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From Anthem Press A Longitudinal Study of Young, Rural, Same-Sex-Attracted Men Coming of Age By Jan W. de Lind van Wijngaarden Anthem Studies in Sexuality, Gender and Culture This book presents the very first analysis of male homosexuality in modern rural Thailand that is based on sociological/anthropological research directly with 25 young same-sex attracted men. It explores changes in the way men view and describe their sexuality over time by interviewing them three times over a period of around 18 months. The men are followed during an important transition in their lives: the end of their high school years and the end (in most cases) of their life as a child with parents or extended family at a rural home. Nearly all decided to move to a city to continue their education or to find work. Some also had stints with sex work in one of Thailand’s well-known centers for prostitution. For nearly all men, this transition brought them into contact with new ideas about gender and sexuality, and many experienced an abrupt increase in their opportunities to have sex, leading to a readjustment of their moral universes. The young men in the study were still in the process of figuring out who they were/wanted to be, and many contradictions emerged in their narratives over the period of data collection. These contradictions, and the way they were resolved, presented an opportunity to critically explore the way the social structures in which these young men operate influence the way they think and explain their own sexual/gendered selves, and how changes in these social structures affect their sense of self. A number of explanatory ‘lenses’ are used in the different book chapters that zoom in on different structuring/explanatory frameworks for making sense of gender and sexuality in Thai cultural contexts, as used and applied by the study participants. The first is Buddhism. Buddhist beliefs and traditional ideas about karma, fate, hierarchy, family, masculinity and femininity played important roles in the young men’s childhood understandings about homosexuality and same-sex relations– especially in terms of their cause and morality. The second lens for understanding male homosexuality in Thailand is gender, where men are divided into feminine-oriented bottoms and masculine-oriented tops. A third lens is modernity/the desire to develop and grow, closely linked to Thailand’s globalizing economy and the increasing role of the Internet and social media. The Internet functioned as an important ‘playground’, a platform for trying-out different presentations of the self via Facebook and chat applications – and in many men this resulted in a rejection of their previous self-presentation as effeminate, which they gradually started to associate with being backwards, rural and ‘traditional’. The fourth lens is related to economy. Many of the young men in the study searched for romantic relationships based on complementarity and were looking for boyfriends who had something they did not have—money, a better position in society, or ‘wisdom’/the ability to guide. Most of the more effeminate men saw their sexuality as valuable, and several of the study participants described in this book – especially those coming from poor families – engaged in sex work and used their youth and beauty to find a wealthy long-term partner, in the hope of lifting their families out of poverty, towards a more prosperous future. The fifth lens is nationalism, or more specifically the concept of ‘being a good Thai’; gradually the young men learned that the Thai sense of self and the importance of performing one’s role as a ‘good’ son in public can be used as a strategy to cover-up private behaviors and desires. The sixth and final lens is family. Being ‘good’, respecting elders and elder siblings, financially supporting (grand-)parents, having good manners, meaning ‘acting appropriately in time and space’, gave the young men a way to retain the respect and support of elders and seniors, and determined how they dealt with (non-)disclosure of their sexuality to their families and others and explained their ability and desire to remain part of the mainstream of society. In the final chapter, a discussion about three critical concerns pertaining the health and wellbeing of same-sex attracted Thai men are discussed in the light of this proposed model: the ongoing HIV epidemic, mental health and LGBTI rights. Overall, this book presents significant new insights about the Thai sex/gender system, particularly on how it is affected by processes of globalization and the ascent of the Internet and mobile phones as tools for dating and romance. https://anthempress.com/sociology/books/male-homosexuality-in-21st-century-thailand-pdf

I thought we'd put to bed the notion that otherwise straight men aren't interested in sex with gay men. There are many guys on the board who have a preference for straights--regardless of their nationality. Most of the guys who work the bars and massage shops in Bangkok are straight. That they can service both men and women adds to their utility and--for many admirers--their attractiveness.

what about all those temples, palaces and blue waters of Chao Praya river not to mention ruins of soi Twilight ?

