PeterRS

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.

It is certainly closed at present. Rumours about its permanent closure have been circulating on Thai gay forums since last summer. Almost all posts state that it is definitely closed and will not reopen. Others point to a Facebook notice that it is temporarily closed. The consensus certainly is that it will not reopen. It seems the Babylon premises sit on a considerably larger plot of land owned by two rich brothers. From what I have been told, one wants to sell up and move to Chiang Mai. The other wishes to stay. Whatever the truth, that land area is amongst the most expensive in Bangkok. A developer would pay a small fortune to get access to it and put up a multi storey condominium block like the 41-floor Sukhothai Residences just across the soi. When that went up about ten years or so ago, the apartments were the most expensive in the city. The Babylon premises were never intended to make a profit. Entrance fees only covered staff and upkeep costs. So it is highly unlikely that anyone would be interested in buying it and keeping it as a sauna were it to become available as a separate entity from the rest of the surrounding land. The sauna is surely doomed.

Many may not be aware that sodomy laws remain in the statute books of various countries around the world. In Asia, this is true in Singapore and Malaysia. It was also true in Brunei until the much stricter homophobic Sharia law was introduced. The reason is primarily the 1860s law enacted by the Parliament in London prohibiting sex between two men. Allegedly as originally drafted, the law had also specified two women. But when it went to Queen Victoria for ratification, she ordered the part relating to women to be struck out since she did not believe it possible that any woman could have sex without a man! With the British Empire ruling much of the globe, the law was eventually enacted in all British colonial territories. When the Brits started buggering off [sic] and leaving their colonies independent after World War 2, that law was still on the statue books in London and elsewhere. But then Britain repealed the law in 1967. Many of the newly independent countries decided just to keep the law. Singapore's Prime Minster has stated the law is necessary in his multi ethnic society, but it will not be used to take action against individuals in their own homes. But the island state has used the law to bolster its decision not to permit a Gay Pride Parade. Instead, a group of gay individuals got together to organise an annual Pink Dot assembly in a public Park which many thousands attend, many with their families. Again the government has tried to control this, first by not permitting non-Singaporeans to join and then prohibiting overseas corporations (of which there are many in Singapore) from becoming sponsors. It is perhaps ironic that the Prime Minister's nephew is openly gay and married his partner in South Africa a couple of years ago. At that year's Pink Dot celebration, the couple attended along with both sets of parents! Hong Kong used to have the same law and would regularly make sure it was used to have 2 or 3 individuals convicted and jailed for a couple of years. At that time, Hong Kong did have a register of gay men. The colony had just two gay bars. One had a set of stairs running down from the street. This was brightly illuminated because the police had set up cameras in an apartment across the road and photographed everyone who came out. The other on Kowloon had a police informant as one of the bartenders. At the end of the 1970s, the police even set up a special branch to seek out known homosexuals. As soon as this was announced, one High Court Judge quickly left Hong Kong for good. I doubt if that department and its lists still exist, though. In 1990 both China and Britain realised that Hong Kong would need to have a Bill of Rights registered with the United Nations to take effect after 1997. Both sides agreed that the anti-sodomy law would immediately be struck down.

For the life of me I totally fail to understand why groups of workers who interact with a large number of other people, often from other countries, had not been routinely tested many moons ago. After its experience with the huge cluster amongst immigrant worker dormitories just as the government was assuming it had been so effective in its covid actions, I'd have thought testing of airport workers would have been an absolute priority in Singapore. It's the same in Taiwan where authorities clearly turned a blind eye to employees of its national airline who were flying in and out of the country regularly. Come to that, Thailand cannot be let off the hook either. Although successive governments were fully aware over many, many years that the fish market in Samut Sakhon employed thousands of Burmese workers, about half illegally, yet they decided to keep turning a blind eye to the fact that many of these workers quite regularly slipped over the porous border when it should have been testing everyone. At a time when countries should have been at their most vigilant with virus variants rising rapidly, why they sat back complacently totally beats me.

