macaroni21

I hardly ever go to Siam Paragon, but yes Japanese desserts are nowadays the only kind I can really enjoy.

Ah, Baan Dok Mai..... what a dump that was.

Wait... this story is not as clearcut as it may at first appear. Much depends on the deal made between the customer and the boy regarding being off'd for a period of days. If the customer had agreed on a rate that represented the equivalent or near-equivalent of a tip for short-time or long-time for each day they would be together, then I think it's only fair that the boy should know he has to deliver. Of course, if the customer was not agreeing to such a rate and still demanded daily service, then there is a good financial reason for the boy to get out. However, the story mentions exhaustion, not financial dissatisfaction. If a boy in the sex trade cannot cope with daily sex then he shouldn't be in this trade. I've spoken with massage boys in Thailand and Japan, and many have told me they do an average of 3 customers a day, taking perhaps one or two days off a week.

Hmmm, new tech problem with the site. I misspelled "filling" above and instead used a term that connotes dental fillings. I caught my mistake almost as soon I hit Post, then tried to edit it, but I received the error message that I was past the edit time window. It was no more than 3 or 4 seconds.

3-high is within reason, I suppose, though I might still waste half of it. The slices of banana in the photo reminded of the last time I ordered one of those crepe things sold at night markets with banana fillings. I couldn't finish it. I felt sick halfway, and threw the rest of it away. Has anyone else also seen their tastebuds get intolerant of sweet?

Well done! Since I was curious about how much increase in elevation you conquered (and also curious about your statement about "not hot"), I did a Google search, and found: "In Erawan National Park, the lowest waterfall sits at approximately 100 meters above sea level. The highest waterfall (Level 7) reaches an elevation of around 400 to 800 meters above sea level, depending on the trail section.The hike spans a total distance of 1,500 meters from the park headquarters to the summit. The waterfall features seven distinct tiers, with the elevation gain between the lowest and highest points being roughly 700 meters. Planning to hike the 7 tiers? Here is a quick breakdown of the stages along the trail: Level 1 (Hlai Khuen Rung): The starting tier, located just 20 meters from the entrance zone. Level 2 (Wang Macha): Known for its emerald-green pools and abundant fish. Level 3 (Pha Namtok): Features a cascading 10-meter drop. Level 4 (Oke Nang Peesau): Known for unique rock formations and slide-like features. Level 5 (Buar Mai Long): A scenic and slightly quieter tier surrounded by lush trees. Level 6 (Dong Prouk Sa): The second to last tier, requiring a slightly steeper climb through the jungle. Level 7 (Phu Pha Erawan): The highest fall, named because its cascading water resembles the three-headed elephant (Erawan) of Hindu mythology"

I enjoy the occasional pancake, though I'm not quite familiar with iHop. The problem I now have is that American serving sizes have grown too large for me. Over the years, I have been cutting down on sugar and now each time I eat something that to normal people is normal sweet, I find it unpalatably sweet. I can put up with a small serving but even with a normal sized serving, e.g. a standard wedge of cake, I start feeling sick (not always, but often enough to deter me from ordering anything sweet). Do you remember if this shop's pancakes are stacked 4-high or 6-high? Or some formidable number?

Has anyone actually visited the Pancake Palace yet? Any reviews?

I feel I should clarify that my shorthand use of the term "rice queen generation" does not mean an entire generation, but a tiny subset of a generation, in the same way that straight men keen on mail-order brides are a fraction of straight men in general.

