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.

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I consider myself to be a normal, heterosexual male. I like to think that in appearance I am conventional enough (albeit devilishly handsome) and that my mannerisms, speech and so on are all those of an ordinary Englishman of a certain age.

I’m not gay, and as far as I know I don’t have any characteristics that might indicate that I am. I’m not effeminate, not camp, not prone to hissy fits or bitching. I have an obsession about Thai ladyboys, that’s all. I’m an ordinary bloke who loves girls and who especially loves girls who have something a little extra. And quite frankly, given the beauty of some of the Thai third sex, I don’t blame me.

But a few days ago, something happened that made me pause to think.

I was shooting a video of a ladyboy, Jane. Jane was very nervous and when we started the shoot she was chattering to me, trying to overcome her nerves. That was okay by me. But then she asked me if I was a man.

I laughed, and if you watch the clip here you can see the camera shaking. I thought at the time she may have mangled her words and that she was telling me she was a man. But when I played the video back on the screen, there she was asking quite distinctly, in Thai and then in English: “Khun pen pu chai labao? You a man?”

What on earth prompted the question? I couldn’t figure it out. If I was a more insecure soul I might have started worrying.

I wrote about this on the log page on the main site, and in addition to some predictably ribald emails I had one member contact me with what seems now to be the likely meaning behind Jane’s question.

He said that perhaps she was asking me if I was straight. In conversation with a couple of Thai genetic girls recently, he said that they were referring to straight men as “men” and gay men simply as “gays”.

This should have occurred to me, perhaps, and in the inverse logic of the ladyboy it makes sense.

Ladyboys regard themselves as female. Any man who is attracted to them, if you follow this line of reasoning, is therefore straight. A gay man is not interested in ladyboys, because ladyboys are feminine. Gays are interested in masculine qualities.

Ergo, by being attracted to Jane, I was a man.

It does bear out my inner feelings. And it does seem accurate when I think of the gay friends I have, none of whom have ever expressed any interest in ladyboys.

I found all this reassuring. Until I read another email from a member who had been in Phuket, and had spent time with a beautiful post-op. During the course of their relationship, he said he had told her that he actually preferred pre-op ladyboys. In that case, she had replied, you must be a homosexual.

You really can’t win. But as I said on this site a long time ago, when it comes to ladyboys, conventional logic goes out the window.

Not that long ago, I was sitting at one of Patpong’s outdoor bars, idly
contemplating a gorgeous ladyboy standing a few yards away trying to drum up business for a neighbouring bar. I knew her well, biblically as well as being a friend. Her name was Mel. We had enjoyed some good times together.

A British man came along and sat down next to me at the bar. I could sense he was eyeing Mel up. And she certainly was an eyeful. Tall, curvy, beautiful skin, impeccable makeup. He turned in my direction. “She really is quite something, isn’t she?” he said.

I couldn’t resist it. “Not bad for a feller,” I commented.

I heard a dull clunk as his jaw hit the ground. “NO!!” he said. “You don’t mean….” And he began spluttering in his beer. “Who would have thought it possible?” he said.

At that point, if you are totally straight and have only ever had sex with genetic girls, and only ever wanted to have sex with genetic girls, you can cross a boundary into unknown territory and find out a little more about the world and about yourself too.

I knew all about Mel’s long, elegant dick and her sweet little bottom and her soft little tits. I knew that she was a real sweetheart, and that being with her, even if you had done everything you could do and were simply sprawled out reading a book, was a pleasure. In other words, she was a classic example of the third sex.

I waited to see if the British visitor rose to the bait. I saw Mel glance in my direction, smile, and then turn a sunny smile upon the visitor. I sensed him shift on his bar stool. He drained his beer and paid his chit. He got to his feet.

Then he walked away in the opposite direction.

He didn’t know what he was missing.

I have just come back to Bangkok from a three-week overseas trip, and having been without any ladyboy company for such a long period of time I called one of my favourite ladyboy friends and asked her to come round and see me that same evening.

She duly turned up, and I instantly peeled her clothes off until she stood there wearing nothing but a smile.  I gazed at her, suddenly overawed by her beauty. She is very slender and very pale-skinned, with prominent nipples, one of the cutest bottoms I have ever seen and a cute little dick that springs into action if you so much as look at it.

At that moment, if I had my ladyboy friend and an identical genetic girl standing side-by-side, I would have chosen without hesitation the ladyboy.

