Silom 6 reviewed

Silom 6 on a recent Friday night. An initial warning - if you don't like tattoos (I loathe them), it's slim pickings. Unfortunately that's a growing trend these days in all the bars. Drink prices and tip levels for the boys (except at Tawan) are significantly cheaper that Soi Twilight

Golden Cock - didn't even stay for a drink
Nature Boy - I'd read wowpow about this bar on CFS so was curious. Very, very small bar, so-so collection of boys (the one who took my eye was already up to some mischief with a Chinese customer) so I paid my 150 baht drink price and left
X-Boom - not a tattoo-free boy in sight. A number of customers, some of whom had tried and failed to gain entry to Nature Boy (too full) earlier - like me they had one drink, paid and left empty-handed
Tawan Bar - encountered a friend in the Soi. We entered. Standing room only. We left
Solid - only two boys without tattoos. I chose the wrong one. Oh well

I saw the same handful of customers in all the bars; we all rotated between them, I think, except in Solid where there were some different faces

[catawampuscat]

I am not crazy about soi 6 establishments because the boys are too young and underfed looking except for Tawan.. I enjoy the tattoos except when they are crude or of naked women..I have seen many beautifully done tattoos and consider it an art form..As I recall, the boys at Tawan are fairly tattoo free as they distract from the muscles but these guys are not for everyone, certainly not for the fans of the skinny boys...I heard from a friend that Solid had gotten very quiet which is a shame because it was a fun place to have a drink and some physical contact... The colonel has a problem with his dislike of tattoo as it is very common..I must say some farangs (younger straights mainly) have overdone the tattoo thing and look like fools but no problem for me on Thais.........

The colonel has a problem with his dislike of tattoo as it is very common
That is precisely my point catawampuscat - very common people often have tattoos and certainly in the West it is a clear indicator of a low-class, criminal or fringe mentality. It is no surprise that the elder son of the world's greatest soft-core pornographer (PeterUK apart) proudly confesses to having such a thing

[catawampuscat]

I have only seen a few middle/upper class Thais at places like Babylon and no doubt tattoos are not as popular as they are with the lower class boys who form the majority of the working boys in the bars... Fortunately, I am turned on by the lower class boys althou as I said before the grossly tattooed lower class farangs just look stupid to me..

I'm with you homintern - I HATE tattoos. If I got a boy home who I hadn't seen shirtless, and he had tattoos, I'd send him off with just his motorbike fare.

Ch

[Smiles]

" ... It is no surprise that the elder son of the world's greatest soft-core pornographer (PeterUK apart) proudly confesses to having such a thing ... "
. . . (rushing to the aid of a friend) . . . Protest protest! PeterUK is no pornographer! He is the Board's best wordsmith by a long shot and the subject of (shhhhh) 'sex' has never ~ as far as I can remember ~ ever passed his quill.

Dodger is the Board's soft-core conveyor, and I'm sure he would agree. Get your facts straight please.

Cheers ...

[piston10]

... you got there before me because I was so horrified by Homintern's characterisation of PeterUK's writing that I needed an hour or two to mull it over. I tried seeing it as irony, even grumpy irony, but have finally decided that it is either malevolent or Homintern cannot, in any serious or complex meaning of the word, "read". You are absolutely right, and I am pleased you were so straight-forward and succint in what you said; it leaves it me to be, as often, a bit long-winded!

Most recently Peter posted 'Garbage', a deeply imagined and beautifully written story about a young girl's fortitude in looking after her brothers and sisters by gleaning saleable refuse from the garbage heaps of Bangkok. The d├йnouement depends on a murderous sexual event, but there is no description of it and it only cuts through the reader with horror because the writer is so reticent about it. Indeed, the end of the story affected me so forcefully that when I first read it I wondered if I could ever bear to read it again.