Now what has one of the most popular disco numbers of the 1980s to do with Gay Icons? I wonder how many are aware that this song comes from a Broadway musical? "Chess", written by the chess-loving Tim Rice who in the 1970s had made himself a nice fortune as the lyricist for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Evita" and then later for Disney with lyrics for Elton John’s “The Lion King”, opened in London in 1984. To write the music, Rice commuted to Sweden to discuss the idea with the ABBA boys, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. They liked the idea. In the view of many, including me, the resultant music remains one of the greatest Broadway scores of all time. Sadly, though, internal Broadway feuding and international rapprochement as Gorbachev's star was rising, rendered Tim Rice's book and lyrics about a Cold War love affair set alongside a chess match between a Russian and an American all but redundant. It struggled along in London for three years but then collapsed spectacularly on Broadway with a loss of over US$6 million. Some years later Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Aspects of Love", his first post-"Phantom" musical, lost $8 million after it too died on Broadway, thus becoming Broadway's most expensive flop up to that time. This was eclipsed by the massive $60 million loss when “Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark” also collapsed in 2017. Broadway can be an unforgiving beast. Included in the original London cast of “Chess” were Elaine Paige (Grizabella in the original “CATS”) and actor/singer Murray Head who had featured in the first full mouth-to-mouth on-screen kiss with actor Peter Finch in John Schlesinger’s 1971 movie “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.” If Broadway IS New York, now it also belongs to the world. Musicals had always toured internationally, mostly in locally produced versions often quite far from the Broadway originals. When Andrew Lloyd Webber teamed up with the struggling gay London producer, Cameron Macintosh, though, a new idea was born: cloning musicals. Macintosh realized that audiences in Sydney, Berlin and Tokyo not only wanted to see a hit show, they wanted to see exactly the same show as audiences in London and New York. Thus the musicals' franchise was born. The result: everyone involved in their shows - "CATS" and "Phantom of the Opera" (and let's not forget that Cameron had also produced on his own two other blockbusters, "Les Misérables" and "Miss Saigon") - started achieving profits earlier producers could not even dream about. A few years ago Forbes Magazine estimated Macintosh’s wealth at over US$1 billion! As the relatively recent book "Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway" by Michael Riedel illustrates, the relationships between theatre owners, producers, directors, PR teams, performers and critics have usually contained far more drama offstage than on. Perhaps less so in its beginnings during the Great Depression when all audiences wanted were bright lights, glitz, glamour, chorus girls - and more chorus girls! Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II changed all that. When the curtain went up on their first collaboration "Oklahoma" in 1943, the audience literally gasped, for this show and four others that followed from the same team transformed the musicals' genre from musical comedy to serious musical theatre, with real story lines and real people living all but real lives. A string of great musicals followed, starting with "West Side Story" by the gay quartet of Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein's gorgeous music, the book by Arthur Laurents and stunning choreography by Jerome Robbins. Others included "My Fair Lady" and "Fiddler on the Roof". Thereafter the Dance Musical came to the fore with the brilliant - and gay - Michael Bennett conceiving and directing "A Chorus Line" and David Merrick producing "42nd Street". But soon Broadway itself was threatened with one of the world’s mega-disasters. The sexuality of those on Broadway has always been the stuff of gossip. The distinguished British actress, the late Dame Peggy Ashcroft once said, "Of course I knew Laurence Olivier and Danny Kaye were having a long-term affair. So did all of London. So did their wives. Why is America always the last to know?" Perhaps it's the Puritan streak in America that encourages people to look the other way. Those who faced up to reality knew full well that Broadway and the Broadway musical had always relied on gay men, gay girls and a few theatres-full of bisexual men and women for its success, and the toll of those who died in the early years of AIDS was horrifically high. It was not just the male dancers and the dozens of boys in the chorus who were dying by the week. Directors Michael Bennett ("A Chorus Line”), Tony Richardson, Joe Layton ("Barnum"), song writer Peter Allen, Larry Kert who played Tony in the original "West Side Story" and the lead in Stephen Sondheim’s “Company”, lyricist Howard Ashman, choreographer Michael Shawn, publicist Frank Nathan - the obituaries just went on and on. In memory of all those who died, I would like to pay my tribute by including here the Anthem from "Chess", with its beautiful melody sung fabulously by the Swedish singer Tommy Körberg whom I saw in the original London production. Benny's smile at the end says it all! But after all the crying and all the funerals, the Broadway musical picked itself up. To this day it continues to present some of the finest entertainment in the world. More recent shows are again the talk of the town – “The Lion King”, “Wicked”, “Hamilton” and others along with revivals like “Cabaret” at Studio 54 which I saw some years ago with the androgynous Alan Cumming superb as the Master of Ceremonies. Before the pandemic, 70% of all New York visitors attended a Broadway show. That equates to more than forty million seats sold - just to tourists! So I salute Broadway and its musicals as my final Gay Icon. Of course there are dozens more. But I wanted to keep the list relatively small. Some have said I should have included Liberace. He was indeed very gay and very much an icon. But was he not more of an icon for the middle-aged ladies who attended his Las Vegas extravaganzas and made him the highest earning artist in the world? I could certainly have added living icons like Sir Ian McKellan and Bette Midler. Since coming out at the age of 49, Sir Ian has been a champion for gay rights. I love the true story of his visit to Singapore in 2007 to perform "King Lear". Taking part in a live morning radio show, he was asked what he would like to see in Singapore, "Can you recommend a nice gay bar?" he quipped. The programme controller had a fit and pulled the plug on the rest of interview. The ‘Divine’ Ms. Midler owes much of her fame to gay audiences. After all, her career more or less began when she sang regularly at the famous Continental Baths, New York’s huge gay sauna, often accompanied by the young Barry Manilow on the piano. But they are still alive, thank goodness, and so do not fit with a series looking to the past. Perhaps another reader will contribute

I echo Ruthrieston's comments, although I live in Bangkok and not Pattaya. On Saturday I went to a friend's and we ordered in a very nice Italian dinner from a nearby restaurant. Soon after 9:00 pm I left for my apartment. In a district where taxis can usually be picked up until at least midnight, there was not one to be seen. I ended up walking much of the way home until I gave up when a motorcy suddenly appeared.