Sunee Plaza Nice Boys

[Keithambrose]

16 hours ago, macaroni21 said:

and people would see us as pedo perverts.

Surely not!😛😜

[12is12]

So.....r there nowadays any venue with hung guys to play with?

[PeterRS]

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.

[vinapu]

1 hour ago, PeterRS said:

Or has the end well and truly arrived.

that !

[Olddaddy]

1 hour ago, PeterRS said:

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.

The writing ✍️was on the wall years ago , the buildings were falling to bits , the bars offers maximum 12 months leases etc 

The plan obviously is to sell the area for apartment buildings🏘️🏠, despite all the deniers years ago saying it would never be developed 

[a-447]

With the tens of millions of gays in China, you would have thought gay business owners in Sunee would have advertised on Chinese social media.

But TIT.

If you don't tell them what 'services' are available, they won't come.

It's probably too late now.

[bkkmfj2648]

35 minutes ago, a-447 said:

With the tens of millions of gays in China, you would have thought gay business owners in Sunee would have advertised on Chinese social media.

But TIT.

If you don't tell them what 'services' are available, they won't come.

It's probably too late now.

@a-447, Spot on about what you wrote above.

But it goes beyond trying to market to China.

Firstly, the Pattaya gay business community should join hands and try to market to the world about their existence.  From what I see, there is next to none or little international marketing about the 3 gay areas in Pattaya - Sunee Plaza, Boyztown, and Jomtien Complex, aka Supertown.  In fact, there is not much cohesion between these 3 entities - as one example is evidenced in the Gay Pride parade - Pattaya does theirs and Jomtien does theirs.

As I am fairly new to the scene here - I moved here as a new retiree 4 years prior - would anyone be able to describe what the distribution of patrons was to these 3 distinct areas were during their peak in the years 2000 to 2010?:

• Sunee Plaza - I saw old maps that showed like 30 bars, hotels, and massage shops existed back in the day,
• Boyztown area - I believe that the number of bars was fewer than Sunee Plaza had?
• Jomtien Complex - It now has in excess of 30 bars - but I believe that its footprint on the local gay scene only took off after the decline in Sunee Plaza ?

In other words, would it be safe to say that when Sunee Plaza became a ghost town that the patrons just moved over to  the Jomtien Complex and the net increase in patrons to Pattaya was zero?

I still believe that if Thailand will win the competition with Barcelona to host the World Pride 2030 - then there could still be a unique chance to get the Pattaya gay brand back onto the world stage.  The winner will be announced in January 2027.

I wrote to the author of the recent Nation Thailand article:

https://www.nationthailand.com/the-opinion/commentary/40066684

and he agrees that there could be a unique chance for Thailand to give recognition and economic life to the "outside of Bangkok" gay economic centers in Phuket, Hua Hin, Koh Samui, Chiang Mai, and Pattaya - which have all been shrinking in the last decade.

Would you all agree that Thailand has a vested interest to try to save its "outside of Bangkok" gay economic zones?

[macaroni21]

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.

[Olddaddy]

Unfortunately sunee plaza didn't actually attract the gay community like Boyztown did 

It attracted a lot of the filthy pedophiles who pretended to be gay ,good riddance to them 

[PeterRS]

5 hours ago, a-447 said:

With the tens of millions of gays in China, you would have thought gay business owners in Sunee would have advertised on Chinese social media.

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.  

4 hours ago, bkkmfj2648 said:

I still believe that if Thailand will win the competition with Barcelona to host the World Pride 2030 - then there could still be a unique chance to get the Pattaya gay brand back onto the world stage.

 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.

[vinapu]

5 hours ago, Olddaddy said:

Unfortunately sunee plaza didn't actually attract the gay community like Boyztown did 

It attracted a lot of the filthy pedophiles who pretended to be gay ,good riddance to them 

you are on something Olddaddy, quite possible  one of factors of Sunee's decline was threat of police raids , not entirely unwarranted to put it mildly

[vinapu]

2 hours ago, PeterRS said:

But with the price of airfares now much higher than 20-30 years ago

 not exactly.

