macaroni21

I must have missed something, but I don't seem to have a fix on where Aurora is located. From the pages shared in the opening post, I see mentioneof Ramindra (Ram Inthra), Hathairat (Minburi) and Sukhumvit, but no specific address. The first two areas are far outside our usual haunts. But does anyone know what their Sukhumvit address is?

Take the train to Phrom Phong. Jey Spa is in the area. From Nana station, Phrom Phong is just 2 stops out. Another option is Googuy. The do not have a physical shop. Instead, they have an arrangement with a short time motel in the Nana area. After you make a booking for a boy, the manager will book a short time room for you, and give you instructions where and how to meet the boy. The problem with Googuy is that they want payment transferred to them electronically in advance. I have not figured that part out.

What a disaster for the transport company 😂 The new policy has halved the number of trips the boys now need to make for their visa runs.

@vinapu has given a good reply. A lot depends on what @Kiwi306 means by "beefier". All the time we see different tastes among members of this board, and different ways of understanding what looks like similar terms. I have found that even among my own friends, they have vastly different understandings of the word "beefier", and what I have learnt from observation is that it may depend on the speaker's own size. If the speaker is 70kg, then 80 - 85 kg is likely to look beefy (assuming it's not mostly fat). But if the speaker is himself 90 kg, then an 85 kg sex worker will fall short. The beefier ones in Tawan are in the 90 - 100 kg range. Very few of the "beefier" ones in the other bars would be more than 85 kg, and when they are, it's not as much muscle as the Tawan guys. Take for example these Models (that's what the bar calls them) from Moonlight. ttps://www.facebook.com/MoonlightBangkok/videos/4976894425769483 Generally speaking, they'd be the biggest or most sculpted boys Moonlight has. Vinapu reported that their off fee is 1000 baht (I'll take his word for it since I have no personal experience). What's the tip they expect in the hotel room - 5000 baht? Moonlight has some good-looking boys in their rotation (what he calls "floor boys") but they are not quite the same standard as their Models. My estimate is that they are mostly in the 60 - 75 kg range. I can't link to examples since these guys are not on Moonlight's social media. ... just adding context to what Vinapu has said.

Thankfully free of ugly tattos, except one.

@roughjock - my impressions of Manila are the same.

While I am not in Bangkok currently, I've been to Bangkok and Thailand in July more than a few times. The scorching heat of April and May would be past, but the humidity of the monsoon season would be ever-present. When it's also warm between rains (e.g. over 30 degrees), the humidity can be quite oppressive, but other times the temperature is quite nice and one doesn't notice the humidity so much. On days with warm humidity but no cooling rain, I'd plan for daytime hours in airconditioned comfort. Either I am in my hotel room catching up on work remotely or I'm in some shopping mall wandering around or reading a book in a coffee shop. From about 4pm onwards, it should be pleasant enough to make one's way to a massage place. Temperature-wise, I don't think you will find Bangkok much different from Tokyo, but in Bangkok, it would be a good idea to be dressed for wet roads and splashing from passing vehicles. I always have an umbrella with me and for footwear, I prefer crocs (though sandals would be just as good). As you can see from these screenshots of BBC Weather for the same day (this coming Tuesday) the temperatures in Tokyo and Bangkok are similar, but Bangkok is wetter. I've also added Atlanta for comparison. Of the 3 places, it is Atlanta that has the highest peak temperature. --- Right after Covid, I made a beeline for Thailand as soon as travel restrictions were lifted. That was in July 2022. In that trip, I spent 5 days in Pattaya, and there's a report about it here: https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blog/2022/08/30/rainbow-flags-and-rain/ It rained every day, but I remember the days to be pleasant, especially when the seabreeze came in too. I had a lovely visit.