Some time ago Peter gave us 'Voyeur'. This certainly contains explicit sexual description, but what the voyeur watches through a hidden window or mirror is a callous and brutal sexual assault by a farang on a Thai boy. This, again, is horrible to read and could only be titillating to a very twisted mind. It is a very tight little story about an inadequate man who can make no real contact with other people (hence he satisfies himself here with voyeurism); and it has a marvellous and painful ending, when, deceiving himself completely, he believes for a moment he has found a "friend", made a contact, in the pimp/mamasan who set the thing up for him. The reader knows that nothing has changed for him. (It's a shame to spell it out and anyone interested should go back and look at the way Peter achieves his intention without being explicit. It's very skilful writing indeed.) This has nothing to do with pornography at all. If anything, 'Voyeur' falls into the category of 'moral tale' - and a very chilling one at that. If it's sexual titillation you're after, forget the writings of PeterUK!

Peter may have posted other stories that I have forgotten or missed, but these two make the essential point.

Homintern's posts have ever been hit-and-miss, though I understand that some people enjoy his ejaculations from time time. I am sure he's a real person, but so inconsistent. On the one hand we remember his own self-descriptions - 'fat, bald old c....', 'not a kind bone in my body' - his snobbishness (he belongs to a club that can dismiss whole swaithes of humanity as ' common' with all the conviction of a Womens' Institute member from Berkshire), his obvious pleasure in mouthing some of his locutions ('Soi Prostitute' and 'catamite', a centuries-old word of contempt for passive homosexuals that no one alive at the present time should be tempted to use), his taking of the high moral ground when you least expect it and in the oddest ways. (A little while back he clobbered me with the Buddha's Second Way - elimination of desire. I thought he was being ironic then, but no, he repeated the advice with the implication that I would be lost if I didn't change my ways and that he had found the idea very helpful.)

On the other hand, we find him in his recent posts zimmering round the establishments of 'Soi Prostitute' and the sleazy stuff off Soi Tarntawan, discriminating between the bars and the 'catamites' with the eye of a connoisseur, passing on his findings for our information and delectation, and, unless I'm misreading him, actually offing a boy or two. This seems an odd way to set about eliminating desire - especially as the Buddha probably had G & T in mind as well as sex.

As modern youngsters might ask, "Where's he AT? Where's he COMING from?"

To adapt slightly the old North Country saying, "There's now't so queer as queer folk".

[piston10]

... hairy/smooth, cut/uncut, muscular/skinny, spiky hair/smooth hair, upturned noses/downturned noses, I have only one thing to say:

Some people like strawberry ice-cream, but I prefer pistachio.

"So what?" you say.

Precisely.

And I only mention my taste in ice-cream in conversation when buying one.

I would if I could but I have used my hours' worth on my dear Baziel, just to counter the horrid creature who has been smiting him........

Early hours of New Year's Day in the rain in London UK..........

Slightly drunk and anxious about my flight to Thailand tomorrow evening.........

Where are any of us coming from? Do very many of us sit still long enough to find out??

I spent some years as a monk of the Order of St Benedict, in a beautiful 13th Century Abbey in the north of Scotland, chanting the Office and Mass each day in plainchant, and praying to be saved..........from myself I suppose!!! Those years were the time for me to grow up and accept that I am gay and I must live my life to the best of my ability, respecting all others as I wish to be respected myself. They were a community of good, holy men, and they were good to me. I doubt that I would have survived without them.

Today I fly to Thailand for the umpteenth time, but this time is different, I fly to be with the man I love and ask him to marry me. Will he laugh and tell me to piss off? He ought to really. He is 19 years younger than me, incredibly handsome, and very popular (if you knowe what I mean).

What do I have to offer him?????? Love, security, stability, care, protection.....are those enough to take him away from the country of his birth? Away from the food, the friends, the climate, the freedom...............

Wish me well??

