Below are some notes on the Patpong / Silom / Suriwong scene from my most recent visit to Bangkok, from mid-August till the end of the first week of September. The scene is definitely lively and on the up, although there is a way to go before it matches the pre-pandemic buzz. Much has changed, but much remains the same. More importantly, though, are several big changes to come.
PATPONG
There are currently three male a go-go bars operating on Patpong 2: Dream Boy, Fresh Boys and Hot Male. Along with the Midnight Bar and Red Dragon beer bars at street level, the Suriwong end of Patpong 2 has certainly come back to life. Crowds were decent and the number of boys available makes it easy to find someone, regardless of what your taste might be. What has clearly changed though, is the kind of customer to be found in the bars right now. A lot of the customers in the Patpong 2 bars were younger Asian guys travelling in groups of friends, often including women. These are people who come to watch the shows and may invite a boy down to join them for a drink, I don’t think I saw any of them actually off anyone. Also interesting was the number of straight Indian couples coming to watch the shows. That wasn’t something that I noticed pre-pandemic. While the Patpong 2 scene is limpid compared to what it was before the pandemic, it might be about to receive a shot in the arm, with Patpong 2 set to see a major change.
Dream Boy: Dream Boy continues to offer the biggest line-up of boys among any of the Bangkok bars, with around 50 boys in their crew at the moment. A good many of those are to be found on stage on weekends, with even week nights regularly featuring 25 or more boys. The quality of the line-up doesn’t hold a candle to what the bar used to offer during its Soi Twilight days, but it isn’t a great challenge to find someone who will match your taste, whatever your taste might actually be. Customer numbers fluctuated considerably over the course of my several visits, with the late night show on weekends seeming to draw the biggest crowds. Young Asians constituted the biggest contingent, but Dream Boy continues to attract a notable number of farang customers as well.
Mercifully, the katoey factor has declined visibly at the bar. A single katoey was prominent during the show, doing a comedic lip synch routine. Otherwise, the twice-nightly show now features a line-up of a go-go dancers, a big cock show, a choreographed strip dance routine with a trio of boys, and a fuck show with not one, but two simultaneously copulating couples engaging in athletic and acrobatic sex on stage before descending into the crowd. If you’re looking for an old school Bangkok fuck show, Dream Boy is the place to catch it; indeed Dream Boy is now the only place to catch it. The DNA of the old Boys of Bangkok is alive and well in this bar. It might not feature the sort of six car pile-ups sometimes seen in the old BoB, but this is as close as it gets.
For a bar that was once known for having the best line-up to be found anywhere, Dream Boy has gone through a period of clear decline since moving to Patpong. The smaller venue simply could not hold the number of customers, nor the facilities, needed to support the large stable of boys that they had on Soi Twilight, leading to the departure of many of their more popular boys. Added to that was the number of boys who chose to leave the industry during the pandemic. That period of decline now looks set for a reverse though…
In the biggest shake-up in the boy bar world over the last three years, Dream Boy has taken-over the huge Lucky Boys venue and is set to open there "before the 7th of October." The Dream Boy sign has already gone up at the new site.
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The venue’s interior is being refurbished, with Lucky’s katoey rococo fantasy décor being chucked out and the interior redone in Dream Boy’s signature black, chrome and mirrors theme.
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The new venue will comfortably be able to seat nearly 200 people.
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The current Dream Boy venue will be closed down following the move, with their Dream Boy Paradiso annexe already permanently closed. That, at least, is the plan, according to management; but this is Thailand and until the move actually happens, I shall remain only sceptically optimistic about them hitting their schedule.
In preparation, the bar has gone on a big recruitment drive in order to rebuild its famous “more than 100 boys” stable and, apparently, the have had a slew of applications from new boys looking to enter the industry. Amidst all the optimism though, the fly in the ointment has been their ending their famous “Only Thai Boys” policy, with a number of Cambodians now to be found in the bar. Management says that their focus will remain on recruiting Thai boys, however. The reboot of Dream Boy could be a catalyst for the scene on Patpong 2. If they are able to replicate anything close to their success on Soi Twilight, the Bangkok scene is about to get a shot in the arm and the prospect of their iconic neon sign returning to lord it over the soi gives me reason to start planning my next trip.
First drinks are priced at 450 baht (500 baht for cocktails). Boys' drinks are 400 baht. Off fees are 500 baht. Guys are mostly in jeans and bare-chested.
Hot Male now has about 15 boys on the books and between 10 to 15 on rotation every night. On all my visits, the boys clearly outnumbered the customers. Hot Male was still good fun though. This is the only completely katoey-free bar in Bangkok and the shows aren’t bad either. There were several decently choreographed dance numbers and a big cock show. Missing was their famous fuck show. When asked, Mamasan informed me that they had done away with it because “boss don’t like fuck show”. Really? “Since when?”, I was tempted to ask. Hot Male was practically the home of the fuck show. Alas, no longer, it would seem.