You're on to something there. I agree that lap dances are virtually unknown throughout Asia and so it may be something Asian customers in Thai bars would not be demanding. But these things can change. After all, near-naked gogo girls and boys twirling themselves around poles also came to Asia quite late. While it is true that some bars with cabaret-type shows are doing well and their audiences seem to be majority Asian, I would be careful not ascribe it to an Asian preference for shows. After all, the offing bars - bars which downplay their shows and focus more on selling their boys - are also predominantly Asian in their customer traffic. Think Hotmale, Fresh Boy, Moonlight (and Toy Boys in Pattaya). I remember a dinner party some years ago in Singapore with a whole bunch of gay Singapore guys - friends of friends - many of whom were frequent visitors to Thailand. They dissed the cabaret-type shows and very much preferred the ambiance of offing bars; they were also very much into "massage" places. I think a better explanation lies in the hetero/gay divide. IMO the bars with splashy shows appear to do better not because they attract Asians, but because they attract heteros. I see the current gogo bars slowly bifurcating into (a) show bars and giving up the offing side of its business. A handful of bars remain as (b) offing bars. By "Show bars" I mean places like The Venue in Pattaya where taking a boy out is not on the agenda (with rare exceptions depending on the dancer). These bars may have a courtesan side to it, where the performers sit with customers, teasing and flattering them for biggish tips, and enticing customers to splash on bottles. I think that's where BoyzBoyzBoyz has gone, and the 1,000-baht off fee may be a signal that they're not interested in offs anymore (I also wonder if a different off fee applies to female customers). More and more, I see Jupiter (Bangkok) evolving in this direction. In my estimation, show bars can be very profitable, but in Bangkok with its high overheads, they will also need to be more hetero-women-oriented than gay-oriented because they need the traffic in volume. Eventually, e.g. Jupiter, they may discontinue the offing side of its business and just focus on shows and courtesans. An uncoming report in ShamelessMack, from a recent visit to Banana Room, will illustrate this transformation. Toy Boys (Pattaya) is an example of a pure offing bar - essentially a brothel that displays its service-providers in a drinking environment for customers' selection. I think A-bomb (Pattaya) is too. Hotmale is coming close. What little show Hotmale has now is entirely performed by its numbertag boys, with no katoey component. Fresh Boy, Tawan/The One, Dream Boys Pattaya are close to being like Hotmale; the drag component of their shows is shrinking and may in time disappear altogether. What performances remain after that would be amateurish dick displays -- which would be in line with a business objective of encouraging offs. Because offing bars have little appeal to heteros - we've heard again and again that the straight women seldom take boys off even when they go into these bars - pure offing bars have to remain small and therefore have to watch their costs very carefully. Like massage shops, pure offing bars can be viable though they will have higher overheads (e.g. wages to boys in attendance, rent in expensive parts of the city, tea money to you-know-who), but then they also sell drinks unlike massage shops. (Actually, they need to rent less floor space than a massage parlour). The uncomfortable in-between would be places like Dream Boy Bangkok and Moonlight. Currently, they are trying to be both a show bar and an offing bar. How long can this uncomfortable straddling of both sides last? If I have to make a wild guess, I think Dream Boy will evolve towards a show bar* and Moonlight will evolve towards an offing bar - perhaps a more respectable one without flashing dicks. *Shows don't have to be slick cabaret acts. Banana Room seems to be leading in this space. Dream Boy, if it evolves into a place that is mainly a show bar, may find itself squeezed into the niche of offering shock value freak shows to hetero traffic. It already has older performers whom few customers would consider offing, hired to perform its explciit shows.

I can't answer that question, but isn't @abidismaili in Pattaya at the moment? Also, this is best placed in the Gay Pattaya forum. There is an instagram account https://www.instagram.com/club_pattaya_legacy/ , maybe those who are more savvy can follow it and see dates of its latest posts?

Here's another video with a good time stamp 1990 -1991. This accords with what I remember of Pattaya in my first few visits in the first half ot the 1990s. It was already pretty urbanised and the main streets quite congested. The sex trade (mostly hetero) was easy to spot. Again, there are hardly any night scenes in this compilation, but a vibrant night life was definitely to be found.

