of Policy Studies found that between 2013 and 2018 there was a "steep drop" in opposition to LGBT issues. The Report also found that, yet again, it was the minority Christian community that "were most likely to the amenable to religious leaders being vocal about LGBT issues. Slightly more than half said they could be comfortable with it." Yet up to 71% of those professing to belong to other religions said they would feel "uncomfortable." So if about half the Christian community are pro their religious leaders advocating anti-LGBT issues, that means roughly 9.4% of the population. Only! In other words, around 310,000 are dictating the policy of the island state's 5.7 million citizens. It is about time the Prime Minister and his dictatorial government (just one party has ruled the island since Independence) took into account the views of the vast majority of its citizens and not the bigoted views of a tiny minority. https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/majority-of-singaporeans-uncomfortable-with-religious-leaders-speaking-up-on-lgbt-issues

Some of the major beneficiaries of corrpution are government ministers. That is why in Bangkok we have several operators each extracting tolls on a single expressway. The Ministers get wind of the developments in time to buy up the land which is then sold for major profits. I love the story of the Minister of Transport who lodged a complaint to the police about a break in at his residence at which some relatively invaluable items were stolen. When the police searched the home, they found something like US$200 million in cash in the basement!

Of course they should, otherwise the number of cases in the country will mushroom exponentially. But this seems yet another case of one government department acting on its own with zero communication with others.

This has to be some form of joke! A 20 year plan to root out corruption? Why on this good earth does it take 20 years? Fact is it doesn't need to take a fraction of that time - unless this is merely another of the PM's publicity stunts and nothing whatever will actually have been achieved at the end of that time. There are examples in the region of the correct way of rooting out corruption in a vastly shorter period. Singapore is one. Hong Kong another. Before the mid 1970s corruption in Hong Kong was rife. There was triad infiltration in many aspects of society, many in the police force were corrupt. Same with the civil service and even the judiciary. For example, even if you wanted an ambulance to get to hospital, most crews would demand tea money to get you there! Once in hospital the cleaners would demand a small amount to clean around your bed! Power in Hong Kong in those pre hand-back-to-China days was vested in the figure of the Governor. Appointed in 1971 Sir Murray Maclehose became the longest serving Governor and was much liked and respected especially by the general public. He quickly realised that Hong Kong was a cess pit of corruption. He determined to do something about it. He also realised that only a radical solution was needed, one that would strike at the problem with speed and teeth. Nothing within the existing police force and civil service system could achieve that. The trigger for what was about to happen was a case in 1973. Peter Godber, a Police Superintendent, was found to have assets vastly in excess of his income. During the investigations, with the help of his friends he was able to escape to Britain. A mass body of students assembled in a park to protest and condemn the government for failing to tackle the corruption problem. Like Thaiiand now, Hong Kong had an anti-corruption agency. Like Thailand it was a toothless tiger. In 1974, virtually overnight but with many top secret earlier discussions, Maclehose established the Independent Commission Against Corruption - the ICAC. Key elements of the ICAC was that it was answerable only to the Governor. It was also totally separate from the existing police force. It had its own thoroughly vetted inspectors and investigators, most specially imported into Hong Kong from the UK. Judges ruling on corruption investigations were again thoroughly vetted prior to being accepted. Although it was not specified as such, essentially anyone accused of corruption had to prove their innocence. The existing system of justice was all but reversed in those cases. Relatively quickly, 143 police officers and 247 civil servants were fired. One judge packed his bags and left the territory with indecent haste. Later a Crown Public Prosecutor was jailed for 8 years. The business and commercial sector was far from immune. The Chairman and some members of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange were hauled before the ICAC and jailed for the preferential allocation of shares about to be listed on the Exchange. Even today the ICAC continues its work. In 2015, one of the territory's top multi-billionaire property tycoons and the city's former No. 2 in the administration were jailed for 5 years and 7.5 years respectively for collusion and sweet deals. Anyone who thinks such measures were unpopular need only look at a survey conducted on the eve of the millennium. The general public was asked to nominate the most important events in Hong Kong's 150 year history. The establishment of the ICAC was ranked #6. The attached paper outlines Hong Kong's experience in formulating an effective anti-corruption strategy. The first item on the list is "Is there adequate political will to fight corruption?" As far as Thailand is concerned, the answer is unquestionably a loud 'No'! Oh, and one of the ICAC's first successes was the extradition back to Hong Kong of Peter Godber who ended up in jail for 4 years. https://www.unafei.or.jp/publications/pdf/RS_No69/No69_23VE_Man-wai2.pdf

