PeterRS

I have made a post on the "GayThailand is now GayGuides.com" thread which should have been made here. Apologies. Purely for ease of reading, I repost here. I hope the moderator can delete the same one on the other thread. Thank you. There have been comments on the forum that there are now fewer posts here to keep members interested. The absence of trip reports (for obvious reasons) and the withdrawal of the photos thread (also for reasons which to many are logical) are two that have been expressed. I am sure there are more. We live in horribly difficult times and the chances that they will return to anything like normal are very uncertain. Even if they do, though, in gay Thailand we will not just be in a new normal we will be in the new normal that has been creeping up on us with increasing rapidity for well over a decade. Some will say that should be two decades pointing to the huge difference in the gay scene before the millennium compared to just a year ago. As most of us know and acknowledge the gay scene in some key cities in Thailand is dying. In my view it is unlikely to be revived. The scene in Phuket is near death. The scene in Chiang Mai has seen a huge number of closures in recent years. There is little left. In Pattaya Sunee Plaza and Boyztown are a desperate shadow of what they once were and may never recover. Jomtien seems alive and well but without any gay gogo bars and a dwindling number of Thai boys in favour of boys from neighbouring countries. Even the numbers who contribute to this forum has dropped over the years from a regular posting membership of 40, 50 or more to - how many now? A dozen or so? The numbers of gay western and Australasian tourists has been going down for years. Those who do visit are ageing faster than they can be replaced by younger guys. I suspect airfares may be at promotional rates once international flights restart. But those rates absolutely have to rise significantly after that short initial period. The airlines have unbelievable debts and these have to be repaid. Many gay venues will die without the Chinese who will surely come in ever increasing numbers in the new normal. They will still be joined by other short haul north east and south east Asians. But their interests have always seemed more in massage spas and the Asian for Asian saunas. The outlook for gogo bars seems bleak. None of the above has not been expressed before, both here and elsewhere. The point of raising it again concerns the direction of this forum. I can understand that commercial reasons may have prompted the amalgamation. Until this morning I had never visited the boytoy site but I believe the vast majority of its membership is in the USA. What i find strange is that its home page has nothing about threads on Europe, South and Central America. All I see is a section on General Chat and another on Far Far Away. The latter has only two sub threads - Gay Asia and Gay Africa. Gay Asia threads are already mostly about Thailand - and incidentally contain one that has a post that would certainly contravene the lese majeste act. I hope threads on the boytoy site are gone through with a fine tooth comb before the merger or we might find this site disappears altogether. Reading more posts, I note one poster querying the disappearance of the sections on Europe, Central and South America. I wonder why since this was to be a key factor in the merger. But the first post I read from I presume the owner/moderator states "the site is slow at times". I look further down and see a post "This small horny community ..." Yet more posts vigorously lament the taking down of the porn threads. One suggests that the boytoy site will merely become one for those interested in overseas travel. I had no idea boytoy was a small site. What all this preamble leads up to is this. As I read it (maybe incorrectly), there are two sites with dwindling memberships joining forces. One is based in the USA (I think). I expect many of its posters do vacation in the sex districts in Central and South America. Given the much higher cost of travelling to Asia, how many will actually even consider making the trip, I wonder? They may read the forums here but will they fill the gap in the dwindling gay western tourism numbers? Something tells me the answer is no. Then once the sites are merged, if that happens in the near future, all the new readers will be able to see are the doom and gloom threads here about the dwindling sex scene in Thailand (sorry, I know this post will not help). And all the closures. And the Chinese taking over. Is that going to be much incentive to travel here or even read about Thailand? I don't really want answers to my questions. I merely want to raise them, possibly for discussion. Please shoot me down.

