the third sex

I was outside my apartment complex one evening last week, using the cashpoint machine. It delivered my cash, and as I turned round to leave I realised with a start that a ladyboy friend, who lives near me, was standing right behind me. She had been passing the building, and came over to say hello.

It was one of those rainy season evenings that I always enjoy. The rain had fallen during the afternoon, and there was a freshness in the air. There was a fragrance too from the river, a few yards away. The sun had just gone down, and there was still a lurid pink glow in the sky. I looked at my ladyboy friend, and felt not exactly romance, but lust, stirring.

Next to the apartment is a derelict site, an ill-judged market venture that never got off the ground. Most of the buildings have been demolished, but there are still some standing in a state of ruin. Grass grows out of the cracks in the concrete walkway. No one goes there, and the place is lit only by the lights from the main road. I steered my friend into this melancholy area, and into the shadow of one of the remaining buildings.

I unzipped her pants, and felt a hot and throbbing something filling the palm of my hand. At the same time, I felt her warm little hand exploring me. There must have been something in the air that evening, because rather than prolonging the encounter for some other moves that I had in mind, I was unable to resist her warm fingers and smooth wrist motion and there was an unexpectedly fast finish. At the same time I felt a hot, wet sensation in the palm of my hand and a warm spurt that landed on my wrist. We stood for a while clinging to each other.

Then we moved apart, and I raised my hand to my face. Her cum had the aroma of coconut juice. She kissed me quickly on the cheek, and we emerged into the street, where she jumped into a taxi-meter and was gone. It was a sweet encounter, and I went off for dinner feeling on top of the world.

A little while ago I was in the Deep South of Thailand, at Pattani, which is near the Malaysia border. I was with a local ladyboy friend, and she wanted to go and see a friend of hers, who lived in a village way out in the countryside.

I had hired a pickup for the visit, so that was no problem. We headed out of town and soon found ourselves in the rural area. We drove on for a while, and then pulled off the road onto a dirt track that wound past orchards and pineapple plantations, around a small pond and past woodland, until at last a small village hove into view.

Actually, it was a hamlet. There was a village shop that sold essentials, but not much else. The locals tended the fruit farms and the plantations, and grew much of their own food. If they wanted to go anywhere else and didn’t have their own transport, they had to make their way back along the track and wait for a minibus or a passing pickup.

The houses were made of timber, traditional in style with railed platforms that constituted the main living area, tall trees providing shade, and flowers everywhere. It was a picture of rural peace and quiet.

My ladyboy friend led the way between a couple of houses up to a little timber house that backed onto woodland. As we approached the building, a vision appeared on the platform. A most beautiful ladyboy. Dressed casually in short shorts and a T-shirt, and without too much makeup, she was unbelievably exotic in these tranquil surroundings.

We went into her bedroom, where she sprawled out on the bed as she and my friend chatted. I was suddenly aware that under those shorts she wasn’t wearing any panties, for I could glimpse something soft and brown along with a fringe of pubic hair. My friend saw me staring. “She have very big one!” she laughed. I said that I would love to see it. And the interest that we were showing was already having an effect, for the girl’s dick was swelling up and the head of it was protruding from the leg of her shorts.


She gave a sweet smile, and raised her bottom off the bed as she pulled down her shorts. There, arching almost back to her tummy button, was a long banana-shaped cock that had me almost speechless with admiration.

My friend laughed, and said something in the local dialect. The girl seized her dick and with her eyes half-closed and a dreamy expression on her face, pulled it for less than a minute before a great spurt of cum splattered on the pillow beside her face. Then she laughed and jumped off the bed, pulling off her soaked T-shirt to reveal a lithe brown body, and disappeared to sluice herself down from the earthen jar outside.

The show was over. My friend and I went back to our hotel, where we managed to relieve the intense and urgent erotic sensation that had overcome me. I haven’t yet been back the village.

Musing about Thai names in the last blog entry, and the problems Thais have with the English language, brought me onto the related subject of communicating with ladyboys.

Although all Thai kids are taught English at school, few of them have the opportunity to use and improve on the language once they have left. Plus, of course, and I know this sounds patronising but it has to be said, the level of tuition is not necessarily that great. I once knew a Thai girl who had a qualification to teach English and she could not speak the language. She could read it and write it, but could not string a verbal sentence together.

Poor English language skills is one of the problems that holds Thais back when it comes to obtaining overseas work, even (or especially) the lower-level agency work that Filipinos more or less monopolise in places such as Hong Kong, Singapore and other prosperous parts of Asia.

This is also a problem you are going to encounter when exploring the ladyboy community.

A member of the site came to Bangkok recently, and contacted me to see if he could meet one of the models I had photographed. I knew that the girl in question was open to any offers that brought in revenue, so I gave him her number. The only problem was, she doesn’t speak a word of English. Not a word. He tried phoning her to suggest a get-together, and  in the end he gave up because of the language problem.

I can speak enough Thai to get me through most situations, although I have to admit I would find it difficult to sit and have an intelligent conversation in Thai (I find that hard enough in English!). So when I’m taking photographs the conversation is in Thai,  and I don’t always know if  the model can speak English or not. I do test them out before we begin, but as the response to “Do you speak English?” is inevitably an embarrassed “nit noi” (a little bit), I tend to let it rest at that and plough on in Thai.

