Gay Bangkok in the 1980s

[bkkguy]

That area is now quite 'cultural', in that the soi on other side of Soi 1 which goes past the Goethe Institut and on to Ngamduphli has been known as Soi Goethe for many years!

it used to have a much more "military" tone - for as long as I can remember Sathorn Soi 1 itself was known as Soi JUSMAG because of the US military installation near the corner, and while I could never master the correct Thai pronunciation for "1" all the taxi drivers had no problem understanding JUSMAG when I wanted to get to Babylon!

bkkguy

[corky]

Silom Soi 2 before the advent of DJ Station was an interesting place to visit.

In the space that is now DJ Station was the Bamboo Bar that had a traditional Thai dance and cabaret. You sat on cushions on the floor while drinking and watching the show. It was never very busy.

Opposite there in what is now Espresso Bar was Harries Bar and upstairs from there was the Garden Bar. There was a massage shop above Garden Bar but I forget the name of it. Harries was a pick up joint with lots of boys where they went if they had not been offed from their regular employment during the night and others who freelanced. Drinks were 100 Baht each, no off fees; you just went up to the boys who were dancing around and asked them. It featured a lip-sync show at about 2.00am that was so bad it was funny and compulsive viewing.

At about 3.30am Harries closed but then you went through a door at the back of the bar into another place called Zeros where the party continued until dawn with the same crowd, just a different room. Many weekends I used to be surprised leaving there to find that the sun was already up.

Next to Bamboo Bar in what is now Club Caf├й was CharlieтАЩs Hideaway тАУ a bar with a few boys and a couple of rooms upstairs. CharlieтАЩs was a place with a long bar on the left side and table seating with high back benches on the right side that formed small booths. It kept going past the millennium but was never very busy. CharlieтАЩs great claim to fame was that he had been an extra in the film тАШGood Morning VietnamтАЩ.

Out on Silom Road and turning left was RobinsonтАЩs department store and in the place that is now McDonaldтАЩs was the Dairy Queen which was the afternoon and early evening hangout for lots of available boys. Smoking was allowed inside and the boys managed to make a coke or coffee last for hours while waiting for punters to come along. You could sit in a window seat there and get cruised by boys who would be hanging around at the Silom and Rama4 corner or meet them inside.

Happy Days

[corky]

A final thought. In the 1980тАЩs and early 1990тАЩs there were many more boys available on the streets and in the bars. That was the era before the internet; before everyone had a mobile phone and when people went out to find each other.

It may be much more convenient now to meet someone on line and have him come to your room, but I donтАЩt think it was as much fun and much less spontaneous.

[2lz2p]

Bangkok was also wonderful - I went to a few of the bars mentioned, but another on Silom Soi 4 (I think, it was a different Soi than the Rome Club or Telephone), called I believe Charley's - it had a popular cabaret show around midnight.

Thanks Corky for your follow-up message -- instead of Charley's (Charlie's) I mentioned, it was Harries I was referring to in my earlier comment.

[RonanTheBarbarian]

Although I never went to Thailand until 2004, I have a copy of the Spartacus Guide for 1981. So it would have described the scene in about mid-1980, I am guessing. In those days the editor was a British individual named John Stamford, who was pretty forthright in putting forward his own, sometimes rather idiosyncratic, views of places and venues.

Here is the list of bars in Bangkok, with the comments, etc. (I have left out the famous тАЬcodes and symbolsтАЭ). The way addresses are described seems to have changed a lot since the early 1980тАЩs. I have put a few of my own comments on this in brackets and in italics.

Annexe -135/1 Suriwong Road (nowadays Soi Pratuchai) - 1800-2400, Comments: formerly Twilight Bar. Very Sleazy, Rooms upstairs. Very expensive and the boys get very little.
Apollo - Soi Charuwan 98-100 (now Soi 4, where Sphinx is, according to FountainhallтАЩs post above) 1000-2400, Comments: Restaurant, bar-dancing, massage, show at weekends. On 3 floors. Three Stars.
CiroтАЩs тАУ 8-12 Silom Road (Soi 2 I am guessing) Opposite Swissair Office, between AngelтАЩs House Boutique and Nepal Airlines. 2030-0300, Comments: Same Soi as HarrieтАЩs and Garden Bar and under the same management. Four stars
Garden Bar- 8-9 Silom Road (Soi 2 I am guessing) 2030-0200, Comments: three stars
Harries Bar - 8-10 Silom Road (Soi 2 I am guessing) 2000-0200. Comments: Recently rebuilt, five stars (Very positive тАУ Stamford rarely dished out five stars)
Lonely Boy Bar and Coffee Shop тАУ 102 Soi Charuwan (now Soi 4) 1100-2400 Comments: Recently renovated. Has rooms by the day or the hour. One Star.
The Rome Club - 94-96 Silom Road (now Soi 4 тАУ this was on the same Soi as Apollo, mentioned above it seems, but why was Apollo described as being on тАЬSoi CharuwanтАЭ but this place 94-96 Silom Road тАУ a mystery) 2000-0100 тАУ three stars
Tiffanys Cocktail Lounge - 213 Plaza Building (2nd) Patpong 2, Suriwongse Road - Above Thai Room (long but rather cryptic addressтАжthe Thai Room was a restaurant in the listingsтАж I am guessing this was in one of the Patpong SoiтАЩs тАУwhich one is Patpong 2?) 1400-0200. Four Stars.
Tomboy- 104 Silom Road (any suggestions where this was?) 2000-2400. Naked and near naked go-go boys from 17 to 30 years old. Avoid renting the rooms upstairs as the management is said to have spy-holes in the walls. Two stars (generous after the spy-holes!)