I don't think it is useful to speak of gay tourism to Thailand as a generalised, homogenous thing. By that I mean we need to distinguish the different market segments and (catering to them) the different business segments. Each of these segments have/had a waxing and waning cycle non-synchronous with the others and for their own reasons, e.g. the economics, politics or demographics of that segment at that point in time. Restricting my comments to Pattaya, I have never been a frequent visitor to Pattaya, but I have visited irregularly since the early 1990s. That decade I think I only visited the Boyztown bars, and stayed mostly at Le Cafe Royale Hotel (did I get the name right?). I can't directly answer @bkkmfj2648's question about the distribution of patrons among these 3 distinct areas in the years 2000 to 2010, but I think it would be misleading to think of a single market that moved from one area to another depending on their relative popularity. When I visited, just by looking at the offerings in the Sunee Plaza bars, one could surmise that Boyztown and Sunnee served different market segments. Most Sunnee bars, for most of the period, had barely-legal skinny fem twinks. For a short while, some bars went too far (more on this below), but as @a-447 said, the clampdowns came before long. My main memory of that period, 2000 to maybe 2010, was that the inside bars of Sunee had so-so crowds, but the open-front bars (very similar to format of bars in Jomtien Complex today) always had plenty of customers sitting for hours, with skinny fem wait staff flirting among the customers, almost all of whom were silver-haired caucasians with pot bellies. The customers seemed to know each other. So, to answer @bkkmfj2648's question to a degree, Sunee Plaza was pulling in the residents or semi-residents of Pattaya (snowbirds who only came during the northern winter) who had a fancy for skinny fem twinks, but for whom Sunee was also a community space. I would hasten to add that in my opinion, @a-447 described an extreme case, though I myself had a similar experience in one bar. I too was horrified. Let me segue a bit here and describe my experience: I was sitting in bar (can't remember which one now) and the mamasan noticed that I wasn't showing any interest in the boys (they were too skinny and too fem!), but s/he came to the wrong conclusion as to why I wasn't showing any interest. S/he then said, we have more boys, they not dancing now, they at the back. Follow me, I show you. I stupidly followed without digesting what s/he might be saying. Down a short corridor, we came to a curtained doorway. S/he pulled back the curtain to show me a filthy, untidy room with four obviously teenage boys inside. I was outa there like lightning. While the raids severely damaged the reputation of the precinct and made it risky for customers to be seen there, I doubt that it was the primary factor for its decline. I think the primary factor was the demographic receding of the type of customer Sunnee appealed to. In short, many of them died. They were not sufficiently replaced by new residents with similar tastes in boys. The new residents that came were less likely to be looking for skinny fem twinks. That taste is an artefact of time and place. It's a generation (for want of a better term, I call it the rice queen generation) that paralleled the heterosexual market for mail-order brides: men who bought into the stereotype of Asians being more effeminate and submissive compared to non-Asian partners. By the turn of the century, a great cultural shift away from that stereotype was gradually happening in the background, and Sunnee's allure was being left behind by that cultural shift. My guess is that Jomtien Complex added to Sunnee's decline. It offered a safer set of bars without the odium of underage activity. It was also less fem and twinky (but not by much). I think Jomtien Complex sort of inherited Sunnee Plaza's market segment, but a more updated, less rice-queen kind. On the other hand, Boyztown always appealed to a completely separate market, though there was some overlap. Boyztown had more straight-looking boys, in fact actual straight boys. While it had open-front bars that also attracted people sitting for hours people-watching, my sense was that (no less due to the density of hotels in the area) Boyztown attracted the short-term visitors more than the residents. But "short-term" is a relative thing. A short-term visitor from Europe or America might stay for 3 weeks. A short-term visitor from Asia, barely a week -- which has implications. Another great shift was happening that began to sound the death knell for Boyztown: the rise of the Asian tourist to Thailand and the decline of the white tourist. The bars absolutely failed to adapt to serving the Asian tourist and continued to rely on the shrinking white market. But it's a chicken and egg question too, because with an ever-shorter visit duration, the Asian tourist was much less likely to venture out of Bangkok (unless they were of the packaged tour kind), and so unless they showed up, why would the bars start catering to them? But some do show up, as can be seen from the large numbers of screaming Chinese girls in formerly-gay BoyzBoyzBoyz. And then still another great shift: the Asian tourist is relatively younger and is more than happy with the dance clubs of Soi 2 in Bangkok for nightlife. They are not great fans of the gogo bars (maybe also they see these bars as poor value for money, which is true, actually), which explains why the gogo bars of Soi Twilight began the decline, and now in Patpong, they're often in a sorry state. Boyztown's gogo bars are just the more tattered/shuttered version of this general decline of gogo bars.

Sorry to be a wet blanket but I think it's very difficult to imagine that the powers that be see any value in such salvage attempts.

