On love, lust and boys

[snotface]

I first came to Thailand as a tourist in 1988 and moved out here to live in 2005. That's a lot of time spent in Thailand. Obvious question: has it made me happy? Well, happiness comes in many shapes and sizes. If by it we mean deep, lasting happiness, no, Thailand certainly hasn't done that, though I believe it to be possible given wiser life choices than I have made. On the other hand, when I look back on my dark, repressed, pre-Thailand self I feel that I am in a better place now. My main reason for coming to Thailand has always been the boys and the relaxed, guilt-free attitude to sex of most Thai boys has inevitably 'rubbed off' (ahem) on me to some extent.

I have had sex with several hundred boys in my time (a modest tally by the standards of some) and I don't regret it at all, though I sometimes feel I should have moved on by now. The chase has always excited me (if 'chase' is the right word to describe walking into a bar and saying 'I'll have number eight please'). As for the actual bed event, it has sometimes been a disappointment or even a complete waste of time, but more often I have been pleasantly surprised by how giving many of the boys are. Always the high of physical release is followed for me by a level of unease - or even self-disgust if little or no rapport with the boy has been established. Then it just feels like unadorned lust, brutish and ultimately coarsening. Many here will probably disagree. Good for them, I'm just reporting how I personally react after the paid sex to which I am addicted. (For a truly damning take on lust, try reading Shakespeare's sonnet 129).

On several occasions I have become emotionally entangled with boys (let me count them – five) for periods from anywhere between nine months and three years. I find it hard to bring myself to say 'fallen in love' since even to me it feels like such wimpish folly to have done so with barboys. Bad odds. The highs have been intoxicatingly high in these relationships, but the lows far, far worse than normal. Oh, all that clinging, the jealousy, the constant anxiety, the mind games, the humiliations, the frustrations. It hasn't helped at all that the boys I have become involved with have usually had lukewarm feelings towards me at best, often degenerating into dislike. (No need to point out that low self-esteem on my part has a lot to do with my toleration of this situation). The one consolation is that I have never put myself at risk of financial ruin in these relationships. So a modicum of commonsense. I was on the verge of it in the case of one boy with whom I was utterly besotted, but another farang whisked him away to live in Bangkok at an opportune moment (it didn't feel like good fortune at the time).

The longest I have actually lived with a Thai boy was for two years soon after I moved here to live. He was nineteen, new to the bar scene, quite good-looking. I was never in love with him, but it felt like a good time to try the live-in experience. For the first year I was probably more contented than at any time before or since. We made trips in Thailand together, he had his own music-making hobby, sex was available at any time I wanted it, there were no requests to help the family. I think actually that he fell in love with me, which was quite a novelty. If anyone got jealous it was him. Why did it finally go wrong? Usual reasons: the sex gradually became a chore and I grew increasingly bored, what with the age gap, the culture gap, the everything gap. A crisis point was reached when he returned a couple of hours early from a trip to Bangkok one day and found me in flagrante delicto with another boy. A scene worthy of French farce. There were tears, recriminations. He said he forgave me but things were never the same again. We stuttered and spluttered our way to a parting of company.

Abraham Lincoln is supposed to have said that 'love is a many-stringed harp', an oblique reference perhaps to his habit of sleeping in the same bed with another male (in fairness to honest Abe, that didn't automatically confer the status of poofterdom back then). Anyway, I wholeheartedly endorse his sentiment. In the last couple of years I have had some experience of this myself. I first met Num (as I'll call him) twelve years ago when he was twenty and working in a popular bar in Boyztown. He was the star looker with offs almost every night. I was immediately attracted to him, just my type: slim, beautiful eyes, smooth-skinned, gentle-looking but not effeminate. When I called him over he kept calling me 'darling' which irritated me (years later he admitted with a smile that it was one of only about a dozen English words he knew at the time). Back at my condo he turned out to be a so-so performer in bed but his dazzling looks made up for it. Oh, that gorgeous butt! He seemed to like me and we saw each other quite often for a while. I wondered whether I was about to enter the dreaded falling-in-love minefield again, but it never happened for some reason.

After a year or so he went to work in a bar in Bangkok and we lost touch for a number of years. Then I heard from him that he had gone to Kuala Lumpur to work in a massage shop, a few months at a time. We had occasional brief meetings, happy to see each other, him looking as sexy as ever, apparently ageless. The meetings died out. At times I began to think we had drifted apart for good, but then another Line message would pop up and we'd have a little chat. About two years ago I received a photo from him of a partly-built house near his parents' home in Khon Kaen. It had little more than foundations laid and a couple of breeze-block walls. He said he had run out of money and could I help him. Fool, I thought, fancy starting such a project with nowhere near enough money. I immediately rejected the idea and started to ignore follow-up requests. A couple of months passed, the messages becoming increasingly desperate. In the latest one, the poor, skeletal house was looking derelict before it was even built. By chance, I was in the throes of breaking up with my latest paramour (no fool like an old fool) and Num caught me on the rebound, feeling vulnerable. I thought to myself, If I were to die tomorrow or leave Thailand, would any Thai boy have any kindly thoughts towards me or would I quickly be consigned to oblivion? Almost certainly the latter. Although I had never been in love with Num, we had been friends for a long time. I had come into a chunk of money from a property sale in London. I was in a position to help without endangering my own finances. Almost on impulse (not quite), I decided to do so.

To cut the story short, I paid in instalments for the small bungalow to be finished. It has a decent-sized front and back garden which Num, good Isaan boy that he is (actually he's now thirty-two) has planted with lots of fruit and vegetables. He already had a nearby one-rai plot of land to grow rice and when he told me a while back that an opportunity had arisen to buy an adjoining four-rai plot I paid for that too. His reaction to all this has touched me. He has been very affectionate and very grateful. I've saved his life, he assures me, and I'm his Buddha (!). I get floral greetings on Line every morning and cheery goodnights at the end of the day. In between I usually get photos or videos showing me what he is currently up to. I like to have this previously-limited contact with rural Thailand on a daily basis and have told him I will visit as soon as the Covid situation improves.

He comes to see me for a few days at a time and did so just recently. He still looks sexy and his usually happy disposition warms me as it always has done. I don't lust after him, which puzzles me somewhat, for he can still turn heads when we are out and about. At all sorts of odd moments shafts of tenderness towards him surge through me. At night we lie chastely next to each other in bed and he no longer makes even the occasional attempts to arouse me which he probably felt obliged to do at first. I jokingly ask him if he will take care of me in my dotage and he insists he will. I think he means it, but who knows what the future will bring in this deeply troubled world. For now I just like the feeling that I have helped him out in significant ways without any sexual quid pro quo demanded or wanted. It feels good, very good actually, probably the most satisfying thing I have ever done in Thailand. Gorblimey, who would have thought it?

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