It’s at moments like this that you realise just how sensual a ladyboy can be.  I still love women, and I still look at girls all the time. I don’t like men, and the idea of having sex with an adult male is as yukky to me as it is to any completely straight guy.



The ladyboy is an exotic, erotic creature. A Thai friend of mine, a man who is content with his wife but who sometimes has sex with ladyboys, says there is an explosive element to it. “It’s a very potent mix of chemicals and heat,” he said. “Plus, there is something of the forbidden about it.”

As for me, I would find it very hard to exist without them. Three weeks away from ladyboy company was pretty tough – I travel a lot, but I’m usually away for only a week at a time, which is survivable. Just about.

Early last week I had a call from Dai, who appears on the main site in a couple of sets, and who I have known for about 10 years. In fact she was one of the handful of models I photographed for a test run when I first started taking ladyboy pictures, so that shows you how long I have known her. A year ago Dai had moved back to her home province of Sakorn Nakhorn, in Issan. I had kept up with her by occasional phone call, as she is a good friend and I thoroughly enjoy her company. But I hadn’t seen her in that time.
 
Now, she said, she was going to be in Bangkok for the weekend, following a sad trip she had to make to Chiang Mai for the funeral of a friend. I met up with her on Sunday, and she really hasn’t changed much physically over the years, even though she is nearing 30. I thought I would mention all this because many people ask me what happens to ladyboys as they get older, and it is not that often I can come up with specific cases.
 
Dai had worked for all the time I knew her as a cashier in King’s Castle I, in Patpong. She wasn’t really part of the ladyboy scene, and the bar is of course a girlie go-go bar. Her job was shepherding visitors to their seats, getting in the drinks, taking the money. One of the foot soldiers of Patpong. Although a naturally good looking person, with very fine bone structure and pale skin, and with a good working knowledge of English, she has always been hopelessly lacking in confidence. Just a natural shyness, which actually is one of the reasons I have always liked her so much.


But after 10 years working in the same bar, she had had enough. I think there were other pressures, too, maybe from home. Whatever, Dai had suddenly decided she wanted out from Patpong and she headed back to Sakorn Nakhorn.
 
Meeting up with her on Sunday night, I asked her what she was doing now.
 
“I help my mother. She sell fruit in the market.”
 
What, in the town or the village?
 
“In the town. My family is from the town.”
 
Do you have a boyfriend?
 
“No. Have friends to go out and enjoy myself but no boyfriend. Thai men always trouble.”
 
Are you bored?
 
“No. I always miss my home and my town. Bangkok very big, cannot live well without a lot of money. And in Patpong I work every night, only have two or three nights off each month. Work late, so sleep in the morning. Then go to work about five o’clock. So not really have much time to enjoy.”
 
What about later? What will you do in 10 years time?
 
“I don’t know! But now everything is okay. The market good place to work, have many friends there, my mum is okay she not very old. Maybe later we have shop. But I live at my home, very comfortable, not like small room when I worked in Patpong.”


As Dai talked, I realised that she was simply the home-loving type. She had no need to be in a live-in relationship with anyone, because she is basically a self-contained person who enjoys the company of a few friends and her family. She has never been ambitious, because if she was she would not have worked in the same bar for 10 years. She has never been a flamboyant ladyboy: the only clothes I have ever seen her wear are jeans and T-shirts. She wears very little makeup, because her skin is pale and doesn’t take heavy colouring very well. She is not the over-effeminate, gossiping type of ladyboy. She takes no hormones, as they disagree with her. She had a boob job done a few years ago, but it is a good quality one and has settled in naturally. The lack of hormones means that her dick, one of the most physically beautiful I have ever seen, has retained its shape and potency. 
 
She is the natural melding of boy and girl that I find so attractive. A long time ago, she told me that she knew from the age of eight that she would be a ladyboy, and she has simply grown up with a female mentality.
 
In some ways, Dai is a classic case of what happens to a ladyboy when they decide to leave the scene. Most ladyboys have their roots in the provinces. Returning to the peaceful town or village where they spent their formative years must be very attractive to many, because let’s face it, the Bangkok ladyboy lifestyle must be a mind-bending experience.  The opportunity to be back amongst family and friends, to open a small business, even to sell fruit and flowers in the local market must be like balm to a soul that has been seriously tested for too many years.