Airfare for my 1st trip back in Nov 2001  and for my last (so far) in Jan 2026, was nominally  almost the same

[Londoner]

1 hour ago, vinapu said:

threat of police raids

One of my most amusing memories was of being in a Sunee  beer bar when word got around that the police were on the way. The doors of the go-go bars-  I particularly remember Sundance- were suddenly flung open and the dancers rushed-out, some struggling to put on their trousers as they ran down the soi. Not an easy task. It was like a scene from a French farce.  

The police never arrived.

[bkkmfj2648]

3 hours ago, PeterRS said:

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!

@PeterRS, you make a good observation.

I took some time today to look at some archives of these free gay Thai magazines and what I saw was what I suspected - they contained advertisements from various gay businesses and venues from all over Thailand; Phuket, Chiang Mai, Pattaya, and Bangkok who used these paper based magazines as a vehicle to advertise their existence on the world stage - as often the recipients of these magazines where to people who could understand English and generally lived outside of Thailand.

So, that implies that there was a time in Thailand's gay economic history when they would advertise to the outside world - as evidenced in these Thai gay magazines.  I agree with you that these magazines are now dead and hence the reach of Thailand's gay economy is now not (or barely) advertised to the outside non-Thai world.

Does this mean that Thailand's gay economy has continued to exist based only on word-of-mouth since the death of these paper based gay magazines?

Does it also mean that a Thai gay business now (today) does not have an easy vehicle/mechanism to be advertised on the global gay world stage?

  

 

[bkkmfj2648]

10 minutes ago, Londoner said:

One of my most amusing memories was of being in a Sunee  beer bar when word got around that the police were on the way. The doors of the go-go bars-  I particularly remember Sundance- were suddenly flung open and the dancers rushed-out, some struggling to

This is still going on in Supertown in Jomtien. 

Often the targets are the massage shops and when the police/immigration arrive there is a mad run to:

• get outside of Supertown and run towards the beach,
• run into any of the abandoned parking garages and hide and wait for the all clear signal,
• run into the upper floor maze and disappear into the labyrinth of of Supertown,
• or, give up and allow yourself to be arrested.

[a-447]

6 hours ago, Olddaddy said:

It attracted a lot of the filthy pedophiles who pretended to be gay ,good riddance to them 

That was certainly true to a degree when I started visiting Sunee. It had a reputation, that's for sure, even though it wasn't in your face.

I remember going to an upstairs bar and having peek inside.

I immediately rushed back down the stairs, feeling physically ill at what I'd just witnessed. No doubt the police were getting a sizeable amount of tea money to let the business run.

But Sunee was cleaned up fairly quickly.

[a-447]

9 minutes ago, bkkmfj2648 said:

This is still going on in Supertown in Jomtien. 

Often the targets are the massage shops and when the police/immigration arrive there is a mad run to:

• get outside of Supertown and run towards the beach,
• run into any of the abandoned parking garages and hide and wait for the all clear signal,
• run into the upper floor maze and disappear into the labyrinth of of Supertown,
• or, give up and allow yourself to be arrested.

A mama-san who worked at Eros told me the police sometimes phone ahead to tell the bar they are on their way.

That way they can carry out their duty - check for under-age, immigrants, etc - and give them time to escape yet ensure that the bar remains in business, thus allowing them to collect their tea money each month.

 

[khaolakguy]

37 minutes ago, bkkmfj2648 said:

I took some time today to look at some archives of these free gay Thai magazines and what I saw was what I suspected - they contained advertisements from various gay businesses and venues from all over Thailand; Phuket, Chiang Mai, Pattaya, and Bangkok who used these paper based magazines as a vehicle to advertise their existence on the world stage - as often the recipients of these magazines where to people who could understand English and generally lived outside of Thailand.

I am not sure how much these magazines were either available or publicised outside Thailand. I think that these magazines were mostly advertising local businesses to visitors/residents already inside Thailand. At that time you would find several publications available on the corner of a bar to read or take away for free. It never seemed likely that all the publications would be commercially sustainable. As it turned out none of them were.

[PeterRS]

36 minutes ago, bkkmfj2648 said:

I took some time today to look at some archives of these free gay Thai magazines and what I saw was what I suspected - they contained advertisements from various gay businesses and venues from all over Thailand; Phuket, Chiang Mai, Pattaya, and Bangkok who used these paper based magazines as a vehicle to advertise their existence on the world stage - as often the recipients of these magazines where to people who could understand English and generally lived outside of Thailand.

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.

[macaroni21]

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.