From Bangkok Post Support for mid-Oct launch grows with fall in infections, jabs boost When Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha announced on June 16 that the country was gearing up for reopening in 120 days, many wondered if he had set himself an unattainable goal. The country was languishing in the throes of the Covid-19 crisis and prognoses about the pandemic were not encouraging. The daily caseload was spiking at a time when the government had fumbled over vaccine procurement as it tried to figure out when the next batch of vaccines would come from. It is now half-way through the 120-day deadline that falls in mid-October. Daily infections which peaked at more than 23,000 have retreated to around 18,000 in recent days. More vaccines have arrived with more than 120 million doses promised by the government by the end of the year. The government is pinning its hopes on the success of the tourism sandbox programme underway in Phuket and Samui to lure back overseas visitors. At the half-way mark to the government's mid-October reopening promise, politicians and stakeholders interviewed by the Bangkok Post cautiously agreed the deadline must be honoured as the economy cannot stay shut any longer. The economy has been in free-fall for long enough as a result of intermittent lockdowns and public health restrictions. It must be allowed room to breathe come the middle of October, said Kla Party secretary-general Atavit Suwannapakdee. He predicted the pandemic will still be lingering in October although reopening the country should be the rule, not an exception. "We've reached a point where we can't keep shutting our door. We must also face the fact the government's centralised approach to handling the pandemic is out of place," he said. "The reopening plan must go ahead. If we delay it, what the country has planned will be ruined and the country as a whole will lose its credibility," Mr Atavit added. The government's fight against the pandemic has been less than successful with the latest lockdown and restrictions proving an exercise in futility to contain the virus. "Many won't die from the disease but from being unable to make a living," he said. The chance of the country getting back to business in October depends on its "saviour", the vaccine. Continues at https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/special-reports/2172887/ready-to-reopen-safely

I said it 127 times here but only 11 this year so I say it again in defense of straights. They know they need to try harder and almost universally they do. As a bonus they tend to be more straightforward with limitations they may have. like : "you sleep with me ? " Ok, I fuck you but you no fuck me" , "in the evening, but what about morning ? "ha, ha , ha , lets go"

Alitalia has been in its death throes for many years and its demise is hardly a surprise. The Italian government tried to keep it alive without success. I believe Delta and Easyjet had expressed interest in taking it over a few years ago. But the talks came to nothing. I only once did a long haul on Alitalia and a few inter-Europe flights. For my money it served the best coffee in the air, but not much else! Reminds me a little of the Belgian airline SABENA which went bankrupt in 2001. Its acronym amongst frequent travellers was Such A Bloody Experience, Never Again!

Travel fund is quite healthy but I would rather save as much of that for the fun times to come after I get there, fares should come back closer to normal by the time I go back. From Australia we still need a valid reason to travel overseas, unfortunately 2 weeks of sex with some smoking hot Thai guys is not reason enough for our government 😉

Im on the same boat, plus i need my country to also allow us to travel. Otherwise, its bureaucratic headache both ways.

Knowing her as I do and her being such a fucking idiot usually I'm guessing she was more thinking along the lines of 'thyme, oregano and perhaps a little basil" thrown in for good measure just. I doubt she even had the wit to read any of the online nonsense and probably just came up with that bright idea all on her own !

No worries, its the same damn crowd anyway. Lol

At least she came to her sense and still goes to the hospital for treatment. Clearly her natural method didnt work to ward off covid. The "natural" things that ive heard here includes charcoal, cloves, vitamin C, papaya leaves. Ivermectin while gaining traction here as well, is not natural.

more of less like Troy

good for you, finally you guys have taste of how life was in former Eastern block and still is for North Koreans.

Assuming you're double jabbed take care and enjoy your dat at Manchester, I've been several years in a row but gave it a miss this year as I CBA with the flights and it IS always jam packed with people and there would be trouble enforcing any form of social distancing even if they wanted to I think, especially later in the day when everyone's half cut. If not double jabbed personally I wouldn't be going anywhere near it for the above reason. I've four friends who all tested positive after attending a Tom Jones outdoor concert here ( yes I know I cant think what possessed them to go either, I think it was just more a case of going SOMEWHERE for a night out". The two of the unjabbed friends ended up in hospital straight after it ( one of them had it seems decided that she intended to ward off Covid in her own unique way using natural remedies and herbs it seems !! ). The other two jabbed friends still got it but with very much less drama and no need for medical intervention other than paracetemol thankfully. My point being, even at an outdoor event the four of them DID still pick up Covid. Away from Covid I see there have been several protests this year re the management and "goals' of the Manchester Pride committee after they stopped giving out free comdoms and things, with the usual ( probably correct) cries that they're forgetting what PRIDE was MEANT to be all about and allowing it to become far to commercial etc, so Im sure that that's a debate that's going to run and run this year now perhaps.

