PeterRS

I wish I could believe you. But when you come from the 2nd most wealthy family in this country with a net worth according to Forbes magazine of US$26.4 billion, you can buy your way out of almost any kind of trouble. As long as corruption remains endemic in the country and there is no change to the status quo, the mega-rich will never need to repay anythiing. This is Thailand!

Very true - and very sad. He had posted on this Board about his cancer which he had had treated in the King Chulalongkorn public hospital near Lumphini Park. He raved about the treatment he received and said it was a small fraction of what he would have had to pay in the private hospitals. Unfortunately he either had no medical insurance or very little. So when the cancer returned he had no money for more treatment. I recall he wrote he stayed with friends in Bangkok who let him sleep on their sofa. And then he passed away. No matter what your feelings about him, it was a very sad way to die. It also brought back on to the forum the absolute necessity of members who live in Thailand having some form of insurance to cover costly on-going medical treatment.

No. I am saying I cannot understand - nor accept - that the highest court in any land has a right effectively to overturn a long standing law in a city and as a result insist that citizens be given the right to carry hidden weapons. From what we have read over the last years, it is obvious that in the USA criminal histories are not always checked. And what about mental history? The right wing always blames the mental health issue. How is that to be checked? Only for those who have visited a psychiatrist? The mental health issue is to all intents and purposes a red herring. The checks and balances clearly do not work.

With respect I think your comment is not wholly accurate. Even in straight relationships, the man will often be the main breadwinner and provide for his wife/family. Many gay relationships with younger Thais may not include cash (I can think of several long term relationships where the Thais actually make more in good jobs than their farang partners) but will include payment for things like dinners and overseas holidays. My partner will very occasionally get a small amount of cash for a special purchase. Otherwise, we take care of our own expenses other than those I have listed above. I wonder if it is because most of those who read this site look for or are in relationships with commercial boys that there is this belief that every relationship will involve the transfer of regular amounts of cash. There are many which do not. I realise Thai social attitudes to gay men result in it being difficult to find Thais profession, but it is a lot more difficult I believe for visiting tourists than for those who live here.

Very sadly the number of deaths will almost certainly continue to rise. When fire has all but destroyed your lungs, the chance of life is extremely limited. And they are all so young! That the owner was provided bail is in my view monstrous.

Pardons are one thing. Making sure that those who have broken the law, especially in the case of murder, are incarcerated rather than their cases getting tied up in legal wrangling and the passing of presumably very large amounts of cash, is another. When will the government, the police and the judiciary finally capture the Red Bull heir and place him in jail where he belongs for many years? His crime in killing a policeman took place 10 years ago come next month. Why so much lying? The government's statement that he had been put on an Interpol wanted list was untrue, as it was easy for people like me to discover. That they say they are unable to find him is equally untrue, given that he has appeared under their noses in this country several times in recent years.

Throughout my career I have visited the USA 32 times and each time taken in several cities. I love much of the country and have very good friends there. But I think I have seen my last visit. The idea that the highest court in any country can order, in this case, New York where I always spent most of my time to overturn its no concealed gun carry policy so that anyone can carry a gun hidden on their person is anathema to me. Of course, that is not my only reason. But to use an inappropriate analogy, it's the icing on the cake.

Perhaps it is important to draw more recent members to this Board's Mission Statement and Code of Conduct. They have been in operation for many years when the Board was mostly about Thailand issues. Since they are clearly stated, I assume they apply equally to other countries on the expanded Gay Guides network and not just Thailand. Mission The Gay Guides Message Center forums are provided as a venue for the discussion and exchange of information about Thailand and other related issues. It is a place to submit queries and share experiences, information, concerns, news, and views, and maybe even a little humor for the benefit of members. Responsible, non-abusive, free and open dialog is fostered between members and between members and guys in support of the Gay Guides site mission. Abusive posts shall not be tolerated. Code of Conduct: Gay Guides membership is restricted to Adults Only. That Message Center members shall be expected to behave as adults is not an undue burden. The expected conduct standard for the Gay Thailand forums is the same as that observed every day in society by adults in our neighborhoods, towns, and cities. It is based on straightforward mature behavior, civility and courtesy that you find in a neighborhood Pub or Tavern where neighbors and acquaintances joined by occasional strangers come together to socialize in good temper, to share conversation, and to hoist, in moderation, a glass of favorite beer or wine or a cup of coffee or tea. These forums are NOT presented for abusive arguing and name calling, score-settling, thread stalking, or general cyberspace blood sport for the chronically bored.

