PeterRS

Now if only someone had told me this, I would have booked a longer trip! As it was, I really wanted two days at the astonishingly beautiful and hugely memorable Jiuzhaigou National Park which covers three large valleys and which I reached by short flights up to its airport 3,500 meters at the top of a mountain. But I could easily have added a few more days at the end to enjoy more of the beautiful scenery (oops guys) in Chengdu!

Isn't prostitution in one or other of its forms one of the reasons many gay guys visit Thailand? We all know that tips for offing from bars aren't tips; they are just fees for prostitution! Was Sunee's reputation for prostitution any different from Soi Twilight's? But another reason for Pattaya's slow decline as a gay go-go venue may be its having been much more a retirement haven for westerners, many of whom moved there quite a few years ago partly for the availablility of the bars and guys. Many are ageing given the length of time they have lived here. I'd guess there are many more retirees in Bangkok but Bangkok also has a vastly larger array of evening haunts apart from go-go bars and a great many expats who choose for whatever reason not to visit go-go and other bars. A bit like the new version of me! For a dozen years, I had living next to me a couple of elderly gay UK expats enjoying their retirement here. I once asked them of they read this forum. They did not read any gay forums and had no interest in them! In the evenings, only one of them would visit the then Telephone Bar about 4 or 5 times a week, but only to meet up and chat with fellow western expat friends. That was his only reason for the visits and they never went anywhere else. The other cruised occasionally in Silom Complex but no idea how successful or otherwise that turned out to be. And isn't one basic problem for Pattaya that perhaps retirement options now in other parts of the world are a good deal greater than they used to be. I know several people who are considering Portugal before its existing easy visa access is changed, including Chinese guys from Hong Kong. For medical costs, India is now a good deal less expensive than Thailand with some very fine medical faciities. Of course Thailand takes some beating, but for those who read the American threads on this forum, several countries in South America have become/are becoming attractive. As I know from my travels, there are also gay young Asian guys in many European cities very happy to meet up - although the numbers are small. In Asia, I expect Taiwan will eventually introduce a retirement visa and that Vietnam may change its previousy changed policy and reintroduce one. I certanly would find Vietnam very enticing. Just thoughts!

I took that photo in 2012. GIven the popularity of Russian cuisine, I expect the sign is probably still there. I have found on the internet a photo that includes it dating from 2020, so I can see no reason it would have been taken down. This is an entrance to the restaurant with the title in three languages but clearly from the figure in the doorway it is Russian and dressed for winter! Apparently it was the first Caucasian restaurant in China. I am wondering if the sign is a crude portrayal of Russian Muslems! Most Russians had left the city by the md-1960s but from that 2020 review the staff are still Russian. The Ice and Snow Sculpture Parks also have a lot of Russian influence, even with a ballerina in one of the massive snow scuptures. Incidentally, thanks to the flood of Russian immigrants following the Revolution, many were musicians and Harbin developed what remains the oldest music Conservatoire in China.

Apologies! In line 4 of my post above I should have written Purachai and not Anutin.

I could bore readers with endless photos of from China visits. Let me just say that Chengdu is a great city for gay visitors. Apart from its obvious sights, including the amazing huge panda reserve just outside the city and the Giant Buddha at Leshan, it has a few gay bars. When I was there the apps were absolutely humming. In fact, I couldn't keep up. One cute guy just would not give up and I had to squeee him in (or I squeezed into him 😵) on my last morning before I had to check out at midday. Not one wanted even transport money. Perhaps one reason is Chengdu is the 5th largest city in China with the metropolitan area having nearly 10 million citizens and a catchment area of around 14 million. It also has well over 20 major universities - that's a lot of sexy, hungry, cute young guys!

I feel I must mention here a superb post made by @macaroni21's predecessor quite a few years ago. There had been a lengthy discussion about the fact that go-go bars were becoming somewhat boring in that all seemed to adopt the same model and lacked the entertainment value of earlier bars like Barbiery. He outlined his idea for an updated go-go bar which included various sections, one being where the boys would always dance naked. Entry to this part would obviouly be more expensive but the essence was that a bar which offered a variety of different types of experience could perhaps rejuvenate the bar scene. I thought it was brilliant!