What a fickle fable! An official request goes to the UAE and no reply is received? Who on this good earth actually believes that? As for the Red Notice, Interpol's own website states there are currently 62,000 valid Red Notices of which only 7,484 have been made public. So what the Thai Police are moaning about makes about as much sense as their stated intention all those years ago that this murderer would be brought to justice. Being the heir to one of the richest fortunes in the Kingdom, the police in Thailand will no doubt be receiving plenty of well stuffed envelopes to ensure he is never discovered.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Neil Sheehan has died at the age of 84. He is perhaps best known for having told the story of The Pentagon Papers for The New York Times. These revealed the highly secret US history of decision making in the dreadful Vietnam War. They illustrated the decisions and strategies adopted by successive US administrations which substantially increased the war effort even as their own serious doubts about the possibility of success rapidly diminished. There is an utterly fascinating long article in The New York Times about the cloak and dagger story of how he obtained the Papers. He revealed all in a 4-hour 2015 interview which was embargoed until after his death. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/now-it-can-be-told-how-neil-sheehan-got-the-pentagon-papers.html The NYT has a firewall, but by using google and his name you can access it. As a war correspondent in the early days of the Vietnam War, he was fascinated by this first war where "people were dying for nothing". This led him to investigate the War in far greater detail. The result was "A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam". This took him 15 years to write and won him the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. He decided to write about the war focussing on one charismatic lieutenant colonel. Vann was very confident the war could be won. Former Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience in 2017 that he never understood the country's anger against the war until he read "A Bright Sining Lie" which showed him that all up the chain of command "people were just putting in gobbledygook information, and lives were being lost based on those lies and those distortions." But Kerry was a bit late. He should have read former Secretary of Defence Bob McNamara's mea culpa in his 1995 book "in Retrospect" where he writes, "We in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation. We made our decisions in the light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong." "A Bright Shining Lie" is a wonderfully written expose that should serve as a lesson for future governments considering war to obtain its goals.

Can any of us forget when we watched our first episode of the TV series "Queer as Folk"? It didn't matter if it was the UK original series or the US series. I can remember sitting in the living room of a friend in England's Lake District. We'd both been out to the pub and were a little drunk. Then he said I had to see the first episode he'd recorded. So well after midnight with yet more beer I watched in disbelief that this series about gay men, including one very young, with an extremely graphic visualisation of gay sex had been shown on British terrestrial television. I later bought vdo of the two series. Then later in Bangkok I found the American series in a vdo store in MBK. The creator of the series, Russell T. Davies, is one of Britain's most acclaimed gay screenwriters. Even he was surprised at the show's success. But did you ever think about something? The acronyms HIV and AIDS are never uttered once in the series even though a character with HIV appears briefly. Davies finally came to the realisation that he could no longer avoid writing about HIV and the pandemic which started as he was starting his sexual life. Many of his friends and lovers who died in the 1980s were said to have died of pneumonia or cancer. AIDS was rarely mentioned. Even today stigma still exists, often fuelled by ignorance and fear. "It's A Sin" is Davies' new TV series which has AIDS at the centre of the drama. It will be aired in the UK on Channel 4 in late January. Hopefully it may soon become available on youtube or other channels. There is an excellent article about Davies and his life in today's Guardian. It starts like this - https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2021/jan/03/russell-t-davies-i-looked-away-for-years-finally-i-have-put-aids-at-the-centre-of-a-drama

From the above I assume the Club area could include the type of photos that I and others have been posting. But I will wait to see the new rules.

Pesonally I dread the thought of having to wade through pics of western guys in order to get a few of cute Asians . Assuming photos meet the criteria, can there be two - one Asian, one western? Or even a third if there are those interested in, say, guys from the indian sub-continent? How is anyone supposed to know if photos uploaded to the internet are in copyright or not? E.g. many of the photos I have uploaded originate from a Taiwanese company with many different photo sites including BlueMen, Bliuephoto and Whosemen. It posts some of the photos on its own sites as teasers. The others have come mostly from another different site. I have seen many photo sites headed by a note that if any photographs are in copyright, the owner just needs to notify the gay website owner and the photos will be taken down. Is that not sufficient? Your comments re regulations for photos threads seems similar to this present site. But when you say that no nudity will be allowed and no "ass shots", does that mean photos of a bare ass (but not specific detail) are now out?

I agree 99% with williewillie. But it is perfectly clear the Thai government dropped the ball big time with all the foreign and illegal workers at the fish market. After the April lockdown and the gradual easing, did absolutely no one look at what happened in Singapore with migrant workers? I find this impossible to believe, given that numbers of infections are reported daily. After Singapore was thought to have effectively controlled the number of infections, in May an explosion of infections was discovered amongst migrant workers. Treated very much like fifth class citizens, these workers mostly from India and Bangladesh receive minimum wages, live in packed dormitories one on top of the other and are taken to and from work in packed buses. As the government had previously been warned, they were a huge cluster waiting to happen. Then happen it did. 157,000 testing positive out of a workforce of around 300,000. It is not as though successive governments have been ignorant about the number of migrant workers at the Samui Sakhon fish market and the fishing industry in general. For decades each government has said it would do something to stop the illegal practices and clean up all the corruption. Each government has done precisely nothing. Once again endemic corruption rules the day. By turning a blind eye to the possibility of a major cluster, the government has seen its hopes of slowly opening up the country collapse. Yes, it did an extremely good job. But how good is good if all that good work is undone because it failed to do what Taiwan has done - impose massive fines on those who break the rules? In my view the excuse that TIT is more than pathetic when it puts lives and whole industries at risk.