That's OK for those who have a home in Hong Kong. If not, then I assume that means yet another 4 days in some hotel. That still makes it too expensive. My pre-covid visits were 5 or 6 times a year with 2 - 3 nights per stay. There is nothing that would keep me there for 7 days, unfortunately.

Much more informative and interesting than many posts on a similar topic. Under our happy exteriors in our retirement years, I think many of us have locked at the back of our minds the torments we went through when younger, some much more than others. Looking back, I enjoyed much happiness and success, but there were times when it was really tough being gay. As a teen, the fear of being found out and what that might entail. Keeping the secret as my brother and sister went out with their girlfriends and boyfriends. The temptation to just find a nice girl and get married, to appear 'normal' no matter that this would undoubtedly eventually cause misery for both parties. Then having found a pleasant way of adapting to my closet lifestyle there appeared on the horizon HIV/AIDS. Having just been through a couple of years of covid, few outside the gay community can surely understand these just-passed years were a mere inconvenience for most gay guys compared to the spectre of death from an act of love or just momentary passion that started little more than 40 years ago. I was visiting Bangok quite regularly during the 1980s and early 1990s before the researchers came up with medication that would ensure we no longer faced a death sentence. Perhaps oddly Thailand had been at the forefront of condom use - not for gay sex but to encourage couples to use them to reduce family sizes. Khun Meechai, the condom king, had all but totally taken the stigma away from using condoms. In the villages, he organised condom blowing competitions, dropping water filled condoms from a height to see if any did not explode - and so on. So common did they become that condoms became known as meechais. (His Bangkok restaurant Cabbages and Condoms is still a fun place to dine - it's just off Sukhumvit). With more Thais than foreigners making up the customers in many gogo bars, the need to wear condoms was more understood than in most Asia countries early in the pandemic. I always felt that prior to Bangkok becoming known as a gay sex destination, Manila with its gay clubs like Coco Banana and huge, barn-like 690 Retiro Strip with its seemingly endless stream of naked and near-naked boys attracted more foreigners. For anyone still in the closet it was first Asian paradise.

To each his own. I could never live in London or New York. Happy to visit but certainly not to live.

I find it unbelievable that the 27-year old owner of the club was freed on bail of 300,000 baht although he has to wear an ankle monitoring bracelet. Just 300,000 baht when more than a dozen have been killed due to his negligence? The police opposed bail. So who was paid off is my first assumption. And will he ever return to the court?

How true! And how many of this generation married primarily to escape from the possibiliity that their gayness would be discovered? After all, it was only in 1967 that being gay - being queer, a fag, "one of them" and all the other epithets used at the time - was decriminalised in England and Wales, and in 1980 in Scotland. I have four good friends of approximately my age who married and each had children. Three knew they were gay; the other that he was bisexual with a greater fondness for guys. The last opened up to his future wife before their marriage. She understood and realised that she would have to share him occasionally. Even so, their marriage was a happy one and they had 5 children. The other three all divorced - eventually - and set up home with a gay man. Only one divorce was reasonably amicable. This friend was from continental Europe and had moved his family to New York for work. One evening he was on the small balcony of their apartment tormented by the dilemma of constantly lying to his wife and as constantly cheating on her. He even thought of jumping. Then reason took over. The next evening he opened up to his wife. He was then staggered when she said to him in a sympathetic way: "I know!" Theirs was the amicable divorce. He soon moved to Thailand and found a Thai boyfriend. I was once at dinner in their apartment when his two children were staying. Another had a very messy divorce. He had met and fallen in love with a Thai who lived in London. They also now live in Thailand, but his earlier family refuse to speak to him. I continue to look up to the sky and say thanks for university. In that freer evironment with its less hide-bound tradtions, I met a fellow student and instantly had the most enormous crush. I was never sure if he knew I was pursuing him but we quite quickly became very good friends even though I hadn't the slightest idea that he might also be gay. Although it took almost a year, we did finally kiss and end up in bed. I realised then I could stay in the closet and enjoy relationships if I was careful about it. And that's how I lived before finally coming out.