[bkkmfj2648]

40 minutes ago, macaroni21 said:

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.

Amazingly, I used to see those freebie magazines back in the USA at some gay venues (bars and saunas) and also at friends homes who had traveled to Thailand and had brought them back.  They intrigued me many years before I ever set foot in Thailand.

My bigger question is - do you think that there is a correlation with the demise of gay businesses in Thailand with the ending of these free magazines and Spartacus - which served as marketing mechanisms to attract the gay tourist from outside of Thailand - so that the gay businesses that advertised in these publications could be discovered - as there were no other ways to get the word out?

From Pattaya's point of view, the demise of Sunee Plaza was shortly after the time that these free magazines and Spartacus stopped being popular.

What I believe happened was:

• Free magazines peaked by the early 2000s and then disappeared when Thaksin came into power,
• Sunee Plaza peaked between 2008 - 2010,
• Boyztown peaked around year 2015,
• The Jomtien Complex growth surpassed Sunee/Boyztown after covid,
• Probably (I don't have any concrete proof) the net number of gay bars in existence in Pattaya was much greater in years 2000 - 2015 than they were after 2015 - especially after covid.

My hypothesis is that small gay businesses throughout Thailand had a cheap and easy way to market and reach the external to Thailand gay tourist and after the demise of these free magazines and Spartacus this was no longer possible.

Could this explain the decrease in gay businesses in Chiang Mai, Phuket, Hua Hin, Koh Samui, and Pattaya in the last decade?

 

[Vessey]

Facebook, TikTok, WhatsAp and Twitter('X') are used extensively by many of the Karaoke Bars of Pattaya, and also the Spas and Massge shops of BKK, to promote themselves, the Spas usually explicitly so, through pictures and 'clips', enabling you to see exactly what each boy is packing! TK Massage in particular will show you how the various boys would each deliver your 'Happy Ending' 😂

XBoys also uses FB and TikTok. as occasionally does Dream Boys, but the vast majority of bars in BoyzTown and, particularly Jomtien Complex do not. 

So some gay businesses do make the effort, but oddly others, even those struggling through Low Season inexplicably do not, which is a shame 😢

 

[daydreamer]

The free magazines were not widely available outside of Thailand.  Spartacus had some information about Thailand, but it was not comprehensive by any means.

There was one resource that was widely read, and available outside of Thailand.  It was a small pocket sized book titled The Men of Thailand or TMOT, as it was commonly known.  Although small in size, it had extensive information, with maybe 250 pages.  This book by Eric Allyn was available for sale in Thai bookstores, and worldwide, through mail order, and in some gay bookstores outside of Thailand.  

The TMOT book was by far the most valuable resource on gay travel for anyone planning a trip to Thailand in the 1990's, as it was kept updated with new editions annually.  It listed every gay business in the country, in sections for each relevant city, and for Bangkok, was further broken down by district.  The book had maps, short descriptions of bars, massage parlors, saunas, clubs, discos, etc.  Business listings had directions in Thai, to show a taxi driver.  There was also practical information about culture, financial affairs, travel, etc.

I believe the book stopped being published in the late 1990's.  This was the same time when gay websites about Thailand such as Dreaded Ned's Gay Thailand, and the first Gaybutton board were becoming popular, superseding printed material.  

 

 

[PeterRS]

6 hours ago, Vessey said:

Facebook, TikTok, WhatsAp and Twitter('X') are used extensively by many of the Karaoke Bars of Pattaya, and also the Spas and Massge shops of BKK, to promote themselves . . . . XBoys also uses FB and TikTok. as occasionally does Dream Boys, but the vast majority of bars in BoyzTown and, particularly Jomtien Complex do not.

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. 

9 hours ago, bkkmfj2648 said:

My bigger question is - do you think that there is a correlation with the demise of gay businesses in Thailand with the ending of these free magazines and Spartacus - which served as marketing mechanisms to attract the gay tourist from outside of Thailand - so that the gay businesses that advertised in these publications could be discovered - as there were no other ways to get the word out?

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.

10 hours ago, macaroni21 said:

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.

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.

[a-447]

12 hours ago, PeterRS said:

But the publication of most was stopped after the first Thaksin government's social order campaign at the start of the century.

I didn't know that those publications were stopped. I do remember seeing them on sale on Suriwongse.

Luckily, they are still available online.