Talk about utter stupidity. Taiwan had gone 253 days without any local covid19 infection. That changed when a New Zealand pilot flying for EVA idiotically broke the rules by not maintaining the mandatory home quarantine for just three days after returning from a flight. After one flight he failed to quarantine and consorted with a woman and visited some shops. Probably infected earlier in the month, he was found to be coughing on a flight from the USA back to Taipei and was not wearing a mask. In Taipei he had infected at least one woman and two other pilots. 170 people who had been in contact with the woman are now in quarantine and being monitored. The two shops known to have been visited by the pilot and the woman have been disinfected and further tracing of possible customers is taking place. If Thailand had such severe penalties, would any of those employing immigrants and illegal immigrants at the fish market have dared do so?

Sorry I omitted to mention something in my report on the air con. There is a control unit on the wall which appeared to achieve little in increasing or decreasing temperature. When you leave the room, all power goes off except the air con which reverts to 25 degrees - allegedly. It was still too cold! I switched the air con off. But it automatically switched on on leaving the room. I have only stayed in one hotel with air con but no control unit. Flying to London on Finnair, my daytime flight ex BKK was seriously delayed and I missed the last flight connection. So they put me up in the nearby Holiday inn. As I was wide awake around 8pm local time, I tried to do a little work. After 20 minutes I was feeling cold but could find no air con control. Three calls went unanswered so I made the very long walk to reception. There I was told that extensive studies had been made and 21 degrees was regarded as the ideal room temperature. For Europeans, I suggested, but I had lived in the tropics for many years and I was cold. Reluctantly they eventually brought an electric heater to the room. The shower in that hotel was as bad. Located in a corner of the bathroom it had just a curtain around it. No problem, except there was no raised part to stop water spreading outside the shower area and the floor was slightly slanted. When I opened the curtain, the entire floor was covered in water. At least they had provided a mop so we could get rid of it all ourselves!

Recently booked a week stacation to get away from Bangkok and enjoy sea breezes again. Nightlife was not on our agenda, just relaxation and a bit of swimming. Just as well as much of the area around the hotel was closed. I only selected the Hilton on the basis of a friends recommendation. Unfortunately he had not stayed there for 2 years. Quite frankly it was about the worst hotel stay I have had anywhere in Thailand. We would have been happier in a one star bungalow by the beach. I had to go somewhere as i had money in agoda as a result of an overseas stay I could not take earlier in the year. Although that was non-refundable and non-endorsable, agoda agreed to refund the amount to my account for 6 months. So I used most of it for the Hilton even though I rarely stay in Hilton hotels. The problems with this one were too many to itemise here. The main one is the hotel has undergone a renovation of many floors. I thought the renovation ghastly! The lobby itself is like something out of Star Wars. Corridor floors were of hard slate and wood. So every time a room door slammed shut, we heard it. Same with people's conversations outside the room. Same when families left early in the morning and dragged wheelie bags. Inside the room is all pure white - not even a picture to break the monotony. Light switch placings are really bad. Air conditioning allegedly set at 25 degrees but the room was close to freezing. Although the website photos show a small carpet around the bed, the floor was entirely wood. I guess another problem was that the other guests were almost exclusively Thai families with young children. I guess I should have realised that before booking. The constant running around in the floor above and the screaming by the pool and beach just got too much. I do not eat much for breakfast but my partner said the buffet was good. I was happy with my croissants and coffee. But after 5 nights we just gave up and came home. The one bright spot was an Italian restaurant just across the road run by Italians and serving genuine Italian food. We ate there several evenings and loved it.

Far point. But given the fact that the government has put Thai citizens through many hardships due to the pandemic and knowing full well the danger of migration workers who do not live in the country, why was regular testing not made mandatory for the fishing industry. That would have been simple, relatively inexpensive and would have avoided such a large outbreak.

Quite a number of Vietnamese girls in the north of the country are whisked across the border to provide wives for the millions of surplus men in China. So the oversupply of males is likely to continue.

After we have spent months congratulating the government on the way it has contained covid19, its failure over the big new cluster is extreme gross negligence. The fishing industry uses a lot of non Thais offshore who are provided by agents. That one or more of these would pass the infection to Thai fishermen and from there to a fish market was something that was absolutely bound to happen. Why did Thailand not look far more closely at the fishing industry and its practices? The country just had to look what happened on a much larger scale with migrant workers in Singapore. But now we have to question - was it in fact a larger scale? Since the virus has spread again to Bangkok and other parts of the country, how many in fact are now infected? With this debacle coming just as it looked as though tourism might slowly reopen, the government has shot itself in the foot big time.