On the few occasions I have seen her show, I find it generally nauseating. Only once or twice have I seen an interview conducted intelligently and with a nugget of interest.

The Asia Times has an interesting article on the reasons why Thailand's third wave is vastly more serious than the first and second. More importantly, it reminds readers that it is partly because Thailand's government gave so little priority to obtaining vaccines that the third wave is spinning out of control. At the WHO assembly last November, Thailand was one of the countries complimented for its near exemplary actions in the face of covid19. The Ministry of Health then assembled a team of experts to help publicise this worldwide with a major PR blitz. Before that could take place, though, the disaster at the Samut Sakhon fish market hit the headlines and the blitz was shelved. Now it seems a sad fiction with "laxity, poor governance and even corruption" contributing to present large spike in cases. The third wave started in the first week in April with a cluster detected in the high-end bars in the Ekkamai entertainment district. This is where hi-so kids from hi-so families like to congregate. One who attended the clubs was a member of the Chirativat family which owns the Central Group chain of retail stores. According to the article, this member of the family was a regular at Cambodia's casinos. On his return to Thailand, the police allowed him to reenter without undergoing the mandatory 14-day quarantine period. How much was passed in brown envelopes can only be a matter of speculation. Probably quite a tidy sum. It was another example of the rich and elite being able to bend rules as and how they wish. As the cases have spread, it is those in the poorer areas of the city and now the prison communities which suffer. Why testing in prisons was not undertaken is another case of government failure. As the tension between the government and the business community has grown, the government decided not to lock down the country during Songkran as it did last year. Officials feared a public backlash from another lock down. Yet this was against the advice of the medical experts who predicted and high wave of new cases. No need to guess who was correct! But it is Thailand's laggard vaccination drive that has been sparking sharp criticism on social media and elsewhere. "Siam Bioscience, a pharmaceutical company partly owned by XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXXX's Crown Property Bureau, is at the heart of the controversy. The firm won a competitive bid to produce AstraZeneca's vaccine for distribution in Thailand and regionally, but for unclear reasons has not yet produced or distributed any shots. "Health experts note Siam Bioscience has no previous experience in vaccine production, unlike the Government Pharmaceutical Organisation, which has collaborated with the US and the WHO to produce other vaccines but for unknown reasons was overlooked by the Oxford University AstraZeneca." To comply with Board rules, I shall not go into detail about what the article says about the Health Minister's affiliations but readers can see this in the article appended below. The article goes on to suggest that this may have "contributed to the Health Ministry's failure - or perhaps fear - to secure batches of other vaccines . . . " That the Health Minister allegedly has ambitions to become Prime Minister has not helped the situation. But it is clear that when the Thai government left decisions to medical experts, the country did extremely well. When it set aside these experts' advice and took over control, disaster struck. It's a sad but sadly typical Thai tale of incompetence and greed. https://asiatimes.com/2021/05/thailand-fast-spinning-out-of-covid-19-control/

The sad fact is that the market at Samut Sakhon was a covid disaster just waiting to happen. Successive governments have been perfectly well aware of the thousands of Burmese who work there and that a great many are illegals. Successive governments have promised they would take action to clean up the problem and successive governments have done absolutely nothing about it! Despite the fact that there were thousands working there and despite the example of Singapore which suddenly found a huge cluster of thousands of cases amongst (legal) workers from poorer countries, no testing programme was put into effect months before the outbreak was discovered. This was definitely a case of the government authorities taking their eye off the ball - probably deliberately. The rich elite who control the market are probably in the same pot as the senior army man who ran the Thai Boxing tournament several days after large gathterings were declared illegal, one that made the very first outbreak more difficult to control. Like the police officers who ran the illegal gambling dens which were found to be responsible for part of the second wave in January, the chances of anyone being held accountable in this country is virtually zero.