Where to avoid.
He also warned people off the following venues:
New Flora, Stockholm and Black Bar, which according to Stamford, were тАЬvery expensive clip joints and very AYORтАЭ

Restaurants
He recommended one restaurant, with four stars:
The Thai Rooms - 30/37 Patpong 2 Road (underneath TiffanyтАЩs Cocktail Lounge as mentioned above) тАУ Comments: Reasonable prices for good food.

[fountainhall]

New Flora, Stockholm and Black Bar, which according to Stamford, were тАЬvery expensive clip joints and very AYORтАЭ

That's the first time I have ever heard any other mention of the Stockholm bar! I had begun to think the name must have been only in my imagination.

I'm not sure if comments on bars in this millennium are totally appropriate in this thread, but the following may be of interest in providing one reason why there may be differences between 'now' and 'then'.

Any discussion about BangkokтАЩs gay bars between the 1980s/90s and today needs mention of a major event that occurred almost exactly 13 years ago. On 23 July 2001, Dream Boys Bar in Soi Duangthawee (Soi Twilight) was raided by the police. The owner was instructed that in future there was to be no nudity, no big cock show and no sex show. Boys were still permitted to dance in underwear and customers still arranged offs. This was not the first time a Bangkok bar had been raided, but regular pay-offs to the bib meant they were very isolated affairs. Dream Boys was not closed and it was assumed that business would return to normal within a day or two. It did not.

Around this time, the iTV channel aired a series of five investigative reports about the sex shows in gay bars. Thanks to a hidden camera, graphic footage of two young men engaged in anal sex swinging from overhead bars was shown. Very quickly the state-owned Channel 9 jumped on the bandwagon and broadcast its own exposes of gay nightlife. These programmes created a major public scandal throughout the country.

At that time, entertainment venues were supposed to close at 2:00 am but not all did. Just the previous month, the Venue Operators Association had lobbied the Interior Minister, Purachai Plumsombun, to extend closing to 5:00 am. Purachai would hear nothing of it, complaining that visiting Ministers from China had protested after being taken to watch sex-shows whilst visiting Thailand (presumably a pretty spurious excuse)!

Purachai had been given the Interior Minister portfolio by his old friend and former colleague in the Police Academy and later in the business he ran. That friend was the recently elected PM Thaksin Shinawatra. Whilst it seems no-one has been able to point the finger directly at Thaksin, it is assumed that Purachai had at least cleared what was about to happen with his boss. And it can surely be no coincidence that the owner of iTV was none other than the Thaksin family who held a 53% shareholding. For that raid on Dream Boys was to be no isolated event. It was to prove the start of two major moral social order campaigns: one targeted at the nightlife industry in general; the other specifically at gay establishments. All would end up suffering to a certain extent from new regulations and new restrictions.

Purachai was determined to stamp out sex shows and to ensure laws governing entertainment venues would be aggressively enforced. On this moral high ground, Purachai directed the social order campaign. Whether the one against the gay businesses was directly linked to it has again not been proved. Whatever, no-one at the time realised that the raid on Dream Boys was to be the start of a long six-week campaign against the gay entertainment businesses.

At one point six gay bars in the central Suriwong-Patpong area were closed. Sex shows involving nudity ended. Even go-go dancing in briefs stopped at certain bars. In week two all bars, straight and gay, were ordered to close by 2 a.m., and told to bar the entry of any customers under 20. This was the beginning of the very well-publicized "social order" campaign of Interior Minister Purachai Piumsombun, concerned with closing hours, underage patrons and drugs. Beginning in week three, all thirteen small gay host bars in the more distant Saphan Khwai area were closed. By week six, the targeting of the gay bars was over, but PurachaiтАЩs crusade for a new moral "social order," reining in all entertainment venues, continued, publicly endorsed by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra . . .

Purachai said he would erase social ills and create an orderly society for quality people to live in. He said a good country should be one where children stayed at home with their parents at night and only a few people visited the appropriate entertainment venues in designated areas.

Other actions included raids on saunas with Obelisk and Colony thereafter closing for good, a ban on full nudity in the rising number of sex photo magazines that had started to spring up, and all bars had in future to be licensed.