Catamite: A boy who has a sexual relationship with a man
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=catamite

Contrarian: One who takes a contrary view or action ... unpopular at the time
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=contrarian

Being "in denial": a cause of suffering, according to the Second Noble Truth

Home Page: http://au.geocities.com/homintern

See also - quote from Jane Austen, below

[PeterUK]

Ah, thank you Smiles and piston10 for leaping to my defence, but quite unnecessary I assure you. Unlike one well-known ex-poster, I've never allowed homintern's barbs to get under my skin. Horror of horrors, I've actually grown rather fond of him. He can be a pompous old fool (not alone there), but then he can be disarmingly honest as well, as when he admitted the other day that he has few friends. Sometimes his humour is Christmas-cracker stuff but at other times genuinely funny, as in his recent account of crossing Silom Road at the new pedestrian crossing. He regularly protests his atheism, but in his constant returning to spiritual matters I sense someone genuinely troubled in that area. He's a complex, contradictory individual who brings a bit of interest outside the world of bars and barboys to this board. More power to his elbow. Oh, and thank you, hom, for the Christmas present of asp, in aspic - it was very tasty once I was able to stop it moving.

He regularly protests his atheism, but in his constant returning to spiritual matters I sense someone genuinely troubled in that area.
I suggest you review my home page, PeterUK, but I can assure you that my "troubles" are in the eye of the beholder. We've crossed swords before about your somewhat blinkered view that religion necessarily means belief in God. As for "few" friends ... I am constantly reminding ES and Smiles of the need for an Irony symbol - more useful I know as a signal for our American cousins, but it's clearly also (often) lost on fellow countrymen

[PeterUK]

I suggest you review my home page, PeterUK, [quote]

That won't happen, old chap. Life's too short for such frivolities. I do, however, apologise if I misrepresented you as having few friends. That famous irony of yours is positively subterranean at times.

That famous irony of yours is positively subterranean at times.
Yes, I'm afraid the next thing we know there'll be some damn fool out on Silom Rd, waiting to spot an old buffer with his zimmer frame so as to greet The Colonel - http://www.sawatdee-gay-thailand.com/fo ... php?t=6425 (http://www.sawatdee-gay-thailand.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6425)

[piston10]

Well, that sorts a few things out, doesn't it?

Smiles and I jumped in because because there is no hint in the writing that describing PeterUK as a soft pornographer was ironic or a joke. It sits there on the page like an accusation, and neither of us were to know that it was, what shall I call it? - an 'interpersonal' irony between Peter and Homintern. Peter's finding the expression 'positively subterranean' to describe Homintern's irony is amusing, original and kind, but it sidesteps the real problem in reading Homintern's posts. In conversational irony we get our pointers from gestures, facial expression, tone of voice, etc., but in writing a reader usually needs a few hints in order to interpret the author's ironic intention properly. Again and again Homintern provides no indicators at all, and the result is we simply don't know how to take what he says. When we miss his ironies it's entirely his own fault.

I'm pleased to have the problem of 'denial' cleared up. I pondered Homintern's response to what I had written previously, but I could not decide what he was saying; and his attempt to make it clear did not help. I can now see that he was not recommending to me the path of denial, but saying that I was 'in denial' - a quite different matter. (I should, perhaps, have caught on, because the Thrope had accused me of this a while earlier. I can't say I understand, because here am I trying to make the most of life and take it for what it is - attempting not to deny anything!) I perhaps misunderstood 'Buddhism/denial' as Homintern put it to me because I tend to see Buddhism as a religious philosophy that is very good at setting up 'paths of self-denial' for us. Now I understand what he intended, however, I'm more than happy to withdraw the charge of hypocrisy that underlies the structure of my post.

As for his other 'accuracies':
The definition of 'catamite' he has dug up is only half the story about the word. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it, with Victorian primness, as 'a boy kept for unnatural purposes'. This should be 'a boy kept for buggery'. The word is a corruption of the name Ganymede, the ravishingly beautiful boy who was abducted by Zeus for... unnatural purposes. No one had ever contested the butchness of Zeus and 'catamite' has always referred to a passive homosexual - as I said. More importantly, the word has a history of use in English. Since the 16th century it has only been used in a derogatory and contemptuous way - with animus and disdain. It's about the nastiest word they could think of to clobber gay people with, and to resuscitate it and spit it out ('...ite' words are good for spitting out) at the beginning of the 21st century is wilful and self-indulgent.