The cities listed, agree with them or not, were not there for their attraction to visitors. They were for those who live in them. How many orchestras and theatres do you want in the city of your choice? Given the choice I'd rather regularly attend performances of the Vienna Philharmonic or the Royal Concertgebouw than orchestras in other cities. True, musicals and theatre are more difficult outside NYC and London if your only language is English. But to generalise the performing arts in terms of number of venues to visit is, to me, not a valid reason. Quality is more important than quantity. Besides, the cost of living in NYC and London would make it more difficult to attend many performances unless I lived outside the cities and commuted in.

Without being too specific, let's just say it was in the management of the arts, entertainment and related businesses. I think reading my posts some will certainly have guessed it was something like that. And knowing this, you can understand why I can never not work in some way or another. I was so fortunate in that my work was essentially my passion. As for all my travel, hardly a trip went by without my attending one or more operas, plays, musicals etc. In fact, I once flew from Bangkok to Chicago just to see an opera. Another time it was to Dresden. Now I am quite heavily involved in writing with a first book published in March and a second one about to go to the printers.

A report in today's Guardian newspaper reveals that another virus which has spread from animals to humans has been identified in China. "The novel Langya henipavirus (LayV) was first detected in the north-eastern provinces of Shandong and Henan in late 2018 but was only formally identified by scientists last week . . . Initial investigations into the virus were outlined in correspondence published by scientists from China, Singapore and Australia in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) last week. "There have been no deaths from LayV to date. Prof Wang Linfa of the Duke-NUS Medical School, a co-author of the NEJM paper, told the state-run Global Times that the LayV cases had 'not been fatal or very serious' so far and that there was 'no need for panic'. . . . Infectious diseases experts have long warned that the climate crisis and the destruction of nature will increase the risk of viruses being transmitted from animals to humans, in events known as 'zoonotic spillovers'”. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/10/newly-identified-langya-virus-tracked-after-china-reports-dozens-of-cases

Times will always change whether we like it or not, sadly. Switching to Bangkok, I always thought the best gogo bar was Barbiery directly across Suriwong from Soi Twilight. It started up in the mid-1980s and was always packed - mostly with Thais - at the weekends. It must have had around 100 boys working there, all seemingly enjoying themselves, and great shows which again those taking part seemed to thoroughly enjoy. Indeed, there was a sense that everyone was having fun in so many of the bars in "those days". For whatever reason, Barbiery changed location to a modern building opposite Nature Boys around 2000. Compared to its earlier incarnation, it was a disaster and died less than 2 years later. So sad! Even earlier, I have written before of my first favourite bar being Apollo which i discovered in early 1980. It was located on the right side at the end of Silom Soi 4 (above where Sphinx restaurant was later to appear). As was to happen when the original Twilight moved to its location at the end of Soi Twilight, at around 9:30 pm the boys would all take off their underwear and dance naked for the rest of the evening. For those interested, there is a fascinating thread of the early years of Soi Twilight over on sawatdee. It's a long thread but a great read. https://sawatdeenetwork.com/v4/showthread.php?21487-History-of-Soi-Twilight I'm factionally older and I still work, but I work for myself and I am fortunate that I have no set hours and no set schedule. I have had a great career which for the most part I really loved. I enjoy keeping in touch and working occasionally even though retired. I would find life quite boring without that.

I have been to all except Calgary. The nearest I got was Banff! Cannot agree at all with the comments about lack of entertainment and culture. All, including Calgary, are home to symphony orchestras, some of them absolutely amongst the best in the world with three better than any orchestra in London, Paris or NYC (Vienna Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouwm Royal Danish and Amsterdam Baroque Orchestras, for example, and to that list can be added more orchestras like the Vienna Symphony, Melbourne Symphony, Osaka Philharmonic); many have international opera companies (the Vienna Staatsoper is one of the world's top four) and most either very fine ballet or contemporary dance companies (The Royal Danish Ballet where the phenomenal Eric Bruhn, Nureyev's lover, was based as first a dancer and later as Artistic Director, and the Dutch National Ballet in Amsterdam, with the excellent Nederlands Dans Theater just 45 minutes away in The Hague). All have several Museums, some superb - Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum, Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Frank Gehry-redesigned Art Gallery of Toronto, and equally a variety of good to excelent restaurants. Many regularly host Broadway musicals. The main problem could be theatre since most theatre performances will be in the local language. Not much good if you don't speak German, for example, but then Frankfurt also has an English language theatre company. All this is "as boring as it gets"?? Certainly not in my book.

