the third sex

Following on from Sargeant Shameless’s posting last week, I thought I would add my two bahts’ worth on the increasing popularity of ladyboy bars.

They date back only to the early-mid Nineties. KC3, which had been the original King’s Castle girlie go-go bar, became a ladyboy bar round about 1993-94. I had used it as my regular Patpong watering hole for many years before that, when it was GGs only, and it was a good bar. I used to make a habit of calling in directly after work, walking up from the office on Silom Road and plonking myself down by happy coincidence just as the girls were arriving. I would sit in the bar, which would be almost empty, while they got changed: there wasn’t enough room in the toilets, which doubled as their changing rooms, so they peeled off in the bar. They certainly weren’t shy, and it was the best free show in town.

I used to enjoy chatting and joking with them, and I also got to know about technicalities, such as the fact the girls actually had to clock in. There was a clock in one of the neighbouring restaurants, I think it was the Derby King, and they had to punch a card before they went into the bar. It might well be there still: some things don’t change much in Patpong.

King’s Castle was the most popular bar, as it had the most and the best girls. The King’s Castle group expanded, opening King’s Castle I and II on the other side of the soi, and the original was switched to ladyboys. At around the same time a ladyboy bar named Limelight opened up in Patpong a few doors down. These were the first two bars in Thailand to go ladyboy-only. Before that time, if you wanted some third-sex company the girlie go-go bars generally had a couple they could produce if you asked. The drinks bars sometimes had one or two on the payroll. Other than this, you waited for the freelancers to arrive in Patpong, congregating outside Foodland shortly before midnight.

In these early days there wasn’t much happening over at Nana Plaza. It was a shopping complex that didn’t work out, and I don’t know when it became a bar area. My own first visit there was about 1992, when it was beginning to become popular. I’ve no idea when Casanova opened. Soi Cowboy, meanwhile, was a homely, shabby kind of place with homely, shabby girls and you seldom found a ladyboy there.

The next big ladyboy bar venture was at Clinton Plaza, on Sukhumvit, not far from the Asoke Junction. This was about 2001. A hotel is now being built on the site, although it hasn’t progressed that much over the past year and I’m wondering if there are problems with the funding. The Crack House in Clinton Plaza was one of the best ladyboy bars ever. It had a nice decor, for one thing. For another, it had a whole stage-full of gorgeous ladyboys: so many they had to cram together and there was barely room for them to dance. Many former freelancers were drawn to this place, enticed by a regular salary and congenial surroundings, rather than the hardness of the streets.

Sadly, Clinton Plaza closed down in the style that is so familiar in Thailand, with owners locked out of their premises, and staff literally out on the street.

Obsession opened at exactly this time, and drew many of the Crack House ladyboys into its employ. I never went much on the atmosphere of the place: it always seemed so glum and cold. But there was no doubting the quality of the girls, and Obsession has arguably become the benchmark of the city’s ladyboy bars.

Nowadays, as the Sargeant points out, you are spoiled for choice. Patpong’s two most popular bars are ladyboy. At Nana Plaza there are four ladyboy bars, employing between them a huge choice of very attractive girls. All these bars do very good business: they would soon close if they didn’t. But if you look at the girlie bars, the situation is different.

Walk into any of the go-go bars in Patpong or Nana, and although they have good nights and bad nights, the girls and the mamsans there will tell you the business is right down. This is especially so in Patpong: Nana still does relatively well.

Why is this happening? The Sargeant puts his own opinions forward. I would add that there are several other factors. Whereas once you could go into a GG bar in Patpong and be overwhelmed by the beauty of the girls dancing, nowadays you see only a few attractive ones and a lot of real clunkers. The music is almost invariably bad: only the Safari plays decent music, the rest play the kind of stuff that gives you a headache and if there are only a few customers they will play Thai music if they think they can get away with it.

Then there is the soullessness of so many of the bars. I gave up going to one GG bar because every time I walked in I would be greeted by the same girl with the same “hellowhatyournamewhereyoucomefromyoubuyonedrinkforme” schtick. There was nothing going on behind the eyes, no form of recognition. I had started to steel myself against this as I entered the place, and that was a sign it was time to take my business elsewhere.

Ladyboy bars, especially the go-go bars, offer the frisson of excitement that the girlie bars used to offer. The sense of the unknown, the forbidden, the exotic, even the dangerous. And, let’s face it, many of the ladyboys you see up on the stage dancing are heartbreakingly beautiful.

Customers who go to ladyboy bars behave in a different way to those who visit girlie bars. The latter are out to get drunk, ogle the girls, and possibly, maybe, end up with one at the end of the night, if they remember to do so. Those who go to ladyboy bars are going for a very specific reason. They quite positively do not want to get drunk. They want to take a ladyboy out, and they want to do so as quickly and as discretely as they can. They may themselves have only one drink but they will readily splash out on a few drinks for the gaggle of ladyboys that comes up to their table, mainly to get rid of them. They will be generous with tips to the mamasan who offers advice and help, and to the cashiers. Having made their choice of companion, they pay the bar fine and off they go. Probably only for a short time, allowing their escort time to get back and repeat the cycle while they themselves go out and get blissfully, solitarily drunk.

Although the ladyboy bar customer would appear to be a less lucrative proposition than the beer-swiller, he is not. Weigh up the profit margin on a girlie drink as against a beer. The retail price is about the same, but the girlie drinks, usually a Coke or an orange juice, will cost almost nothing in raw materials and give almost 100 percent margin. I don’t know what the profit margin on a beer is, but I would hazard a guess at 25 percent. Add the bar fine into this, and the ladyboy bar customer is a profitable one. 

That might sound modest, but how many customers does a bar have during the course of one night? I don’t know but say it’s a hundred. Each spending 1,000 baht, most of which is profit. How many ladyboys on the payroll, at 8,000 baht a month? Say fifty. So your payroll is covered in less than a week, your rent, supplies and squeeze in another two weeks. You have a week’s income in clear profit. Twenty-five percent. A healthy margin for most restaurants and bars. Hence the increasing number of ladyboy venues.

As I’ve said before on this page, the fame of the ladyboy is spreading far and wide. I now know of people who visit Thailand purely for the ladyboys. That was not happening 15 years ago. This kind of business is going to increase, and believe me, the huge number of ladyboys now available in Thailand is ready, willing, and able to meet the demand. We can cheerfully expect more ladyboy bars to open, in Bangkok and elsewhere, and I for one am very happy indeed at the prospect.