I don't remember seeing massage shops in the 1990s. There must have been (with girls at least) but I probably wasn't paying attention. That said, I mention in my post above that I got a soapy massage from a boy in Adam & Eve, and the upstairs room was designed for massage. Soapy massages generally come with happy endings, as did mine. However, I detect in your question that you may possibly be holding an opinion that currently guy massages are widely available in Pattaya - and that's why you're asking when did it all begin. I don't quite agree with this generalisation. Except for the shops in Jomtien Complex, sexy massage by guys is not obvious anywhere else in Pattaya. Yes, you can see straight-looking boys outside a few massage shops around the South Pattaya Road corner, but the front rooms of these shops have foot massage loungers. To the average straight tourist walking past, they may seem as no different from the shops along SIlom Road in Bangkok, which also has very straight looking guys sitting out in front of their foot massage parlours. They don't scream happy endings.The shops that do screem happy endings along Second Road are those with girls out front. I don't think the gay gogo bars and open-front bars were more hidden. In the early 1990s, there was no internet information, and yet I could easily find Nautilus, Gentleman's Club and Adam & Eve (and probably a couple more that I have since forgotten) on my own just by walking the streets. Something about the frontages of these gogo bars must have signalled "gay" to me. As for girl gogo and open-front bars, when looking at the old videos, bear in mind two things: Firstly, they are almost all street scenes, and shot in the daytime. Even now, you don't see bar girls in skimpy bikinis on the streets in the day time with the rarest of exceptions. For technology reasons in those days, night scenes would have been difficult to film at night. Cameras would not be allowed inside the bars. So what you see in those old videos is probably not representative. In this video showing still pictures from the 1960 to 1990 period, there is one photo at 2 minutes 42 seconds of a girl in a bikini on a stage. This indicates that indoors, even in the decades before I made my first visit, the scene was as raunchy as it is today. My sense is that the street scene has gotten bolder over the years, but confined to just a few sex streets, such as Soi Buakow and Walking Street, with more girls in bikinis standing out front. But this is just the vaguest of impressions since I wouldn't have paid much attention, having no interest in the hetero bar scene. Actually, one can still have a family holiday in Pattaya withouth encountering much of the sex trade. Because we tend to frequent the gay sex parts of the city we may not realise there are huge parts of the urban sprawl that don't look X-rated.

The name "Gentleman's Club" rings a bell, but since I didn't make my first visit until 1990 or so, it must have been around for many years from 1985 on. My vague recollection is that it was in the same Soi as where X-boys is now. But I may be mistaken. I don't quite recall whether Boyztown was there on my first visit, but I am fairly sure it was by my second visit, probably around 1992, or at the latest by my third visit. I remember clearly that I stayed in Flipper Lodge in Central Pattaya on my first visit. For my second visit and third visits I stayed at Natural Inn and Cockpit Hotel - not sure now which place was 2nd visit and which was 3rd visit. But I can confirm that by 1993 or so, Boyztown was in full swing. My earliest memories of gay Pattaya (around 1990) do not have Boystown in them. Instead, the bars were in the Soi 2 area in North Pattaya. I have fond memories of the cavernous (aircraft hangar-like) Adam & Eve, and Nautilus bar. Adam & Eve had gogo boys whom one could take out or could provide services in their upstairs rooms. It was where I had my first soapy massage (could have been my only soapy massage) lying on a ceramic tiled plinth. Nautilus had an aquarium and that was where I saw my first "underwater show" to the soundtrack of Richard Marx's Right Here Waiting For You. Sunnee Plaza might have been developing in that period - first half of the 1990s or mid 1990s - but I might not have noticed. By the time I noticed (late 1990s or early 2000s) it had a bad reputation for underaged boys, and I continued to stay away from it. I can't put a finger on when Jomtien Complex became gay, maybe after 2000? Perhaps others can recall.

Indeed, we've discussed this before, but the funny thing is that such inertia is only in the Thai gogo and host bars. In the massage sector, they behave as any business would behave. They have a range of product offers as evidenced by the lengthy menu boards outside their shopfronts or on their Line advertising: Foot massage, Thai massage, Oil massage, Aroma oil massage, Coconut oil massage, Scrub combos. 60-minutes, 90-minutes, 120-minutes. Many Saphan Khwai places, in their Line feeds, spell out which boys are top, which are versatile. Their tip ranges also vary, some as low as 800 baht, others (GooGuy, for example) ask for 4,000 baht. More recently, we see discounts and packages (e.g. 5 sessions for xxxx baht)....

What??? How can you be a card-carrying whore-hunter if you've never been to Sodom-on-sea?