I've had the pleasure of meeting Peter Jackson, but it was socially and in Sydney (or was it Canberra? too long ago now), though I understood that he was normally based in Bangkok. Unlike my haziness about the year or the city we met in, I have an indelible memory of the man being a fount of knowledge about gay culture in Thailand. Have never since met anyone as knowledgeable as he was.

I too was always glad to get hold of those freebie magazines. I needed only to know a few gay places and chances are that are the entrance door there would a stack of them. Take one and it would tell you where else you could explore for the delights of Bangkok. Of course, the days of print are over. But there's the internet. The businesses seem to be grouped in three different tiers. 1. Those with an informative website, plus maybe social media. Thinks Glam's. S'Sense, Prestige, Jey Spa. 2. Those with only Facebook or Line... the downside of this is that they are harder to find (Where does one even begin to find the Line number of a massage shop?) and the information is not as well-organised the way a website can be. Think Moonlight, Jupiter, the Saphan Khwai massage shops... 3. No media presence. This includes Hotmale in Patpong and many of the Silom Soi 6 massage parlours. The fact that there are businesses in tier 1 indicates that the question isn't whether internet advertising can be done - it can - and the question then becomes why some businesses do it and others do not. At first - and it may still be a factor to a degree - I thought that with these businesses operating in the legal shadows, it may be risky to draw attention to themselves. Selling sex is supposed to be illegal, but also, having staff of irregular migration status, which may in fact be the bigger problem. Yet, when I think about it, the Saphan Khwai places with their rudimentary Line broadcasts seem to be able to sustain such marketing despite staff from neighbouring countries and unmistakeable notations about which boy is top or bottom. Even Jey Spa, Glam's, S'Sense and other places which maintain a web presence (not just Line broadcasts) are similarly in the legal shadows on both counts, So legal risks from advertising exposure doesn't explain why many bars and massage places don't advertise at all. I think it ultimately boils down to whether the management has any imagination or initiative. As we know, some of the bars are set up by expats for their Thai lovers to run. These Thai lovers don't have a lot of education. Maintaining an English-language social media presence or a website is way beyond them. So, maybe we can group the business owners into 2 tiers: 1. Those educated enough and/or with enough drive and motivation to do marketing; 2. Those without. What about the farang-owned places? Well, here's where our logic leads us: Just because someone has white skin does not mean he is educated or have the creativity to drive a business forward. It may well be that farang or not, the owner is a tier 2 kind of owner.

Gay travelling, as a subtopic of gay history, is full of these episodic periods that flourish for a while and then vanish. As for Sunnee Plaza, I'm sure I have said somewhere what I thought of its dynamics and why it couldn't last. A bit too busy today to say it again. The above video (its actual title is Victorian Gentlemen in ITALY: The Secret History of Bachelor 'Art Tours' in the 1800s Revealed ) is only 40 minutes long, not the two hours as indicated, because the second narrative following the titular story is about why medieval people smelled. I find it almost funny to imagine the second topic as a kind of antidote for the dirt and disgust that "good" people might feel hearing the first story. What is interesting is that it is based on a 2018 unearthing of a trove of documents and photographs. Assuming that everything we post here on GayGuides is captured on the Wayback machine or other such archiving system, one day all our stories and ruminations may be made into a historical doumentary about that fleeting moment in history when Sunnee Plaza, Jomtien Complex, Boyztown, Soi Twilight, Soi 4, Soi 6, Saphan Khwai, etc were on our kind of art tour itinerary.

It's why this board - thanks so very much to @TotallyOz - is a huge social asset. We all have had great memories (and continue to make new ones) and besides this board there are few places where we can relive the fun by sharing such stories. Tell these tales anywhere else, and people would see us as pedo perverts.