I did a search just now and flight price is still reasonable for me. Not as cheap but standard price when there is no promotion or sale.

after such long no-travel period your travel fund should be ballooning by now, no?

Not only is it a bureaucratic nightmare for me to travel (both ways) but the fares are ridiculous, just as an example I looked on google for a two week trip November 8th to 22nd and there is no way in hell would I pay $5400 for an economy return flight to Bangkok (that was the cheapest flight that came up). It would have been on Singapore airlines and Scoot and 11hrs 50mins via Singapore (about 4hrs in transit), previously I would fly direct to Bangkok on Thai airways (6hrs 50mins) and pay about $1000. I also searched Skyscanner and Flight centre and they say there are no flights listed for the above dates. Think I'll wait until things settle.

A propos the amusing, and sadly true, anecdote in @JKane's post above about Ronald Reagan whose determination not to acknowledge HIV-AIDS as the massive health disaster all his medical advisers tried to drum into him for years and who did not even mention the illness until his old gay pal Rock Hudson died, had he acted much earlier perhaps there would now be a vaccine. Perhaps. too. millions need not have died. Perhaps, too, the world could have saved trillions of $$ spent to date on HIV-AIDS programmes and research. It always amazes me that American 'freedoms' mean that a very large number of people claim they have the right to decide whether they are vaccinated or not. If the country was at war, those freedoms would be quite seriously and legally curtailed. With most of the anti-vexers being Trump supporters and with Trump having told Bob Woodward that covid is a "war", one wonders why such anti-social people are allowed to get away with the stupid freedom argument at this time. It's almost as though they are perfectly happy to be at war with their fellow citizens whom they could infect and whose hospitals are once again chock full of covid cases. Less than 2,500 Americans have died in 20 years of war in far off Afghanistan. Nearly 640,000 have died at home of covid. The cost of the war in Afghanistan is acknowledged at just under US$1 trillion. The losses amounting from covid so far - $16 trillion. Priorities seem amazingly twisted.

if only thing required will be proof of vaccination and perhaps pre-departure test, I'll go. Any certificates of entry , quarantines and other bureaucratic nonsenses, sorry , no

Same here. But only if the venues open also. If I go to Thailand and I can’t get massages, can’t visit bars, can’t see beautiful boys dancing in show bars, it is pointless. Certainly if also most boys still are in their home province. For me more needs to happen, then Thailand just be reachable again via plane.

With some drop-dead gorgeous guys to rival any at Lagoa, to sketchy guys with humongous circus-worthy cocks, to a drop-dead gorgeous black guy with a 10-incher - I can always have the memories,

Sure it wasn't that the Vietnamese guys wouldn't take you as a client again and tossed you out?

My opinion about less and less real Thai boys working in either bars or massage is more the declining nr of such guys-TH is ageing rapidly. Plus the generally rising level of education among the fewer and fewer who become adult so more jobs open up for them. So thats progress. But many of the Burmese and Khmer taking over do a job quite well. However, my favourite msg place tried out some VNese and after too many complaints of customers simply threw them out and wont take any again.

Just for the information of the perplexed, Micheál Martin is the Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister)