It's very hard to imagine that a bar permitted (in one way or another) to provide big-cock parades and other acts involving nudity on its main stage is prohibited from nudity in some screened-off corner, but TIT, so I don't really know. But there's a simple work-around if there is a prohibition. If I were a bar, I'd rent a satellite location a short walk away, a simple upstairs room or two. A room can be divided into 2 or 3 screened corners. When a customer orders a lap dance, he pays at the counter, and the boy takes him to that satellite location. The boy is told by the bar that he must return within, say, 10 minutes. The bar also keeps the customer's seat and drink for his return.

Thanks, @Riobard for those kind words. Lap dances inject scaling into bars' product offer - that's what started me on this suggestion. It's like this: most businesses would try to offer a range of products to suit different budgets. For example, airlines have first class, business class, premium economy, economy. and then major airlines often have a low-cost subsidiary too. Shampoo makers usually have different brands at different price points, and each brand may have different bottle sizes, again to cater to a diverse market. Less visible is that the lower end of the product ranges are used to generate volume and thus spread the fixed costs. What has struck me about gogo bars in Thailand is that they really have just one product and one price point - the off fee (500 baht?) and after that, the compensation to the boy, now averaging 2000 - 2500 baht. If the customer is not prepared to spend that amount, the customer gets next to no satisfaction from a visit. It's an all-or-nothing set-up. There are potentially plenty of customers who could be attracted with additional product offers. For example, a customer who has come from a massage with happy ending, and (being older, perhaps) does not think it worthwhile to off a boy for another full-service bed-romp. Or a customer, e.g. from a middle-income country, who is travelling in a group and sharing a room. He can't take a boy back. Lap dances can pull some spending out of these customers and provide some thrill and fun, even if not the full works. In turn, a reputation for lap dancing pulls more customers into a bar, and drink sales go up (generate volume and spread the fixed costs - rent, wait staff). It's equally important to see it from the other angle. For the boys working in bars, it's currently also a ridiculous all-or-nothing set-up. They either hit jackpot on the night they're on duty (with an off) or go home empty handed, save for a 100-baht tip or two. Lap dances allow them to earn a bit more (e.g. 400 baht for 10 minutes?), and they can serve more than one customer a night, so that there is a lower risk of a night with no income and having to go back to his lodgings with empty pockets. This makes the bar attractive for boys to work in. The bar can also attract boys to work there who are happy to give lap dances but are otherwise reluctant to be taken out i.e. boys who would exhibit and interact superficially to make money but don't do full sex. This can be a two-edged sword for the bar's reputation, but if carefully managed can still work. Sorry @Kiwi306 that I am going off topic. Personally I don't think there is any worthwhile erotic entertainment in Thai gogo bars anymore. The only one I can think of is X-boys Pattaya, but it's quite rough at the edges. Beware too, the last time I was there, the off fee was 800 baht!

I can't answer any of @abidismaili's questions with facts, but from what I have read over the years (and largely corroborated by what's said in the two videos above): It was a small fishing village up till the early 1960s. The US military presence in Vietnam and Thailand built up gradually in the late 1950s and that was about when Pattaya came to the attention of the US officers as a beach escape. Even then it was just a trickle of visitors and visitor numbers would not have been enough to support entertainment outlets. Everything changed from 1964. US forces surged into Vietnam. Where formerly the US military were predominantly regular officers (and a few thousand at most) sent to train VIetnamese and Thai militaries, now the US presence was mostly made up of young GIs, keen on drugs and sex. Numbers hit a peak of over 500,000 in 1969. Because these were conscripts often involved in brutal infantry combat, the US organised an R&R rotation. The men generally had a week's leave a year (?). As the above video says, the men had choices: Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, even Sydney. Every one of these cities developed a Vietnam-GI entertainment industry, but because these were big cities, the entertainment ghetto remained just one small part of a city, the way Patpong is just a ghetto. Pattaya was the only R&R option that was not already a city, so the GI-centric type of entertainment quickly became the town's dominant character. That said, the videos say bars (with girls, naturally) only appeared in the early or middle 1960s. It makes sense - that's when there came a critical mass of customers, the GIs by the thousands. Around 1966, the US moved into and expanded U-Tapao airbase. And thousands more US Airforce, maintenance and logistics people (predominantly male) moved into the region, not as R&R short-term visitors but based there for months or years. So that was another boost to the entertainment business. @abidismaili's first question was when massage places with happy ending a thing in Pattaya. I would guess that it came very quickly after the bars were established. Bear in mind, massage is indigneous to Thai culture, and locals too look forward to happy endings. Even if no US GIs had come to Thailand, there would still be a sexy massage massage scene, like you would find in the provincial cities where few tourists venture to. His second question was "Since when are they all over the place?". I'm not sure if "they" meant bars or massage or both, but I'd guess that the moment US GIs came in large n numbers (mid 1960s onwards), bars AND massage became the main business of Pattaya. Rather than see the sex business as arriving into an already family-friendly beach resort, it's the other away around. Pattaya first went from fishing village to a boomtown of sex, drugs, human trafficking (girls needed to work in the shops) in a matter of a few years, and then, ten years later, after the American retreat from Vietnam (1976), there began valiant attempts to make it family-friendly. They needed to do so to fill the empty rooms left behind by the Americans. Unfortunately/fortunately, by then the glorious reputation of Pattaya had been well established, and even as the GIs vanished, more and more civilians from Europe, Australia and the US continued to come to Pattaya, keeping the sex businesses alive. And growing. I can't answer your 3rd and 4th questions. What I can say however is that by 1989 or 1990 when I made my first visit to Pattaya, there were gay sex options available. They seemed well-established by then, so they must have been there for several years already. Perhaps others who made their first visits before me can say more about the pre-1989 period.