I wonder if there is now some sort of ban on nudity. As you may know from posts I have made before, nudity was common in the early gay bars in the 1980s. At Apollo go-go in Soi 4 and the original Twilight go-go (later Hotmale), around 9.:30pm the briefs would come off and all the boys - and Twilight had at least 60 of them - would strip off and parade in the nude for the next couple of hours or so. It was obvious in Twilight that some of the boys were less happy being naked, but the others and all those in the much smaller Apollo seemed perfectly happy and gleefully played around with each other.

Thanks @gerefan. Given the existing clients, on the basis of @macaroni21's theory below, this could suggest that the Complex days will also be numbered. I have no idea of the average age of customers there, but if I recall correctly Sunee's customer base when I was last there was not especially old - absolutely not all 60s and 70s. I remember a good sprinkling of 40s and 50s. But for some reason they gradually disappeared. Can Jomtien Complex continue to thrive if the average age of customers is somewhat advanced and there are few if any of the new breed of Asian customers? What is your view? Just curious!

As a patron of many gay Thai massage spas in more than 25 years, I have never heard of a naked line up - sadly!

Not really! Whenever there are major raids, one or other top politician will usually be there to ensure his photo is splashed in the media. I believe when Babylon was raided in the early 2000s, the minister which had implemented the Social Order Campaigns, Purachai, was seen in all the media photos and videos holding up a used condom. It was, he claimed, proof that there had been naughty goings on inside. One comment somewhere claimed Anutin was a fool as the Minister for Health should have praised Babylon for the fact that patrons were actually using condoms and not indulging in bareback sex! After all, this was still a time when AIDS was on many lips. Agree that Anutin is dreadful. His aim is to become Prime Minister and I believe he will do all possible to achive that.

Fair points. But my impression is that the pedophilia issue had all but disappeared for all but a very few by 2010. It was certainly front and centre around 2000 but ten years is a long time and memories can be relatively short if what is on offer is attractive enough. Having visited so infrequently, I am hardly one to comment, but I did rarely see any Asian tourists in Sunee. Mind you, my last visit was close to 10 years ago. I am sure your third point is correct. As I have written in several posts, on the basis of what I read on other Asian-based sites and on what I hear from Asian friends, their gay interests are primarily on massage and discos. One reason perhaps is that the majority of Asian tourists like to travel in small groups and spend time doing things together. Bangkok offers much more. One other Pattaya question from me. I hear that Jomtien Plaza is doing very good business. How many in the customer base there is Asian? My expectation would be very small.

Since they have largely been treating most of the public in this way for quite a few years, I imagine an increase will not prove too much of a drain on the tax revenues given the country's increasing prosperity. Plus even in private hospitals, treatments and procedures are very substantially lower than in western countries. In pubic hospitals, I have had MRIs which cost 14,500 baht each and a Professor of Retinology to thoroughly check my eyes and previous retina damage for 2,000 baht. My abdominal specialist's fee is 200 baht with the hospital taking a 50 baht facilities fee! My expectation is that as tourism increases, the larger and richer private hospitals like Bumrungrad will just put fees up yet again to cover the cost of treatment of Thais.

Revolutionary, but the apps were certainly not the first and only way to find guys on line. gay.com and gaydar were just two of the websites which had a wide selection of guys from all over Asia. fridae, the Singapore-run site, was for its first years a major way of finding guys and it listed many tens of thousands around Asia. There was also at least one Thai site mostly in Thai but a good way of meeting young cute Thai guys. I certainly used it for a while. Perhaps more important surely is the rather sudden availability and spread of cheap mobile phones. Soon came grindr and the other gay daing apps. But if that was a reason for Sunee Plaza relatively quickly downhill after 2010, how is it that other gay areas in Pattaya and Bangkok have not collapsed so quickly?

If this was not Thailand, the mind would boggle that any pub could remain operating for three full years without a licence!

When Thaksin introduced the original healthcare plan, it was universally praised - except by the hospitals, even the much cheaper public ones, which would in future have to perform expensive cancer and other comlicated surgeries for the same 35 baht it would cost them to treat a cold. It took about four years but a large group of hospitals complained that they could be forced to close. Within a few years the government realised the scheme needed rethinkiing. So it removed the 35 baht charge and much healthcare became basically free for Thai citizens. Since then hospitals have been reimbursed out of general tax revenues. The new policy seems to extend benefits to greater numbers.

