Before the Internet

[Guest]

Thanks to the internet it's now easy to arrive in Bangkok, Hanoi, Phnom Pen or wherever, already armed with a map that shows where all the gay bars, saunas etc are located. This can be particularly useful for that one bar that's located on it's own in some obscure location.

 

I guess some of our members might just have been travelling around Asia before the internet really caught on.

So back then, how did you find the gay bars etc?

Word of mouth? Taxi drivers? Touts? Or just arriving in town and eventually picking up a gay advertising magazine?

[Guest fountainhall]

A mix of sources. First, on my first ever visit to Bangkok - 24 hours en route from Paris to Hong Kong, it was a tout. I wanted to get to a go-go bar and had no idea where they were. Thankfully, there was a tout outside the hotel who took me in a tuk-tuk to the old Stockholm bar in Lang Suan. This was a real dump, but I got what I was looking for! Oddly, I don't recall being ripped off.

 

Second, for my next 5-day visit a few months later, it was the Spartacus Guide! I can't say it was always accurate, but for visiting cities for the first time, it was invaluable. I know it is still published, but have not even looked at it for well over 20 years.

[Rogie]

When I arrived in Bangkok 15 years ago I was very green. My experience was similar to FH - it was a tout took me to a go-go place.

 

I did buy a copy of Spartacus 10 years ago but rarely used it.

 

Later on, another source of info was the awfully named Squirt, a website mainly specialising in cruising but I've long since abandoned that approach. But that doesn't count as it was post-internet.

 

I remember reading how Kinsey wished to widen his net when he was taking people's 'histories' (resumes of their sex lives). He was short on homosexual sex - it took some doing but once he'd got inside the closed world of the homosexual venues he had a 'field day'. So, yes - certainly if you wanted a safe place to meet others, word of mouth and who you got to know was probably the only way back then. Cruising and cottaging went on of course but was fraught with danger, eg. entrapment, queer bashing, or worse a la Brokeback Mountain.

[Guest]

I purchased a copy of Spartacus about 3 years ago, on the basis that some countries still don't have a great deal of internet coverage for the gay scenes. Turned out to be more or less a waste of money, as it's only really necessary for the more obscure countries and in those, the establishments listed have often closed.

 

This guide isn't widely stocked, but I had a look at a more recent edition on the shelves at Foyles & it's still listing some of the places that I found to be closed a couple of years ago.

Obviously, this guide could have been very useful in the pre-internet era, but it's days will be numbered now.

[ChristianPFC]

Before my first trip to Bangkok (August 2009) I bought "Utopia Guide to Thailand (2nd Edition) : the Gay & Lesbian Scene in 23 Cities Including Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Pattaya & Phuket" but found it of little use. Now I do all my research by internet. I bought a second hand copy of "The Men of Thailand" from the 1990s, it has a lot of addresses, but I bought it for other useful information.

 

But I have to add, I found Soi Twilight by chance. I read about Soi 4 and Telephone bar and Balcony before (on the now defunct gayboythailand), but was not aware that a place like Soi Twilight exists and stumbled on it when walking around (and make a big cross with an exclamation mark in the map of Silom area I had printed out from the internet).

[pong]

when still really young but having money from first job, i once bought a Spartacus guide-and some of the mags of its first and since rather depreciated foundr/writer-about those infamous Pagsanjan falls in Phiillippine.

I really hesitated to go TH-after first and very nice visits to Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam even. First time was South TH-a litttle trip out from MY, and was not nice at all.

years later I decided to try again, hit BKK and was ''found/spotted'' the very evening by a young gay THai, could not really be called tout, but we soon agreed on a little kind of guided tour to BKKs gay places-SuperLek ncluded. You open eyes and see more-and 2-3 nights later i went back on my own to find out more about those other palces (that soi with SuperA and Golden Cock). Then saw an ad-and this opened eyes wide, for that famous series of books (still have them)- TMOT-The men of Thailand, of Eryc Allyn, the best listing and explanation one could think of. It even after a while succeeded me in cinvincing that Pattaya was not just str8 bad sex and I tried too-and was delighted. Must have been around 1990