It was - until about 4 years ago when it converted the upstairs section of some of their A380s. The airline got rid of first class and the front of the business class seating. In their place they have 100 additional economy seats at the front. End result - a capacity of 615 passengers. And it was often totally packed. They used to fly this aircraft on the BKK/HKG route. Not sure what the after covid schedule is like.

For several years. One of the supreme ironies of my short relationship was that he eventually left me for an older Englishman. I knew it was more difficult for him being in Tokyo working in a job he did not particularly like than for me when I was in a job I loved but gave me little free time. I knew too from my last visit when I stayed with him in his tiny little room (how cosy that was!) that he had met someone else who was rich and might be offering him to be his companion on a round-the-world trip. I'll leave aside how we discussed that further. Suffice to say the Englishman he hooked up with also lived in Hong Kong and my one-time lover came to live with him! We still met occasionally as good friends until a few years later. Having tea one afternoon, he told me he was not feeling well. As they were leaving for a holiday in England a few days later, he said would get a check-up if he had not recovered. I then heard nothing for almost two months when his partner called me to say he had died, a victim of AIDS. So sad! I flew all the way to London just to go to the funeral.

Well, it was about time!

My heading is perhaps misleading, for I should not have included "One of". Throughout history, especially the history of the 20th century, Britain made a great many mistakes. Surely none is greater that the ignominy of its hasty and ill-thought out departure from India, the effects of which are still being felt in that country today. The issue should have been simple enough. When Britain took over rule in India from the failing British East india Company whose monopoly of trade on the sub-contnent had been broken in 1813, it regarded itself, as usual, as a moralising force. Even today there are those, mostly of the older generation, who talk of India almost with tears in their eyes. British administration made India work, they claim, and the creation of the huge Indian rail network is just one example of how it brought the country together. It was through no error that Britain's Queen Victoria was given the title Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India. * All that mumbo-jumbo aside, British rule was being undermined for much of the early 20th century as religious issues came to dominate the agenda. A former British civil servant had helped form an Indian Congress in 1885. This was to give educated Indians a platform in which they could take part in civil and political discussions. It never did much more than that until well into the 20th century when it became a movement primarily for all Hindu Indians. The Muslim commiunity had always regarded the Congress with suspicion. Even many Hindus felt similarly believing the Congress to particularly too pro-British. Soon the Hindus wanted a state of their own. Then the Muslims wanted a state they could call their own. Talks in the 1930s were largely cosmetic, until the then Governior General, Lord Linlithgow, declared India at war against Hitler on the side of the allies without his ever consulting any of the members of Congress or any other Indian. By the end of World War II, Britain was bankrupt and exhasted. It owed a huge debt to the USA which, being staunchly anti-colonial, was pressing Britain to give up her colonial Empire. In 1948 then Governor-General Viscount Wavell was replaced by the very bisexual (I know that's rather irrelevant but sometimes history needs to be spiced up a little!) Earl Mountbatten. At least he knew quite a bit about Asia having been the Supreme Alllied Commander in South East Asia during the War. A great grandson of Queen Victoria, he played up his royal connections to the hilt. But he knew his rule in Delhi was to be temporary. Britain's Prime Minister Clement Atlee had given him the brief that Britan was to get out of India within 16 months. He was also saddled with the instruction that there was to be no partition of India and ensure that Britain got out of the country with minimal reputational damage. He achieved neither. By all accounts, Mountbatten thoroughly enjoyed his time in India. While his wife was sleeping around, most notably with the man who was eventually to become India's First Prime Minister, Nehru, Louis was indulging in trysts with young Indian boys. In 1944 the FBI had opened its first file on the Mountbattens. It contains the sentence, "Lord Louis Mountbatten was known to be a homosexual with a perversion for young boys . . . he and his wife are considered persons of extremely low morals." An openly gay British MP Tom Driberg later claimed that "Mountbatten had a fetish for uniforms - handsome young men in military uniforms (and high boots) and beautiful boys in school uniform." What went on in his bedroom was as nothing compared to what was simmering outside, however. The Muslim leader Muhammed Ali Jinnah, a British educated barrister, had returned from London in the late 1930s and fired up the Muslim League to press for a separate Islamic State. By the end of the war, Mountbatten had two angry men tugging at his instructions, each demanding separate states. Finally Mountbatten saw no solution other than partition, precisely what London had instructed was not to happen. India was then a complicated country but the majority Muslim states were in the north-east and north-west. For some reason that is not only hard to fathom, it seems more than downright reckless, Mountbatten had a British barrister Sir Cyril Radcliffe sent from London and given 5 weeks to partition the country into two states. Radcliffe was a uniquely strange choice. He had never been to India and knew absolutely nothing about the country. He didn't want to go. When he got there, he loathed the heat, humdity, the people and the food. “Why? Oh, why was I chosen for this job?” was his constant refrain. His only desire was to get his job done fast and return to England. Yet he was not based in Delhi. He was up in the summer retreat of Shimla where the temperature hovered around a pleasant 20-22 degrees! He had no time to visit any of the territories he was arbitrarily cutting in two. Frankly, he did not really care. He finished the job two days short of the deadline. Thus the fate of many hundreds of millions of Indians - Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims - was sealed. Radcliffe had split the Punjab in the east and Bengal in the west allowing for two Pakistans and one India. His demarcation line had split villages in two, sometimes separating entire families. How and why did he make those decisions? No one now knows for he burnt all his papers before he left, refused to accept his £40,000 fee and returned to his home comforts of England. What had actually happened was one of the most humungous errors in British colonial history. The massacres started almost as soon as Radcliffe departed. Neighbours slaughtered neighbours on an unbelievable scale. Lifelong friends became bitter enemies. One of the largest migrations in human history started. More than half a million were slaughtereed and trainloads of dead travelled in each direction. Ironically it was Jinnah, who had insisted on the creation of Pakistan, who proved the loser. He had always insisted that Muslims were not welcome in India. Yet years after the partition, many millions of Muslims remained in India and became citizens of the new secular state. It was Jinnah's Muslim homeland that never settled. It could not be Muslim and embrace secularism. Within little more than 20 years, Pakistan had witnessed one major political assassination, two wars, seven Prime Ministers, one military coup and two martial-law administrators. Then in 1971 East Pakistan broke free and formed Bangladesh. In the resulting war, between 500,000 and 3 million were killed. Mountbatten's arbitrary decision to hand over the partition of colonial India to an ignorant British barrister with not the slightest knowledge of what he was doing was one of the ugliest and most disgraceful chapters in British history. Saddest of all, most all who were massacred as a result were innocent civilians.