This other one is also informative:

Perhaps @abidismaili was referring to this Youtube video?

@abidismaili, it depends on which part of Bangkok. @JZenLyfe referred to 15M massage which is in Saphan Khwai area. Loads of twinks in that area quote 1000 baht for 1 hour. In the Silom area, that won't be the going rate.

Whoa... How is it that I have not heard of Super Boy?

For some businesses, it can make sense to collect a cover charge at the door. Much depends on how many "take a peek" people come by. If too many peek and leave, then they would want to discourage that. Other business which are confident that peeking leads strongly to staying would be fine with post-visit payment. That said, to make such decisions, a business has to collect data and analyse them. Most small businesses don't do that; they simply follow the market leader.

Whilst I have always pre-booked a boy before arriving, I can report that when I arrived at the shops for my appointments, most times I saw no more than 2 - 3 other boys hanging around the place (sometimes none). I have no idea whether they were available for spot booking, or they were waiting for their clients to arrive - in which case they wouldn't be available. I will have a story soon on ShamelessMack about the evening when, although I had made a prior booking, the boy was a no show. The manager was deeply apologetic but said he had two other boys available in the house. They were presented to me in person; they looked almost like clones of each other, so for all practical purposes, I had no real choice re physique or looks. The only choice I had was black shirt or white shirt. And then the manager said that black shirt (or was it white shirt?) was actually waiting for his prebooked customer to arrive in an hour's time. In that case, this clone might do a rush job if I took him, and so I was left with just the other clone. However, these boys have lodgings in the general vicinity, and my guess (never tested) is that the manager will be able to show you photos from his phone or tablet and you can choose from there. He will then have to make calls to see if the boy can come over, and how soon. You may need to wait up to half an hour, I reckon, for them to freshen up and arrive.

I've thought about it but didn't do it. Hated the idea of walking in the sun and alongside horrible traffic. That was also when there were messy roadworks and motosai often drove onto the kerb -- and there were long stretches with no pedestrian kerbs. Like @Londoner , I have done a long Jomtien beach walk though, from Jomtien Complex all the way south till it joined Sukhumvit Road. From Google Maps, it's about 5 km. It was nice in late afternoon. I'd do it again.

I agree. Our tastes and expectations differ greatly. For example, @sydneyboy1 was disappointed with the numbertag guys he saw in The One, describing them as "overweight, heavily tattooed". I didn't think they were noticeably different from what they were in Tawan in the time before the sudden closure, nor what they were for years before that (except getting older and losing some hair). Possibly the guys working the bar the night I went were a different lot from the boys working the bar the night sydneyboy1 went, but not likely. More likely is that, to my eyes, they were hunk enough for me (in fact, many of them too heavy for me -** don't crush me, please!! **) whereas sydneyboy1 might have been looking for a different standard?