It is hard not to remember that the reason for so many countries having laws against homosexuality in one form or another is Britain. It was the British law of 1860 something which criminalised the law against "sodomy" that was almost immediately extended to all British colonial nations. In quite a few of these nations there had been no major stigma against homosexuality up to that time. It was only a few years after Britain had started divesting itself of virtually all its colonies that the British parliament repealed that law. Of more than 50 countries in what is now the British Commonwealth, most of them former colonies, 37 still have laws that criminalise homosexuality. In some of these countries, the penalty is either death or a long prison sentence. Did the British government make any attempt to get newly independent countries to overturn that Victorian era law? Nope! Britain did not care.

I have been to three restaurants on that list. Only Le Normandie lived up to expectations. But then I was not paying so it was doubly excellent LOL Went with friends to Le Du for dinner soon after it opened. Excellent cuisine and great (quite cute) service. A bit like the late lamented Table de Tee although a notch higher in quality and price. So I took a friend for lunch a few days later. Price was good. All went well until dessert. My friend ordered just a double espresso. I chose a banana cake in some kind of sauce. The espresso arrived. We then waited and waited - and waited. After 30 minutes I was on the point of just giving up. I asked the waiter (not cute) if they had forgotten my order. No, I was told. They just make each little banana cake from scratch and it takes time. When I asked why that was not printed on the menu or why he had not told me when it was ordered, I got the usual blank face and a sort of "sorry". Never been back. Soon after it opened, I had so many friends rave about Nahm we decided to try it. Four of us were seated at a table that was too high and too wide. Big mistake Almost impossible to chat unless you leant over the table. We ordered and specifically asked that the spices be medium, definitely not hot. No problem. Every dish came as though it was on fire and we could hardly eat them. Worse, from beginning to end the waiter never once smiled. Again, never been back.

I have read quite a few novels about India but strangely never 'Kim'. Now I have just started an historical book 'The Anarchy' by William Dalrymple about the relentless rise of the East india Company. Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' may have been written many decades ago but it is a stunning four book fictional account of mostly English characters who chose to live and work in India and whose lives are turned upside down by the coming of Independence. Around the 1970s it was made into a superb 8 episode tv series under the title 'The Jewel in the Crown' which is the name of the first of the novels. It featured some fine British acting talent including Dame Peggy Ashcroft, Sir Ralph Richardson, Eric Porter, Fabia Drake and Judy Parfitt. I found the DVD set in London not so long ago. The companion novel 'Staying On' centres on an elderly couple who decide to remain and not return to the UK. The more recent 'A Suitable Boy' by Vikram Seth is a huge novel of over 1,200 pages but wonderfully written with a panoply of great characters. Set in immediate post Independence India it focuses on a mother and her search for a boy who will be a suitable marriage partner for her daughter. It has just been made either into a movie or a tv series. I fear it can never live up to the novel. In the Washington Post, Vikram Seth was compared favourably to Tolstoy. Of spy novels set in Asia, I still return to Graham Greene's 'The Quiet American' set in Vietnam around the time of Dien Bien Phu and the end of French involvement in that country. I find the quality of Greene's writing superb. And of course there is Le Carre's 'The Honororable Schoolboy' set in Hong Kong, the sixth novel featuring George Smiley.

I wholly agree about government interference. But the rice pledging scheme was a naked election gimmick to ensure the re-election of Thaksin's party,. A second gimmick also backfired in spectacular fashion - a tablet for every schoolchild,. The tablet contract was given to a Chinese company. It was unable to meet its deadlines and there was a big delay. When the first tablets eventually arrived and some actually worked, it was discovered that the kids spent all their time playing games on them. The Chinese contract was cancelled and the whole scheme bit the dust. There was a third gimmick at that election. 1.6 million new car buyers were given a special subsidy. As there was no requirement to trash older cars and no plan to build more roads, traffic gridlock naturally got a lot worse particularly in Bangkok.

I have never been to a girlie bar. I have never been attracted to go to one. I cannot see the point of a girl being naked and showing merely a crop of hair whereas a boy showing a penis and scrotum is very different and more interesting. At least there is quite a lot to see! I suppose some straight guys might equate boobs with dicks. In that case, if the girls are topless, let the boys go bottomless.