The only time I have been 'concerned' about being with a guy younger than me was in a country with anti-gay laws. My first real bf after I moved to Asia was a Japanese. I flew to Tokyo for a long week-end every month to be with him and he twice came to Hong Kong to stay with me for 3 weeks. Obviously I loved spending all that time with him. At the same time I was concerned that Hong Kong still had the draconian Victorian law about gay sex. Every year 3 or 4 guys were sent to jail for 2 years after being found guilty of that 'offence'. (That law was finally repealed in 1990) Worse, the contract with my company stated that if I was ever convicted of any offence in a court of law, the contract would be immediately terminated and I would lose the standard end of contract perks - return air fare to the UK, loss of bonus in lieu of pension etc. So I was sometimes a bit over cautious. For example, when we went to restaurants, I would always go in first just in case there was someone there whom I knew from business and I could explain away my being with my Japanese friend as just a business associate. Looking back, it all seems so silly! It's not as though I was in my 60s and he in his 20s or that we were having sex in the bushes by the gay beach. He was indeed 25, but then I was only in my early 30s! Soon after I finally realised how stupid that was and I gave up the pretence. I finally felt free.

The perfectly awful Anutin has been after this job for years. Hopefully voters will shun him like covid!

One of the biggest stars of the 1970s and beloved by milliuons for her performance with John Travolta in the movie "Grease" has died. Out of the limelight her life was beset by tragedies that she accepted and almost overcame, never losing the lustre of beauty and a lovely woman. Twice she overcame breast cancer. She did not hide the diagnosis and shared her journey overcoming it with the world. After 2005 she was haunted for years by the disappearnace without trace of her boyfriend. He had gone on a fishing trip and never came back. As she told Larry King on his show a year later, "It's probably the hardest thing I have ever experienced, and I've been through a lot of things!" In September 2018 cancer hit her again, this time at the base of her spine. Again she showed amazing courage in facing up to it although it seems this may have resulted in her death. I had the utter joy of working with her once in Hong Kong. And joy is absolutely the right word. She was so easy to work with, charming, fun to be with and clearly loving every minute of life. One of life's gorgeous ladies, taken from us aged 73.