History of Soi Twilight

[JayToff]

A Description of the Bars of Soi Twilight and the Terrible Things that Happened Therein, Along with A Brief Chronology of its Demise

The stub history of Soi Twilight posted above was necessarily constrained by the 15,000 character limit, so that while the reader is left with a decent chronology of the evolution of the soi, readers who did not personally experience Soi Twilgiht may also be left wondering about what distinguished one bar from another, how the scene on Soi Twilight evolved over time and how it all relates to the current, reconstituted, bar scene in the Twilight Zone in Patpong. While the skeleton of a decent history of Soi Twilight is to be found in the previous posts; this post aims to put some flesh onto the bones.

Rather than writing a follow-up post on the different bars purely from memory, I shall instead guide the reader to a contemporary account by that most astute and amusing of bar scene chroniclers, the late and much-missed Rush.

The additional benefit of doing that, of course, is to introduce the unfamiliar to Bangkokbois which, even five years after the final post, remains the gold standard for insight into the world of the Bangkok bar scene. For while Soi Twilight is no more, the majority of the old bars have simply reconstituted themselves across the road. Apart from that, it’s just a bloody funny read…

For a description of the bars on Soi Twilight in 2011, the year it attained its peak, along with some good pictures of the bars, see:
https://bangkokbois.sawatdeenetwork....gay-gogo-bars/

For a raunchier description of what actually happened in those different bars, see:
https://bangkokbois.sawatdeenetwork....-and-the-ugly/

Each of those links is a five-minute read.

Rush died in 2015 and so never chronicled the end of Soi Twilight, nor was it obvious then that 2015 marked the year in which the decline of Soi Twilight began as rumours started to circulate that that the soi was going to be redeveloped, giving bar owners little incentive to make new investments.

The years 2011 to 2014 marked the peak of Soi Twilight in terms of the number of venues. Then, in February 2015, The Zeus, which occupied the site of what had previously been Future Boys and then Ocean Boys, closed for good and no new bar opened in its place. This was followed by the closure of Mario Massage in mid-2015, with, yet again, no replacement venue taking-over the space. If things then seemed to stabilise, this was only a prelude to the flood.

In late 2017, Chai Massage closed on Soi Twilight, with nothing taking its place. In April 2018, Fresh Boys jumped across to Patpong 2 and then the long-running Dick’s Café closed in mid-2018, announcing that they were leaving Soi Twilight for Pattaya’s Jomtien Complex. The impending demise of Soi Twilight was now visible to everyone, despite the heroic insistence that it was “business as usual” by the remaining bars.

The upstairs X-Size A Go-Go bar closed in September 2018, followed by the closure of its downstairs pool bar at the beginning of 2019. The nameless pool bar with its stock of street urchins, located after Dream Boy, closed at about the same time and the Rama IV end of Soi Twilight began to be walled-off with sheet metal. With the not-quite iron curtain now falling, the stage was set for the final exodus.

In April 2019, the remaining venues left Soi Twilight. These included the Soi Twilight stalwarts Dream Boy, Banana, Bangkok Massage and Hot Male. Fittingly, Hot Male was the last bar to leave Soi Twilight. As the original Twilight Bar had lit the spark that led to the rise of Soi Twilight almost 50 years before, it was only right that its reincarnation, Hot Male, should have been the one to finally switch-off the lights on that little soi of neon-lit fantasies.

[christianpfc]

Then, in February 2015, The Zeus, which occupied the site of what had previously been Future Boys and then Ocean Boys, closed for good and no new bar opened in its place.

They closed in December 2014. I went there on 28dec2014 (with vinapu, prolific poster on gayguides) and it was not in business any more. Door was open, lights on but nobody in, so I took pictures of inside and the Zeus statue outside.

This was followed by the closure of Mario Massage in mid-2015, with, yet again, no replacement venue taking-over the space.

I remember Mario Massage. After Mario Massage there was a snooker hall and reception area for a massage related to X-Size on upper level. Here my one visit to this place:
https://christianpfc.blogspot.com/20...-thailand.html

Wed 13jun2018 X-Size massage
The cute boy Lee the Analphabet (whom I first met years ago in Pradipat Karaoke, then he worked in X-Size on stage, then in Fresh boys as waiter) now works in X-Size massage, which is my chance to get him after years of fruitless chat (he cannot read or write Thai or English)!

[colmx]

[B]For a description of the bars on Soi Twilight in 2011, the year it attained its peak, along with some good pictures of the bars, see:
https://bangkokbois.sawatdeenetwork....gay-gogo-bars/

Whilst I appreciate the effort that you have gone through to put together this report, I have no idea where you get the idea that 2011 was the peak of Soi Twilight. If anything it had peaked ten years earlier and was already in its death throes by 2011.

Of course if you look at the statistics it may seem that there were more venues in 2011 than in earlier/later years, but in this case quantity does not equal quality

By 2011 Twilight was already a shadow of its former self and had been abandoned by both its farang and Thai customer base, in this case they were replaced by Chinese tour groups who in the main were there for the shows and not to off boys, party or consume alcohol

[Armando]

For a description of the bars on Soi Twilight in 2011, the year it attained its peak

Sorry I cannot agree that 2011 was when Twilight attained its peak. Yes, perhaps it had more bars that year (although I actually doubt it) but then many had opened and closed in between 2000 and 2010. Sitting in Dick's Cafe, some will remember a bar diagonally opposite with some sort of technology theme. Can't remember the name but it did not last long. I only remember it because one of the boys always outside was aggressively cute and as I later found out completely hairless apart from on his head and lower down. What a turn on! It became a billiards bar.

Then there was the short lived X-treme Bar. This was run by a white haired Englishman who I believe had worked in some position for the Church of England. He tried a different theme. He did have some regular gogo dancers but the main 'act' was a group of 8 or so young professional dancers or dance students who put on a different dance show every week. There was never nudity but these boys were great dancers and the shows were really fun. They would also mingle with customers after the shows. When the bar closed - probably around 2003 - the boys moved over to the German owner's bar across the soi. But even he found the act did not bring in the customers and so they migrated once again to the old Rome Club in Soi 4, then called Roxy. Again I think they did not last long.

We really have to remember that nightlife definitely changed after the Thaksin government's Social Order campaigns in 2001 and the new rules they laid down. One result was that many of the Thai customers who had been quite frequent bar hoppers in the 1980s and 90s began to disappear. By the turn of the millennium, gay saunas and massage establishments had been operating for well over a decade and they also tended to take customers away from the traditional gogo bars. In 2006 an article in The New York Times mentioned Bangkok's dwindling number of night spots. It also highlighted the increased number of raids on nightlife establishments. These were always accompanied by a media scrum. Who can forget the raid on Babylon led by some senior Minister who was photographed outside gingerly holding a condom and pronouncing that this was evidence of illegal sexual activity? The fact that another branch of government had been actively promoting the use of condoms for years as an anti-HIV measure seems not to have occurred to him!

The NYT article even quoted Kurt Wachtveitl, the legendary manager of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, who that year spoke out against the social order rules, especially those that mandated the closure of bars and clubs at 1:00 am. "If Bangkok continues to be the kind of city that begins to look sleepy after midnight, it will be wasting all its advantages to the upscale foreign visitors. They'll go to Beijing, Shanghai and now Singapore," he lamented.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/01/t...m-bangkok.html