I cannot remember when i first got hooked on the writing of John Le Carre. Probably it was with his third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Le Carre described in such extraordinary detail the real world of spies compared to that of the glamorous vodka martini swilling seducer James Bond. I think I have read all his books since then, although one of his last A legacy of Spies remains to be opened on my Kindle. Other spy and thriller writers have published occasional best sellers that have fascinated me. Le Carre was always different. His elegant prose, the way he slowly drew you into each novel with swiftly switching locations and gradually fieshed out characters made them consistently grip me in a way no other writer in that genre has. John Le Carre was the pseudonym for David Cornwell. A very private man, he refused many honours offered by the British government, including a knighthood. Le Carre has died at the age of 89.

Lest we forget, Thai rice exports suffered massively thanks to Thaksin sisters rice pledging scheme that set the price of rice bought by the government far too high. After decades, that allowed India, Vietnam and others to increase their shares of the international market and dethrone Thailand from the No. 1 spot. An official Inquiry found it also lost the Thai government billions of $$.

Thaksins Social Order Campaigns certainly started the downward trend. The zoning of entertainment districts and the earlier closing times brought criticism even from the General Manager of the famed Mandarin Oriental Hotel who tried to remind the government that tourists were not interested in visiting a city that closed soon after midnight. While this forum focuses more on gogo bars, most did survive the Campaigns, but many of the major dance clubs collapsed. The massive Ministry of Sound, Tantra, Mystique, 87 and the Bed Supper Club are just some of many that died. Investors have no interest in putting up cash for clubs that have to close early. Even in staid old Singapore, the 30 year old Zouk Bar remains one of Asia's great clubs and is open till 4:00 am at weekends. But it was not just the elites that were pleased with the Social Order Campaigns (although their children were not). Several countrywide polls showed that they were popular throughout the nation. For a time the arch religious bigot Interior Minister Purachai was even more popular than Thaksin. Given that, it is hard for expats and tourists to complain and have any effect.

I would just keep breathing. For years the Thai elite has been determined that the country get rid of its sex tourist image. Slowly but surely that has been happening and the pandemic has been the icing on their cake. I see nothing that will change it. The saunas and the massage spas will likely continue, as will the Thai only venues that are dotted around the country where farang can never enter. I cannot see the gogo bars continuing in the medium term.

Back to the main topic. I noticed two days ago that votes are still being counted in the US election. Still being counted? Yup! STILL. For an election that took place nearly 5 weeks ago, I find that absolutely unbelievable. It not only illustrates a desperately out of date electoral system, it actually aids the lying shenanigans of Trump and his miserable bunch of cohorts. Is is surprising that many in the USA don't believe that the counted votes are accurate? That Biden's lead over Trump is now more than 7 million votes is not the issue. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/12/04/politics/biden-popular-vote-margin-7-million/index.html

Nor should you. Trump is hardly the first idiot to reach high office. The world has a great deal for which to be thankful to America. But like all countries - all - it has had its less good moments and its faults. I on the other hand will rail against Boris Johnson to any who might listen (seemingly not many!). Its hard to find words for his utter failure with the pandemic and the deaths of so many. Just saying other countries are as bad doesn't cut it with me. A dear friend of some decades died of covid 19 last week. I will never forgive Johnson for that. But in my earlier posts referring to freedoms, I was not specifically referring to politics. I know it is not readers view and I respect his. But I absolutely believe that unfettered freedom of speech is no longer an option in these days and times. I go back to my earlier point that almost the entire world now lives in groups and societies. These only work within a framework of rules. Break the rules and there are penalties. Society cannot work without that. If we are in a pub and I call someone a pathetic moron, I would expect either his drink to be thrown at me or a punch in the face. Freedoms have consequences. Yet if I do that on the internet and social media, I get away with it scot free. Those contributing to this forum are mostly from an older pre-internet age. Youngsters nowadays build their lives around social media. They can mostly say exactly what they like without consequence. If their correspondent calls them out, they can just block him. Social interaction between people has changed a great deal and there will no doubt be further changes. If anyone wants unrestricted freedoms, their only option to my mind is to isolate them in the depths of a thick forest where they are totally on their own. But I absolutely take on board that finding a workable and acceptable middle ground between near total freedom of speech and the curtailed freedoms of an increasing number of countries is close to impossible. I do think though we have to try. I could never give up my freedom to think what i wish. Even so I am happy in quite a number of cases and events to self-censor myself. But I know that there is an increasing number for which this form of self-censorship is just that - censorship and to them that is unacceptable.

Does anyone know if Vietnam has anything like a retirement visa? My partner and I visited central Vietnam early last year just before both countries closed down. We loved it. Even though settled in Bangkok we could see retirement in that part of Vietnam as desirable. We saw lots of recently built condo blocks close to those wonderful beaches and really enjoyed some of the small towns. No idea if there is any gay life but that's not what we were looking for. No doubt the apps will be active around the larger towns like Danang.