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.