My immediate reaction was: surely, there is really no one formula? I had to reread what @jamiebee wrote about his pre-planning to understand what you're referring to, and I think it's fairly similar to what I myself would do (except for the eye-popping obligation to buy gifts - do you have to pay for excess baggage to lug them home?) and I think some others would do too: have a list of places I would want to check out each trip. There can't be a single formula because our objectives may differ. You refer to sex; sure, it's a big part of fun, but each of us has other objectives and priorities too, e.g. @jason1975. And then there is the question of how much time one has. Some visitors have the luxury of several weeks and they can (and maybe should) slow down. Others are only able to squeeze in a week or less of holiday time from work. Let me give you an example: Those who have read some of my blogposts may suspect that for me, it isn't just a simple question of looking for great sex. A big part of the fun I have is to check out places -- within a sensible budget of course, so Capella is out of the running -- to answer the question: "How do these fools manage to run a business?" Once it's framed like that, you'll understand for example why hiring from apps doesn't interest me. It is as much the business that I am interested in as the boy. I know that few others would have such a priority; we're all different. And also in my case, I can (can, not always) find a disastrously bad experience to be very interesting from an observational and analytical point of view. Money badly spent no doubt, but we'll chalk it up to the cost of acquiring knowledge.... about all the things that can go wrong. - water supply cut off (you'll be surprised how often this happens); - filipino massage boy in Manila who asks me to recommend an Australian girl he could marry so he could migrate (talk about a mood-killer!) - mosquitoes in the massage room... and so on. I feel for those who are very focussed on scoring great sex. I see posts from them on this board every now and then asking for recommendations; they're hoping for tried and tested service providers who are less likely to disappoint. It reaches its apogee among those who absolutely must have colossal dongs. Unlike businesses for which a to-check-out list can be compiled by careful desk research prior to a visit, folks who are laser-focussed on getting mindblowing sex and/or mammoth manhoods have much less public information to go by.

At Boys Nigh Club, the impression I got from the papasan was that it would be uni-directional for 500 baht. Possibly a different rate might apply if it was the boy who exercised his arm, but I didn't ask. Perhaps @AsianExplorer who has infinitely more experience than I have can tell us more about the menu options. I have enjoyed X-Boys many times over the years, but I don't recall there being any pillow activity. This bar is like the last survivor of BoyzTown, with an emphasis on the show. You are right, though, about it being totally in your face, with the copulating pair circulating among the audience. More recent visits, I have insisted on more value for my money. With the bottom on my lap, I have used the opportunity to inspect closely (with my monocled eyes and investigative fingers) the piston work that the top was performing on his partner, before giving any stamp of approval in the form of money notes with the king's visage. Even more fun was the bongo drum act -- didn't see it the last time I was there -- where a boy would go around the room inviting guests to hit the bongo drum with his "drumstick". I recall one time some years past, when there were three boys around one drum, and me and my friend managed with three of our hands to beat out a rhythm. There was much mirth all around.

Thanks for the warning. I shall be careful with Cambodian cats on my next visit. 🤭

Meanwhile, here in communist-party Vietnam, capitalist invader Starbucks hoisted this at one of the busiest intersections in Saigon.

I think you're referring to Boys Nigh Club, because I was there in February and that was the business model I was somewhat amused to see. Unlike you, I just couldn't bring myself to participate. It reminded me far too much of cottaging. I almost fled. I have a blogpost at https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2026/05/29/seats-with-cushions/ That said, I think it has a viable business model. Precisely because customers come and go so quickly -- no show to watch -- the bar may never look busy; yet can generate enough turnover to at least stay alive, maybe succeed. I vaguely recall mentions on this board that one or two bars in Jomtien Complex also offer "cushions". Is that correct? Do they operate the same way as Boys Nigh Club?

Well, that's exactly my theory. They're actually like any other people around the world, but when they have to hustle, they hustle hard.

+1

Newer members may not know this, but there is no need to take @Olddaddy seriously. He likes to needle people and get a rise out of them. For some of us long-time members, any help getting a rise is most welcome. 🤣

Fond memories of Barbiery and Hotmale (or was it then still Twilight?) in the very late 1980s and early 1990s. The all nude boys on stage at Hotmale were a thrill. The fluorescent painted dancers at Barbiery were beautiful. The artist was fantastic. I also have a fond memory of a tiny bar called City Boys located on Sukhmvit or Phloenchit Road close to where the expressway flyover crosses it. Took out a charming university student who, very very rare in those days, spoke some English. Despite that, I never fully understood whether he was doing physics or physical education. The following trip I made to Bkk and City Boys was no more.

@Olddaddy note this. You don't have to buy a bar. You need only buy out all the boys from a bar.