the third sex

Someone asked me the other day how I had managed to keep in contact with the ladyboy community before everyone had a mobile phone. It was a good point. Ladyboys are always moving, especially the students of course, because to keep rents down they share rooms, and then they fall out with their room mates, or they go on somewhere to get a better room and a better deal, and so on.

The way it so often used to work was by an extraordinary form of bush telegraph. This method of communication is traditional in parts of Asia, and is not confined only to the LB community. It is actually quite difficult for a foreigner to understand, because a message spreads with amazing speed through what can be a complex network. We, if we ever had the art, and I suppose we did before the days of electronic communication, have lost it.

But a word out to one LB friend that I wanted to see someone else soon arrived at its destination. Ladyboys are tremendous gossips. They will pass on any scrap of information about anybody they meet. This is one of the reasons I behave myself very well with them.

In city areas it is relatively easy to understand how the system works, but in rural Thailand, where few people have their own car and a motorcycle is (or was, a few years ago) considered a luxury, this form of communication also works with amazing speed. Here, the word is transmitted through the temples, the beauty salons, the noodle shops, the endless country fairs that the Thais stage, as well as, apparently, the ether.

I saw this means of communication in action a few years ago when I was down in the Deep South of Thailand. This was long before the separationist troubles blew up there. I had gone down with the intention of photographing 20 local ladyboys, and I knew only one.

So I hired a car, and my scout, and we set off. During the course of one evening we trekked through the streets of Pattani and Yala, calling into a disco, a coffee shop, a beauty parlour, and a local store. In each place there was an attractive ladyboy, and she of course had friends. Within a day I had my 20 models lined up, and raring to go. And I could just as easily have had 20 more. They were queuing up. It was a memorable experience.