In the bars, although the  girls in places like Obsession and KC3 do generally have some English basics, often picked up from customers,  it can still be difficult to make yourself understood.

I had to laugh the other evening. I was in Nana Plaza, standing at one of the outdoor bars with a ladyboy friend, who was on her way to start work. Her English is nil. We were talking in Thai, when at a distance she spotted a foreign man who she knew and who had clearly upset her at some recent point.

“Motherfucker” she said, very distinctly.

I creased up laughing. “That’s the only English word you know, and it’s a bad one!” I told her.

She saw the funny side of that, and went off to her bar with a huge smile on her face.

A ladyboy arrived for a photoshoot a while back and proudly told me her name was Cake. I thought for a moment she was saying Kaek, which is the Thai word for Indian, and she was dusky-skinned, but no, she spelled it out. C-A-K-E.

You can’t go around calling yourself Cake! I protested. She looked at me, wide-eyed. “Why not?”

Because nobody is called Cake. She still looked at me, dumbfounded. In the end I gave up, and changed it to something a little more within the bounds of reason. Kate, I think. But I never did manage to find out why she had chosen that name.

Not long after, a ladyboy turned up and announced her name was Ballroom. Do you mean Balloon or Ballon, I asked, which is a name you sometimes find.

“No. Ballroom. Dance.”

Why Ballroom, I asked, helplessly.

“I like.”

There was no answer, so I took the pictures and changed her name to something with a little more allure.

As I have said on this page before, ladyboys often choose the oddest names for themselves. Sometimes they take the name from a famous model or singer or actress, but sometimes I think they simply like the sound of a name. I used to know a ladyboy who called herself Pop, simply because she liked the sound of the word.

But then a few weeks back I had a ladyboy turn up and announce that her name was Arse. I buried my head in my hands. Nobody on this planet is called Arse, I said.

“Wos?” she replied. Clearly, I wasn’t going to get anywhere here. I changed it to Art.

A couple of years ago I met a Dung. “It’s a real name!” she protested when I laughed. “I not make up!” How do you write it, I asked. D-O-N-G, she wrote. I changed it to Donna.

Poo is a Thai name you hear from time to time. It means crab, and is a nickname given at babyhood. The pronunciation is actually closer to “bool” but it’s not quite a b and the l sound is only just there. The word is impossible to render in written English, so it usually ends up as Poo, and whenever I find a Poo I change the name.

You will occasionally find the names Pong and Porn, both abbreviations for names such as Jurapong and Nataporn, and these I change. I once met a Lung, a name that made me feel quite queasy, and I changed the name to Lorne. Prik I changed to Pik, and Dik to Tik. Bum to Bom. Tit to Tip. Wee Wee to Weena. And so on.

It is all part and parcel of the Thai inability to absorb the English language. And it does have a certain charm, when you think about it.

My old friend Seymour Totti interviewed me a while back for his site (you can find the full interview here ) and during the course of a long conversation about the origins of my interest in ladyboys, he asked me if I had ever had any interest in the more camp aspects of British theatre.
 
It was a fair enough question. Any British kid going to a pantomime is going to see men dressed as women (and girls dressed as boys), and there is an honourable tradition of female impersonators and drag artists that goes back way into history.
 
Seymour mentioned one name in particular, Danny La Rue, who was a famous female impersonator during the time when I was an adolescent and consequently open to anything which had even the vaguest hint of sexuality about it.
 
Did such acts ever prod your curiosity, he asked me.
 
No, was the answer. Not in the slightest. I found Danny La Rue to be tedious and embarrassing. The same went for pantomime dames and drag characters in stage farces, and even as a kid I would find them silly and completely unfunny. Drag queens are a different species, but they always seemed to be middle-aged men trying to fulfil fantasies of their own, and I had no interest in them.
 
In other words, I didn’t find any of them provocative or entertaining. I found them really rather distasteful. As to the origin of men dressing as women for stage productions, I would assume that has its roots in the time when women were not allowed on stage, and female roles were taken by boys and men.

Seymour then asked me about the Thai theatre’s long history of casting males in female roles. I said that I thought essentially that tradition sprang from a different source.
 
Ancient Buddhist texts including the Tipitaka, on which the Buddhist scriptures of Thailand, Burma, and Sri Lanka are based, recognise the existence of at least three sexes, and sometimes as many as five.
 
Traditionally, Thais believe that karma is the reason a person is born as transsexual. The kathoey is paying back for transgressions in a previous existence, and is therefore to be pitied and possibly even envied, because she is in the process of working off a large spiritual debt, presumably leaving the way clear for a better existence next time round

So the kathoey is accepted as being part of society. You will find them throughout Thailand. In provincial towns everywhere, you will find a kathoey community. In the remotest villages you are even likely to find one or two. Visit a temple fair, and you will almost invariably see a kathoey beauty contest, or a stage performance featuring kathoeys. Out of this grew the cabaret concept.

So I believe that the tradition of ladyboy stage performers reflects the fact that they have always been an important part of Thai society, on one level having a very visible presence that is hard to ignore, and on another level having a spiritual quality that can be used to good dramatic effect. They are also of course used to add humour to a theatrical production. Whether performing for the royal court or for makeshift stage shows out in the sticks, a production would reflect life and would also need to entertain.
 
It is all a fascinating subject, and as I have said on this page before, one that cries out for serious research.