The line-up here is a mix of more muscled guys along with a few slightly raffish looking slimmer guys and the crew is mixed Thai and Cambodian. Twink lovers should look elsewhere, but the bar offers a number of well-muscled gay guys who are willing to bottom. Perhaps that is something that they ought to be advertising more aggressively, along with the absence of katoeys. Hot Male’s location counts against it in-terms of attracting walk-in traffic and they really do need to do a better job of marketing their offerings. Guys were mostly in jeans, when they were in anything at all. In a nice touch, the DJ is offable at the end of the night. Drinks, both yours and the boys’ are 400 baht. Off fees are 500 baht.
Fresh Boys remains a bastion of the Viet Cong. Their choice of Vietnamese bar boys, the style of their shows and the continued inclusion of Chinese in their commentary, despite the current absence of Mainland customers, makes clear that they have no intentions of changing anything to accommodate the current reality. Fresh Boys remains focused on attracting Chinese customers. This isn’t a bar that has ever excited me, but it continues to draw reasonable customer numbers and that can only be a good thing. Guys are in white shorts and there must have been about 15 of them visible when I popped-in shortly before show time. There were considerably fewer when I came for the late show on another occasion. Fuck shows, with a single couple, are available nightly, but they don’t generate anything close to the electricity of the Dream Boy bang show though. Drink prices have risen to 400 baht.
A couple of strange things have been written about the origin and ownership of Screw Boy and Lucky Boys over on the GT forum, leading to odd speculation about their future prospects. Screw Boy, for the record, is owned by the King’s Group, which controls most of the top girlie bars on Patpong 1, as well as the largest katoey bar in Patpong. At the current time, they have only reopened their flagship King’s Castle and King’s Castle 1 bars. Whether they will now consolidate their operations in just a few top properties or resume their wider business remains to be seen. Screw Boy’s fate remains in limbo at the moment. Lucky Boys, which was a merger of the X-Group Bars and Classic Boys is now permanently gone. According to the mamasan at Dream Boy, Lucky has no plans to reopen at a new location. Still, given the length of time that its owners spent in the industry and the ample availability of space, I wouldn’t rule-out something new emerging on the scene from that quarter. That may just be wishful thinking though.
SILOM SOI 4 (SOI KATOEY)
Soi 4 is not really my playground. Apart from Jupiter, there is little that holds my interest in the street. Still, a number of strolls along the soi show that it has made a strong recovery with good crowds on most nights.
Jupiter: If one bar has, genuinely, benefited from the anticipated influx of attractive men post-Covid, it is Jupiter. This bar has long had some of the best looking boys in the business and the current line-up is even more impressive than what they had prior to the pandemic. In the long-running contest between Jupiter and Dream Boy over which bar had the best boys, the crown is for now, clearly, on Jupiter’s head; and I say that as someone who continues to favour Dream Boy. Perhaps that will change with the reboot of Dream Boy next month; but for now Jupiter really has no rival in the handsome stakes. Unsurprisingly, Jupiter remains busy, with many of its boys booked for days in advance. The crowd still includes a large number of women and they still offer the slickest, least revealing shows in Bangkok. Their line-up remains heavily skewed towards Cambodians and management’s firm control over its migrant labour force ensures that those lads remain in great shape. Their boy parade alternates between having the guys in black briefs and in black jeans. Drinks are still 400 baht and off fees remain 500 baht.
Banana Boys turned-out to be one of the more pleasant surprises of this trip. Banana is, in fact, the relocated, original, Fresh Boys from Soi Twilight – a bar from which I never had any particular desire to off anyone or to spend more than half a minute in. The line-up here is mostly of smaller-sized guys who run the gamut from actual twinks, to a few pocket Hercules types, to a number of short, fat individuals. This is by no means the best line-up in Bangkok, but it was not bereft of possibilities. Having wandered in on a Sunday night, mid-way through their show, one was treated to a suck show, a rather impressive big cock show and a line-up of three ugly, lip-synching, drag queens. There was also a shower stall on stage, but if they had a shower show that night, I missed it. There were perhaps 15 to 20 guys in white shorts working when I wondered in on the final Sunday in August.
What gave the bar a fun vibe was the crowd. With their relocation to Soi 4, they are attracting a more casual, mixed Soi 4 crowd of gay men, straight couples and girls on a night out. Watching the reactions of the first-timers in the crowd to the shenanigans on stage was at least as amusing as what was happening on stage itself. Drinks are priced at 350 baht and at 250 baht for the boy drinks, making this the cheapest of the mainstream bars. Banana isn’t my cup of tea; but as an unplanned, one-off, alternative night out, it was pleasant enough. Note that the a go-go has moved to the ground floor from its previous first floor location.
Banana officially closes at 1:00 a.m. but the bar now offers a sort-of late night speakeasy on the top floor. Upstairs is a small disco that opens once the downstairs a go-go officially closes and it remains open until very late. The crowd in this little after-hours bar was mostly young Asians, with a couple of older farang who had, obviously, bought and brought their own company. It wasn’t my scene and I only stayed for a while to survey; but for those who want to stay out late but don’t want to go to Soi 2, this is now an option. Just walk into the seemingly-closed Banana Bar and straight-up to the top floor.
Continued below...
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