Many thanks @Marc in Calif. It's a very scenic part of the world especially at that time of year, despite clouds and occasional mist. I was unable to see the Northern Lights on the ferry due to low cloud in the evening. I had to wait until i got to the far north of Finland before getting some amazing photos.

I'm glad @a-447 mentioned these bars because it does rather give the lie to the view that Sunee basically died because it was a fem-type boy area. I have no doubt there was a preponderence of fem-boys. But that cannot have been the primary reason for the area's quite rapid decline. I always enjoyed sitting at Yaya's bar and people watching as I did at Dick's in Soi Twilight. There then seemed a considerable number of farang sitting at various beer bars, drinking and chatting, although we were never sitting there long enough to check if the customers offed boys. Clearly some did. But the fem-boy argument and the underage argument surely cannot have been the only reasons. Re underage, on an early visit in the late 1990s we did enter a bar in Sunee - close to where #22 Memories Beer bar is on the map. We were both shocked and disgusted that some of those sitting at the side of the stage were clearly under age - some even considerably underage. But I understood this problem with Sunee was cleaned up early in the new century. Certainly we never saw a similar bar on future visits, thankfully. I recall one of the regular posters on this Board used to have weekly meetings with several friends over drinks at a Sunee bar. Admittedly it was quite a few years ago, but there seemed no major problem with the area at that time. I do recall being informed that the owners of Krazy Dragon and Happy Boys (the latter being in a lousy location) just gave up because of lack of customers. But again I come back to the question: why did the customer base that could clearly sustain so many gay bars and go-gos in 2010 all seem to vanish with most closing pre-covid?

I am sure you are correct, although clearly there were exceptions. We popped in to Krazy Dragon precisely because the boys there were not the typical fem-type twinks. Quite the opposite in most cases. It was a pleasnt change from Happy Boys.

Found this map of Pattaya's Sunee Plaza dated 2010. The gay go-go bars are marked in blue. I can see 13 - and this was before Winner Boys opened. Of the rest, I think only Nice Boys continues to exist. I was only rarely in Pattaya but did sometimes enjoy walking through the Plaza and stopping at Yaya's bar for a drink before popping into two different types of go-go bars - Krazy Dragon and Happy Boys. I really wonder: how did it all disappear so quickly?

Given that @Moses owns and runs SGT, I am also confused. Why does he post here and get into quite a few argumentative discussions which he hardly ever backs up with background links when with very rare exceptions he does not post such threads on his own site? Is it because he knows SGT gets so few posts these days and most are specifically related to Pattaya? Yet SGT does have a Gay World forum where this and other posts he has started making here could easily be added. Then again, given that that World forum has had all of a mere 12 threads during the course of the last 12 months, he must know that if he posted there most of the readership would likely ignore them. I suggest he should try - and then see what happens. I may be completely wrong - but I think not

You also have to add the montly envelopes handed over to the BIB. I have no idea what the rate is in Pattaya or the present rate in Bangkok. But some years before Soi Twilight closed, I was chatting with a mamsan I had known for years. He informed me that for an indoor go-go bar, 160,000 baht was the expected monthly payment. For a beer bar on the street, 40,000 baht. Following covid and the closure of Soi Twilight, I expect these payments must have been considerably reduced. Mention of bar ownership, it was often claimed that Classic Boys at the end of Soi Twilight was owned by a member of the army. We know, too, that substantial payments are made on a regular basis to the BIB by the owners of the girl bars. Thanks to an arrest made by police in one jurisdiction some years ago, the man taken into custody had specifically made substantial "contributions" over the years to those in another juriiction to enable the police to build air-conditioned police boxes at traffic intersections. He created an almighty fuss and I believe the case swiftly disappeared.

Thanks so much @daydreamer. Trying to remember that name has been haunting me since I wrote the post. Sorry I cannot recall what the mamasans wore. I was much more interested in what the boys were not wearing 😵 I recall that on one of our quite regular visits, I was pissed off that one customer had hogged a table and was buying drinks for the 5 cutest guys. Fair enough! We should have arrived earlier. What annoyed me more, though, was that he and a couple of the boys were smoking, as were a couple of other customers, this despite there being two large NO SMOKING notices. Eventually I walked over to him to point out the notices and politely ask if he and the boys would cease smoking. A few moments later he came over to our table. I was a bit concerned he might want to provoke a fight. But he was very pleasant. He was, he told us, the co-owner of the bar. Since we were regulars, we knew that they never had many customers and the bar was not making profits. It was for him an interesting sideline. But if he stopped customers smoking, he'd lose half the existing customer base and have to close down. It was a very fair point and I thanked him. He offered us a free drink, but in view of the bar's financial situation we declined. I almost said I'd prefer to take one of the boys sitting at his table upstairs, but managed to restrain myself! Thanks again.