I'm not sure whether Homintern introduces 'contrarian' into the debate as a description of his deliberate grumpiness, or whether it is supposed to apply to me. Once again, he just doesn't give us enough to go on.

Since I have had to backtrack on Homintern's use of 'denial, I'm not sure it is appropriate to make too much of TrickyRich's very thought-provoking post; but I'm sure that in a different context we would have much to say to each other. It is obviously written with feeling and I can see how it grew out of the material of this thread, which TR happens to have read at an important moment in his life. It places in stark juxtaposition the way of contemplation and self-denial and the dangers and possible pain of passionate involvement with life. To put it this way perhaps shows where my own sympathies lie. TR, I sincerely wish you a happy trip and a joyous outcome to what you so understandably approach with trepidation.[/b]

I'm not sure whether Homintern introduces 'contrarian' into the debate as a description of his deliberate grumpiness, or whether it is supposed to apply to me. Once again, he just doesn't give us enough to go on.
Let me help you there, piston10 - although I can see from your response you are remarkably obtuse. I have asked Elephantspike if I can have the term "Contrarian" used as a title rather than "Veteran Member" or whatever the standard nomenclature is to which I currently belong

As for "catamite" - I'll stick to the standard meaning, already used by me in my response, which has a venerable lineage. I'll also use other terms that you may equally regard as a gay "put-down", such as sodomite, queen, quean, poo-pusher, shirt-lifter, pillow-biter, faggot and of course pooftah. I have no intention of allowing the prim and proper among us to determine how I use the English language by citing its use by our enemies. We already have those among us (our own worst enemies, in my view) who perpetuate the belief that all gays are paedophiles by constantly referring to themselves or others in their late twenties or thirties as "boys". I'm happy to allow them their rich fantasy life (the Peter Pan complex has a long history in the gay community) provided they don't turn fascist when it comes to my use of the language :cry:

[piston10]

No, Homintern, as you are perfectly well aware, I am not remarkably obtuse. And you have proved my point. In a list of words you write 'Contrarian: One who takes a contrary view or action... unpopular at the time', and you expect us to work out that the reason you have included it is that you have contacted Elephantspike to have your title changed. As I said, you don't tell us enough about your intentions. However, I was not really surprised to discover that it referred to the stance you take. By the way, effective writing does not require buttons.

And I question whether the definition you give of 'catamite' is either standard or adequate. Words have a history of use as well as a dictionary meaning. I am far from politically correct and certainly not prim and proper, and you have, indeed, the right to use every contemptuous and vulgar insult that has ever been used against gay people. But if you do so, you'll just have to put up with people like me objecting. Which of that list of insults would you be happy to see applied to yourself? Most of them make their point by side-stepping viewpoint, opinion, argument, and even normal decency of feeling. Wouldn't it be better to leave that sort of thing to Bad Boy Billy?

Which of that list of insults would you be happy to see applied to yourself?
You've obviously missed the routine description I apply to myself - bald, fat old cunt. An insult only exists if you allow yourself to feel insulted. You are allowing others to define who you are and how you feel - another cause of suffering, according to The Buddha. As a top there are some in the list I wouldn't use against myself - pillow-biter, for example - but that is for factual reasons not spurious offence

The fact that you can't work out whether a term (in this case "contrarian") is being applied to you or to me is an indicator of your total obsession with yourself. Try some meditation on a couple of the Four Noble Truths to gain some perspective. It's not always about you!

[mikelele-old]

I love this thread. I quite honestly wish that I may meet you all sometime soon. =)

[piston10]

.. I was on the point of typing "Glad you're enjoying it", when it occurred to me that I might yet again become the victim of an unflagged irony. (I'm not very good on these colons and brackets, I'm afraid - I only recently discovered that LOL did not mean Lots of Love! - and you have to be very wary round here.)