The above quote from Jeff Tiedrich is a reminder of one of the more depressing aspects of the Kabul fiasco. It has shown that public discourse in America seem so degraded after Trump that many Democrats are incapable of admitting that Biden does deserve some criticism for the disastrous way the evacuation is gone, and lash out in response with basically say nothing more than “Who cares, he is better than Trump at least”. Now, it goes without saying, any Republican politicians who were were backing Trump’s policy last year (as they all were) to abruptly cut and run from Afghanistan have absolutely no standing to criticise Biden in any way. However, from I’ve seen of America, there is a lot of criticism coming from mainstream journalists and retired veterans regarding the way the evacuation has been handled, and a lot of Democrats seem to be responding by treating those people as if they were Mitch McConnell. I think that ten years ago of the Democratic partisans would have been better able to handle criticism of a Democratic president. In fact I would actually blame Trump for a lot of degradation in public life that has happened and has ended up in with Democrats telling nonpartisan experts to “kindly sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up” when independent voices point out problems (now, in fairness Mr. Tiedrich may have been responding to a Republican yuck instead of a credible critic in the above, I have not followed the thread - however, the above tweet reflects a lot of the sort of thing that Democratic hacks are coming out with). And I speak as someone who thinks America should have been out of Afghanistan a decade ago. I must say I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to be Irish rather than British over the last few weeks, witnessing how little the American defence establishment seems to care what the British or any other of their Allies think of the withdrawal. Here in Ireland we are very aware that the American establishment hardly knows the name of Micheál Martin, and we are happy with that.

I try to be optimistic and so am heartened that the infection rate has stopped rising and that vaccinations are increasing. As for the resilient Thai population, I recall the sight of shop-keepers in Pattaya Tai standing knee-deep in flood water to continue their selling; I suspect that the moment restrictions are lifted we will see a similar determination to resume business. And to put my money in the till.

Another perceptive article in today's Guardian newspaper. It still leads with the chaos and catastrophe of the US and NATO powers departure from Afghanistan prompted by Biden's screwing up by rushing out so disastrously. But this focuses much more on those warmongers and especially the media which gloried in the invasions of Afghanistan and also of Iraq. Why the media? "Because to acknowledge the mistakes of the men who prosecuted this war would be to expose the media’s role in facilitating it." Excerpts from an article in The Guardian 26 August - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/25/blame-afghanistan-war-media-intervention Any fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history.” . . . Everyone I know in the US and the UK who was attacked in the media for opposing the war received death threats. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress who voted against granting the Bush government an open licence to use military force, needed round-the-clock bodyguards. Amid this McCarthyite fervour, peace campaigners such as Women in Black were listed as “potential terrorists” by the FBI. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to censor Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets that consistently challenged the rush to war. After he failed, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul. The broadcast media were almost exclusively reserved for those who supported the adventure. The same thing happened before and during the invasion of Iraq, when the war’s opponents received only 2% of BBC airtime on the subject. Attempts to challenge the lies that justified the invasion – such as Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed refusal to negotiate – were drowned in a surge of patriotic excitement. So why is so much of the media so bloodthirsty? . . . An obvious answer is the old adage that “if it bleeds it leads”, so there’s an inbuilt demand for blood . . . Another factor in the UK is a continued failure to come to terms with our colonial history. For centuries the interests of the nation have been conflated with the interests of the rich, while the interests of the rich depended to a remarkable degree on colonial loot and the military adventures that supplied it. Supporting overseas wars, however disastrous, became a patriotic duty. For all the current breastbeating about the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, nothing has been learned. The media still regale us with comforting lies about the war and occupation. They airbrush the drone strikes in which civilians were massacred and the corruption permitted and encouraged by the occupying forces. They seek to retrofit justifications to the decision to go to war, chief among them securing the rights of women. But this issue, crucial as it was and remains, didn’t feature among the original war aims. Nor, for that matter, did overthrowing the Taliban. Bush’s presidency was secured, and his wars promoted, by American ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists who had more in common with the Taliban than with the brave women seeking liberation. In 2001, the newspapers now backcasting themselves as champions of human rights mocked and impeded women at every opportunity . . . You can get away with a lot in the media, but not, in most outlets, with opposing a war waged by your own nation – unless your reasons are solely practical. If your motives are humanitarian, you are marked from that point on as a fanatic. Those who make their arguments with bombs and missiles are “moderates” and “centrists”; those who oppose them with words are “extremists”. The inconvenient fact that the “extremists” were right and the “centrists” were wrong is today being strenuously forgotten.

This is becoming depressing, if true. Just been looking up the Prince massage in Bangkok and it appears another quality massage spa has closed permanently (according to Google search), that's 3 of my favourites gone now. I can understand these things happening because of covid but I'm really starting to wonder just what if any gay massage businesses will survive and what things will be like on the other side of the pandemic. Truly hoping this thing is over or under control sooner rather than later and that these businesses can start back up again.