SInce you started it, you will be aware - or you certainly should be - that the thread is about DEATH! Totally unnecessary deaths! Don't dare mention derailment of threads when you are a master at it! With respect.

Yes, we do agree. It's a pity that you were never able to attend the original Babylon in the building at the top of that soi where it joins Sathorn Soi 1. Perhaps ironically it's now the home of the French restaurant Le Bouchon that for decades was located in Patpong Soi 2! The original Babylon which opened around 1987 I think was clearly more than just a gay sauna, for someone had spent a great deal of money on it - antiques in a tall glass case in the lobby, for example. The smallish restaurant on the first floor was always packed at weekends and the owner would usually engage a classical guitarist or flautist to play gentle music. Much of the music piped into the sauna area was itself quiet classical - rarely pop. I was aways told that it was created basically for gay professional Thais to give them a private space to relax and unwind. Certainly on Friday and Saturday evenings there were always queues to get in. Then the owner expanded it by taking over the next door premises. But by the end of the 1990s, he decided to move it all down to its location in the much larger premises on land which I believe his family owned. When a Thai friend told me about the original Babylon not long after it opened, I admit I became a regular. Every visit I made to Bangkok (several a year) included one evening at Babylon. Happy memories indeed! To begin with I liked the new premises, although for my taste they were too large. The pool, gym, restaurants and bar were great. But it became perhaps more like Hua Lamphong station rather than the niche little Hua Hin station. But that's progress. I was aware of other saunas opening. Heaven down near the river (opened around 1995 I think) was very busy for a time and I believe is still on the go. Chakran quickly became my favourite, though. Once the Skytrain had opened, getting to Soi Aree was so much easier. And with its Moroccan theme, its small pool right in the middle, the bar where you could sip Singhas or cocktails on loungers as you watched the many boys in their towels descend the stairs on the other side - it almost eclipsed the oriignal Babylon. Somewhat oddly, as Babylon had became so much more popular with foreigners as well as Thais, Chakran slowly moved in the other direction - Thai for Thai/Asian. But as you @reader have often said and perhaps I have not given you sufficient credit, time marches on. Some things change. I had a favourite sauna in Singapore named Rairua. It opened in 2002 and was out of the city centre. Like Babylon, it was very well decorated and laid out. It introduced SIngapore's first nude nights. These became so popular that other Singapore saunas had adopted the theme within a year. The clients tended to be better off, cute young Singaporeans - very few foreigners like me! Then virutally without warning it closed its doors in 2006. Now that building happens to be the Singapore branch of the gay Pulse Clinic which started in Bangkok! As I have written before, I was very much a regular at Bangkok's gay go-go bars for decades. When I moved to live here, I discovered that a gay friend from my Hong Kong days also had bought a condo here. So on Sundays we were regulars for dinner somewhere followed by a go-go bar or two. We must have visited almost all of them, even though we returned to our favourites. Our last outings were amost always to a bar whose name I am ashamed to say I cannot recall. It was on the same street as Nature Boys and on the corner just down from Mango Tree. It was not popular in that we rarely saw more than a handful of other customers. But drinks were cheap, some of the boys were great fun and the short time rooms upstairs were always clean. When it finally closed, we'd occasionally chat with one of the mamasans who had opened a small host bar on Soi Twilight almost next to Dick's Cafe. The other more efficient mamasan had earlier gone off to Pattaya to work in Dick's Cafe there. My reason for not attending bars now is simply because I have no desire. Being partnered with a Thai whose only experience of gay nightlife had been a quick visit to Balcony Bar with his cute gay friend, we both prefer to meet our friends for quiet dinners, drinks and chat. Mabe we are lucky in that he really enjoys my friends and I his. On the other hand, I have free reign when I am away from Thailand. But that's another story!