The young men who work in the Bangkok bars of the infamous Soi Twilight, at least those encountered by the author, were guilty of repeated thieving, lying, deceit, disloyalty and even blackmail. They could also be fascinating, fun, and extremely charming. But their loyalty is to each other, their friends and their employers, not to the tourists who pass through their lives as customers in a perpetually passing tide.
The bars’ mama sans are guilty of foisting upon the often naive, lonely or drunken foreigners who enter their bars male prostitutes who should not and cannot be trusted under any circumstances.
The Twilight Soi attempts to make the point that many of the tourists being so routinely robbed and pillaged come from entirely different social backgrounds to the world they experience in Thailand and thus make easy targets.
In many cases they may be alone for the first time in their lives, or at low ebbs after the breakdown of jobs or relationships. To treat them with what is little more than contempt should be discouraged by the authorities in the interests of the country’s tourist industry. At the same time the physical attractiveness, relaxed attitudes to prostitution and sexual liberation, indeed athleticism, of the Thais will always make its sex industry one of the country’s major attractions and money spinners. As they say, when God was handing out sexual feelings the Thais were standing at the front of the queue.
But it is clear that legislative reform is required to force the go-go bars and brothels to take on the obligations to their customers beholden on any normal business operation.
The Twilight Soi derives from the author’s experiences of particular go-go bars and there are definitely better-run establishments; nor are all the boys thieves. But many a sorry tourist has many a sorry tale to tell, suggesting the author’s experiences are far from unique.
“They do it to everyone, they just didn’t quite realize who they were doing it to this time or what would happen,’’ he heard one couple comment in a restaurant overlooking the beach at Pattya.
A few days later, at that beautiful terrace of the Shangrila Hotel in Bangkok where the author spent an afternoon celebrating what he had originally thought was the end of the book and the beginning of a new life, a professorial type at a nearby table mused for quite some time on the tastelessness of publishing The Twilight Soi. He finally shrugged and observed: “Life is a university.”
The go-go bars and their management, along with some of the networks they are associated with, are guilty for failing to take any responsibility whatsoever towards their international customers and for the money or belongings the boys often steal or trick from tourists.
And while one might think picking up a young man from an established bar would provide some guarantees, don’t bother complaining once you have been robbed. Such actions will get you nowhere. The bars take their commissions without taking any responsibility for the actions of the young men whose services they sell.
In Aek’s case the X-Size Bar which so glowingly recommended him as a decent, honest boy, made no reparation for the blatant deceit, repeated stealing, dirty tricks, abuse, slander and vilification perpetrated against the author; and no apology whatsoever for the repeated death threats delivered against him once he dared to complain.
Indeed X-Size went out their way to disparage him as a difficult customer. Any customer who has the audacity to complain is difficult. This bar should be avoided at all cost. From the author’s personal experience, any tourist entering X-Size, located in the heart of Soi Twilight, has a high chance of being robbed and when it comes to the sex you’re supposedly paying for, little chance of getting value for your money.
The industry, unused to tourists with the nerve to criticize them, ridiculed the author as “Aek’s buffalo’’ while helping to make Aek a cult hero in the nation’s gay bars, nightclubs and discotheques – and a national hero for having so successfully stolen from and deceived a foreigner.
Only in Thailand could a thieving and dishonest male prostitute whose best friend and mentor was a pedophile become a national hero.
The author’s comments on the genuine cultural phenomenon centered around the Aek and the buffalo story, with him as the demon and Aek the hero, would ultimately be bad for Thailand, its moral centre and its international image were also ridiculed with references to his own lifestyle.
Eventually he was happy enough to have made a once unknown go-go boy a national and even international figure; standing, he wasn’t quite sure for what, sexual liberation, a finger in the face of the old or for normal social conventions. Or the fact that money doesn’t buy a person, much less love.
While the object of ridicule in clubs and discotheques as a buffalo, he had never at nearly sixty expected to become a disco figure of any kind; so finally he had to overcome his embarrassment and accept that Aek had become a part of the popular culture; thanks to him.
Normally the activities of foreigners in Thailand, no matter how outlandish, are of little interest to the locals except as further demonstration of their drunken, unsophisticated, tasteless and foolhardy behavior.
The attention focused on the author, thanks to the propaganda war being waged against him by what was sometimes known as the “gay mafia”, although there was as much rivalry as cooperation between the operators, was out of all proportion to his alleged indiscretions - a liking for young men in their twenties and a tendency to get smashed at an age when most of his contemporaries were living quiet, discrete lives.
It is easy to find foreigners in many of the tourist areas of Bangkok including in Nana, Soi Cowboy and the original red light district of Patpong who are far more inebriated than the author ever was; and behaving in a far worse manner. A lot of foreigners come to Bangkok and go a bit crazy, at least for a while. You can walk down Nana, the tourist district, any night of the week and find foreigners far more messed up than him, their clothes dank with alcohol sweat as they stumbled between bars, lighting one cigarette off another. In many cases two drinking buddies would have their eyes blackened from the night before, and would struggle with their cigarette while juggling a half empty can of beer and ogling every Thai girl they passed.
In the sea-side resort of Pattaya, little more than two hours drive from Bangkok, during the high season there are reputed to be an estimated 100,000 girls working any night of the week. Even at 7 a.m. in the morning, as some drunken, ragged relic of a human deluded by alcohol into believing he is having a good time, stumbles from one of the city’s many bars, there are girls along Beach Road waiting to offer their services.
Many tourists come to Thailand for one simple reason: to party and to take advantage of the country's relaxed attitudes to prostitution and the unique physical attractiveness of its people. That he was pilloried for doing much the same at an age when he had fulfilled most of what was expected of any responsible adult, worked most of his life, brought up his children, was absurd.
The propriety or otherwise of his private life would have been little known if not for the the grotesque invasions of his privacy and the propagandizing efforts of Bangkok’s mafia and their willing media cohorts. Part of this propaganda was propelled by the spy cameras Aek installed in his computer and later he realized were placed throughout the house, even in his bedroom and bathroom.
“You should see what he looks like with his shirt off,’’ was one comment he would sometimes overhear. No, he didn’t look terrific with his shirt off. Most people his age don’t, but nor do they have their physical imperfections broadcast to the world.
This level of personal invasion would never have been tolerated in his own country or in much of the rest of the world due to privacy legislation or out of simple respect. In Thailand he became public entertainment.
The official and unofficial obstructive behaviour endured by the author and the public ridiculing of him, which pandered to the nation’s worst xenophobic instincts and celebrated dishonest conduct, was scandalous but indicative of broader problems in the industry.
On the other hand the author ignored the many warnings about Thailand’s sex industry or simply