Unfortunately, you are entering the thread at the moment I am retiring from it. It still has an interesting future, I feel, especially now Homintern is introducing the Buddhist justification for being thick-skinned. Partly I am leaving it out of consideration for the busy members of the Forum who really can't be expected to spend any more time on these topics. More importantly (and I feel sure Homintern will find this corroboratory evidence gratifying) I have made the decision in order to (to adapt the expression so loved of politicians who want, or have to, slip quietly out of public life) "spend more quality time with - but who else? - MYSELF". The capitals look good, don't they? I could type them all night!

[Brad the Impala]

[quote="homintern"] I have asked Elephantspike if I can have the term "Contrarian" used as a title rather than "Veteran Member" or whatever the standard nomenclature is to which I currently belong
quote]

Perhaps ES could give you the title "Contrarian Catamite"?

A more apt name would be:

Bald Fat Old Contrarian Catamite

I think The Colonel (aka Homintern) would LOVE to be considered young enough to be a catamite - but who would be desperate enough to have him as one? :lol:

I'll happily remain a sodomite, but thanks for the thought

Unfortunately, you are entering the thread at the moment I am retiring from it. It still has an interesting future, I feel, especially now Homintern is introducing the Buddhist justification for being thick-skinned.
The origin of this comment by P10 was my statement that you can only be insulted if you choose to be insulted. Interestingly I found this comment in an entirely unrelated Forum (unrelated - it is for GBLT frequent flyers):


I am curious - what is the problem with "poof"? I have always worked under the principle that something can only hurt you if you allow it to, so if someone calls me a "poof", I don't really care, in fact, I often describe myself as a poof (yet, I am a volunteer firefighter, I have umpired Australian Football at the senior level, tennis at Grand Slam level, have played cricket at third grade level in a state grade comp, nobody picks me as gay - but yep, I admit, I am a poof!) - what is the problem here? As I said, a term is only demeaning if you allow it to be.
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthre ... 875&page=3 (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=497875&page=3)

[sydneyboy]

Unfortunately this tattoo craze is a world wide trend. I thought Thailand was bad but in Brazil as I discovered on a recent trip they have gone mad over tattoos. I think its tragic to see a handsome young man with a beautiful physique and his body disfigured with tattoos.

Why dont you head over to Mount Druitt Sydneyboy,theres plenty with Tatts.Dont start telling lies on here.

I wonder if anyone is going to give real review of Soi 6. The OP was hardly a comprehensive review - walked - walked out!. I can write about the glory that is Tawan Bar but I think that that has been well covered. I was there a few times in the last few days and they lads are in excellent fitness condition. Thursday and Sunday not so busy. Friday and Saturday packed.

Typical tattooed Tawan-man - the glory of the male physique - adorable!
He had a Superman tattoo on one shoulder.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v27/wowpow/Tawan/Trophy.jpg

I can write about the glory that is Tawan Bar but I think that that has been well covered. I was there a few times in the last few days and they lads are in excellent fitness condition.
I'm happy to write about Tawan Bar. Ghastly, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly, ghastly, muscle marys everywhere, muscle marys everywhere, muscle marys everywhere, muscle marys everywhere, muscle marys everywhere, muscle marys everywhere, tattoos, tattoos, tattoos, tattoos, tattoos, tattoos, tattoos, tattoos, tattoos, tattoos, muscle marys everywhere, ghastly. I think that sums up my position fairly well. And I'm not alone in that :P

[sydneyboy]

What lies have I told? In so far as it is possible to follow your cryptic mode of thought, you seem to be implying that I was excluding Australia from this regretable phenomena of tattooing. What I said was that tattooing was a WORLD WIDE TREND. The last time I enquired Australia was part of the world and in Sydney you dont have to go as far as Mt Druitt to find how common tattooing is. I was simply agreeing with other rational contributors to this thread about how commonplace tattooing was in Thailand and making the additional point that in Brazil they have gone completely overboard.