It's statistically proven that many more girls watch these BL series and movies than boys/men. Don't ask me why, though!

I always wondered if smokers (of the cigarette variety) could blow out smoke through the anus. I guess we're getting there!!

Netflix is a general entertainment channel. I believe Disney is much more a wholesome family entertainment channel. Looking at its California Channel programme for today, there're such "goodies"[?] as - The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot about That Mickey and the Roadster Racers Puppy Dog Pals and High School Musical as the main evening movie!! I'll stick to Netflix thanks!

This sounds like yet another of the many predictions made by all manner of Thai officials involved directly and indirectly in tourism over the past half year. All those turned out to be fictions. With the country now in the midst of its worst wave of the pandemic, serious doubts that its tracking and tracing is as effective as it was in the first wave and mass vaccination still some way on the horizon, this plan is cloud cuckoo land again.

BL series on Disney+? That must surely be wishful thinking in the extreme LOL

Agree entirely. Sadly, as in Thailand, the authorities clearly became too complacent. Having closed its borders for more than a year and put into effect measures for testing and quaranteeing Taiwanese returnees, it failed to do so for air crews, the very people most likely to bring the virus into the country from overseas. The three day quarantine period for pilots was obviously way too short and the supervision of those days far too lax. Very sad! I was hoping travel might be possible to enable overseas visitiors to attend the annual Gay Pride Parade at the end of October, but that must surely be out of the question now - partly as a result of the new outbreak and partly the desperately slow rate of the vaccine rollout in too many Asian countries.

As pointed out in @reader's post, the original Babylon was housed in a smaller building at the top of the soi on the corner of Soi Nantha and Sathorn soi 1. Not sure when the soi was renamed but it has become Soi Nantha-Mozart. This was in recognition of the fact that the Austrian Embassy had extensive grounds just opposite. I expect it was to mark the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth in 2006, but that's a guess. Like many other diplomatic compounds, some the grounds have been sold off. At the top of the soi opposite the old Babylon now is a hotel. Gay saunas were quite new when it opened in mid-1987 (I actually thought it was two years later!) I can recall Volt off Asoke being the first I attended around 1985. This was quickly followed by the 10-storey Obelisks - but each floor was small. Thankfully there was a lift to the top. It had a jacuzzi on the roof which was always popular. There followed The Beach, but I never was there. Others then followed - Heaven which I believe still exists at the river end of Silom and then later one which almost reached Babylon standards - Chakran with its Moroccan theme off Soi Aree. Chakran also still exists but I have not been for around 15 years. I believe it is now largely Thai-for-Thai or at least Asian-for-Asian, whereas in the early years quite a number of young to middle-aged foreigners attended. For those first few years, I loved it and then preferred it to the new Babylon. There were always more young Thais. The large darkroom off the equally large jacuzzi area was always busy. After a few years, this became an all nude area - I believe the first in Bangkok. There was a small open air pool with a bar on one side. I loved just sitting on a lounger by the pool enjoying a drink and watching the eye candy as the guys descended from the first floor on the opposite open stairway. The original Babylon was indeed somewhere special. It was packed at the week-ends with queues at the reception desk waiting for lockers to become available. Like the new and much larger Babylon further down the soi, there was a small cafe/restaurant, usually with an instrumentalist playing quiet classical music on the week-ends - a guitar or flute if I recall correctly. When the building was expanded, a second cafe was opened. In addition to the usual sauna facilities, the rooftop bar was extremely popular. As there was also a large shower area at one end, it was a great place to cruise. The main difference between the old and new is that for its first ten years or so, the vast majority of the customers seemed to be young and youngish Thais along some expatriates/foreign visitors. The Thai crowd was always in the majority and seemed quite well off - a judgement I came to merely by looking at the clothes they were wearing in the queues. But at some point many of the Thais slowly moved elsewhere.