the third sex

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I wrote on this page recently about ladyboys who seem to have no sense of embarrassment about what clothes they wear during the daytime, and who will happily turn up at my apartment or at a hotel where I am going to photograph them looking as if they have just come off stage at the Crazy Horse.

A few days ago, a girl turned up for a shoot at 1pm in the afternoon. She was wearing a white dress with a see-through top, and no bra. You could see her nipples from 50 yards away. Bearing in mind that this is a commercial complex with crowds of office workers milling around during their lunchbreak, not to mention mothers walking their young kids around, and yours truly felt just a tad conspicuous when he went down to meet her.

This however is far from abnormal. I once met a ladyboy at a Bangkok Skytrain station, and she was bulging bra-less out of her T-shirt and wearing hotpants that advertised the fact she had a permanent hard-on. I recently walked through a hotel lobby during the early afternoon with a ladyboy whose dress hem was not long enough to cover her knickers and whose bottom cheeks were greedily observed by the bellboy right up to the moment the lift doors closed.

The other morning, an apparition materialised in the lobby of my building at noon, wearing a gold lame dress and fishnet tights. She had come straight from a successful cruise of Sukhumvit Road the previous evening and a subsequent spell in the hotel room of a Dutchman. I have driven through Pattaya in a jeep with three ladyboys who have been bra-less beneath their T-shirts and only too happy to prove it to the local lads gawping in from their pickups and motorcycles.

It doesn’t matter if I have the opportunity to issue a warning first about dressing inconspicuously. They don’t listen. The chance to have their photograph taken in seductive poses goes to their heads. There is no answer.

All I can do is adopt an expressionless expression that I hope conveys the impression that there is NOTHING ABNORMAL ABOUT THIS SITUATION, and hope that people will ignore me. As in fact they probably do, as my companion will be grabbing all the attention.