Eventually, some newspapers began to hit out at PurachaiтАЩs campaign. The Nation carried an article under the headline тАЬCrackdown on bars will hurt tourismтАЭ. Some members of ThaksinтАШs Thai Rak Thai party also voiced criticism of the new regulations. But Purachai won out. Although by November many of the bars seemed to be back to normal, no-one was quite sure for how much longer this would continue. Within 2 years, closing time for most of the entertainment venues was reined in again to 1:00 am with police routinely entering bars to enforce the regulation. Soon nighttime entertainment establishments could only operate in certain zones.

What of Purachai? By the end of 2001, polls showed that he scored higher recognition than anyone in the government other than Thaksin. Equally, his social order campaign continued to gain the highest approval ratings. Could this be one reason, I wonder, why the easy-going, freewheeling nature of BangkokтАЩs bars that many of us enjoyed right up to the end of the 1990s changed early in the new millennium?

Much of the above is paraphrased and the quote taken from a long and interesting article тАЬThe Crackdown on Gay Bars in Bangkok: Summer, 2001тАЭ published first in Gais Sans Frontiers on 11 November 2011.
http://archive.globalgayz.com/asia/thai ... reports-4/

[2lz2p]

Restaurants
He recommended one restaurant, with four stars:
The Thai Rooms - 30/37 Patpong 2 Road (underneath TiffanyтАЩs Cocktail Lounge as mentioned above) тАУ Comments: Reasonable prices for good food.

This was a fairly large restaurant on Patpong 2 - I ate there a couple times on my first visit - rather extensive menu including Texas Chili (being from Texas, I passed on giving it a try) - also it was not a fine dining type of place; but was usually busy. When I was researching for a hotel, I had the Rose on my list - but travel agent didn't list - so booked at the Manohra. While eating at the Thai Room, I struck up a conversation with the person at the next table - turned out he was from Dallas and I was from Fort Worth - he said he was staying at the Rose, so I inquired as to any problem with joiners -- his response was no, the elevator is near the reception desk, so if you brought an elephant through the lobby, they would probably just tell you to be careful on the elevator.

In my earlier comments I mentioned using a guide book, but not which one as I couldn't recall -- thanks to later post, I now remember - it was TMOT - The Men of Thailand - it had a wealth of information about Thailand and the gay scene.

[colmx]

the elevator is near the reception desk, so if you brought an elephant through the lobby, they would probably just tell you to be careful on the elevator.

Now we know why the elavator in the rose always seems to stop 6 inches short on the 5th floor!

[Brad the Impala]

Answers to some queries arising from Spartacus.

Tomboy was in Soi 4 and was the furthest gay bar away from Silom, just beyond the Lonely Boy Bar. It was owned and run by a policeman who lived above the shop. There were also rooms for rent upstairs but I can't comment on the peepholes except to say that I didn't notice them!

The Lonely Boy was also owned by an ex Police Sergeant, Chaan, who had also been a successful Thai boxer. On special occasions or if any customer expressed interest, he would put his boxing shorts and accoutrements on again and demonstrate the traditional Thai boxing dance. Very interesting, but seeming a little protracted on subsequent viewings.

Chaan's boyfriend was an older American, Howard, who had visited Bangkok and the Lonely Boy on R & R while working in Vietnam as an auxiliary to the US army. He liked it so much that he stayed and I don't think he ever went back to the States again. They were good people and usually had seven or eight guys living with them to entertain the customers. They were never the handsomest selection, I don't think that they ever turned away anyone who wanted to work there, but the guys were always friendly and well mannered. Every now and again they unearthed a jewel who stayed with them a while, before graduating to life as a freelance at the Garden Bar or Harries.

The Garden Bar was the first bar in Soi Two, on the first floor of the end building, and was frequented by gay older teenagers and their admirers. Not everyone there was available but there was a fun atmosphere and the guys used to love dancing together, even the cha cha cha. The bar was opened by Vichai who had a hairdressers on Silom. He then had a share in Harries when that was opened underneath. The other owner, who was always present and who became known as Harry, had been bought his share by his German lover who had literally first found him in a ditch, where he was digging, topless and exposing his impressive physique.

The guys in The Garden Bar which closed around midnight would not go onto Harries unless Vichai told them they were ready or mature enough, or unless they were with a customer. As others have said when Harries closed around 2am, but you could stay on and go through a connecting door to Ciro's, same ownership. It was like having three gay discos in the same street with lots of willing partners.


The Thai Rooms was a restaurant in Patpong Two, which was reasonably priced and good value. For some reason it was a regular haunt of guys with their boyfriends. It wasn't particularly gay friendly, just neutral. It was unusual in that it was run as a cooperative.


Aah history!

[RonanTheBarbarian]

Thanks for the personal remembrances, Brad.

Of course Lonely Boy was where you had that birthday party in the early Seventies, the evocative photo of which has appeared on various "history" threads on SGT down the years.

Dont post it again, good an all as it is, let em search for it!