Bangkok Ladyboys

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK “BANGKOK LADYBOYS”, BY DANISH AUTHOR HENRIK LIST AND DANISH PHOTOGRAPHER ANDERS ASKEGAARD (w. 48 pages of color photography, published by Shooting Gallery Press in collaboration with Tiderne Skifter, Copenhagen, Denmark, Fall 2006).

Copyright Henrik List, 2007.

Madam Butterfly & The Butterfly Man

“What’s so bad about being two sexes in one, honey? We’re SO blessed!”

(Ladyboy-actor in the Thai film, “The Iron Ladies”)

After a couple of weeks in Bangkok, the nightstand drawer is full of crumbled paper notes and cocktail napkins adorned with telephone numbers, little hearts and smiley-faces; the names read, “Pop”, “Coco”, “Lily”, “Chanel”, “Linda”, “Nancy”, “Flower” and “Michelle”, all of which, without a doubt, have never been listed on a Thai birth certificate. And I have become sufficiently friendly with the mama-san at Casanova Club (especially after sharing a 200 dollar bottle of Moët & Chandon that I brought with me one night) to be allowed to touch her smooth, surgically perfect, and organically realistic breasts, which must have cost a fortune, as we sit and talk late at night in one of the booths. I call her “Madam Butterfly” because she teasingly calls me a butterfly man[4]. The ice around the queen is beginning to melt...

Ladyboys are everywhere in Bangkok, day and night, including at Nana Plaza, a compact, multi-storey red light district otherwise catering exclusively to heterosexual farang customers. The homosexual sex tourists have their own theme-park in Patpong’s Soi 2, where small brown boys in tight, white cotton underpants hug the chrome poles instead of small brown girls in bikinis and swimsuits. There is a clear distinction and apparently no social interaction between these two scenes; not even – as one might otherwise expect – between the Thai male hustlers and the “professional” ladyboys, both variations of the same gender and sexuality. No, the local ladyboys apparently do not have anything at all to do with the gay scene, as men that want to have sex with other men obviously aren’t interested in guys that look more like girls than many girls do, whereas the ladyboys themselves – despite their periodically fiery, testosterone-tainted temper tantrums – consciously pursue men that can confirm their particular brand of twisted sexuality and are aroused by their stylized form of femininity. Meanwhile, ladyboys have become politically incorrect among a new generation of Thai gays, modeling their sexuality according to Western gay and str8-acting concepts, and therefore seeing them as an almost embarrassing anachronism from times in which the only way to be openly “homosexual” was to dress as a woman...

Bangkok’s tens of thousands of ladyboys comfortably frequent (without inciting any visible anger or disgust) the midnight world of the heterosexual. They are young or old, ugly, pretty or completely average looking in their display of illusive femininity. They have “real” girls as friends and “real” men as boyfriends; they work and party (in addition to the decidedly transvestite bars such as Casanova) at discothèques and night clubs as waitresses, go-go dancers, hostesses, prostitutes and/or freelancers (that is, semi-prostitutes without a contract). All farang establishments in Bangkok have at least a couple of ladyboys employed; a lot have many more, and at some of the legendary mega-clubs in the notorious Patpong meat market (where many parallel sois to number 2 are purely straight in their orientation), over half of the beauties are not women in a biological sense. This highlights the Vaseline-slippery junction between “ladies” and “ladyboys”, which is apparently just as much so in many of the visiting Westerners’ consciousness. In Bangkok, they do things that they would never dare at home, completely without reproach...

Therefore, a rivalry exists between bio-girls and ladyboys for the attention of the male customers. When one speaks with the bio-girls about it, one senses a hint of envy of the typically taller, thinner and larger-breasted ladyboys, who, thanks to their natural physique (and the more or less subtle trickery of hormones, make-up and surgery), are closer to Western ideals of beauty than a lot of the diminutive, dark-skinned Thai girls. Fun, my girl from Hell’s Belles, grows furious when a couple of the “girls” from Casanova – where I had been nearly every evening with The Photographer to talk and write notes, drink and take pictures – send me a finger kiss one day on the street. Futilely, I try to explain to her that it is my job, that I am in fact trying to compose a story on ladyboys for a men’s magazine in Scandinavia, but the excuses have a pathetic ring to them, even in my own ears. Fun knows what farang men are like when they are set loose without wives, girlfriends, colleagues or conventions in Bangkok. “Are you sure you don’t want ladyboy instead of me?” she asks sarcastically later that night as we lay naked in bed after making love. Sarena’s face flashes through my head as I pretend to have fallen asleep because, at that point, I have to admit that I am not capable of assuring her with a shred of conviction that she and her gender have my loyalty...

When Nana Plaza’s numerous bars and clubs – and the discothèque at Hotel Nana (known as “Fuck Hotel”!) across from the plaza – close at two in the morning, Sukhumvit’s Soi 4 transforms into a melting pot of Thais and tourists, seething with prostitutes and pickpockets, cops and conmen – and Burmese children selling chewing gum, cigarettes and flowers. The 24-hour convenience store outside of Nana Plaza moves pint bottles of Mekong and cold cans of beer by the hundreds, hungry people crowd the food vendors, tuk-tuks and taxis plow honking through the herd, beggars crawl up from the gutters, dubious, scruffy men wave brochures for massage parlors in one’s face, and hundreds of “civilian” young girls in fashionable, western attire, obviously on the prowl, giggle in the dark and send longing gazes to younger foreign men in hopes of meeting a boyfriend, or at least to get a sweet “date” for the rest of the night. Just like western teenagers that go to the city on the weekend to party, score or just have some fun.

Not until after some time in the area do we find out that even some of them are actually ladyboys – or rather, girlboys, considering their ages of between 14-15 and 17-18 years old: Students or shop clerks by day, androgynous princesses by night, where they walk arm in arm in groups of four or five, back and forth in front of the amusement centers in the area, giggling delightedly when men whistle, and blushing shyly when they speak directly to them. The “professional” ladyboys at Casanova – even the cool mama-san – fantasize about being fashion models, and the most beautiful of them would probably make it in a better, less bigoted world. At first, there was a ban on taking photographs on the premises, but fortunately it didn’t last long. A bottle of genuine, vintage French champagne and a couple more evenings of a costly charm offensive by The Photographer and me on the rest of the “girls” was enough to convince most of them to pose for his camera. This even included as they did their hair and make-up on the balcony in the early evening, not looking even half as seductive as they would later in the sultry red light inside.

Quite the opposite was the case with the young girlboys, a new generation of ladyboy lolitas emerging from their cocoons of adolescence with discreet signs of budding tits and puppy fat rounded out by the hormones many of them begin taking as young as 10-12 years old – often with the approval of parents, doctors and pharmacies. Shy as bambies, they fled when we approached – at least the first many times. Until one night when we finally come into conversation with Umi and Tong, girlfriends of 18 and 19 who are a bit older and braver than the others, curious to discover why we’re running around taking pictures of ladyboys on the streets. The vision of appearing in a western fashion magazine – even one for men! – trumps their remaining fears, and The Photographer begins flashing away like a possessed man between the boozers and freelancers in front of Big Duck’s Bar, while Umi writes down her cell phone number and (as something new) her email address on my notepad.

Umi lives at home with her parents in Bangkok, she tells us. She studies business and communications at the university and speaks much better English than most of the Thais we had spent time with up to that point. We stand face to face with yet another new and surprising side of ladyboy culture in the form of a pair of feminized middle class boys that are not involved in prostitution and do not express their special kind of sexuality due to social need – which one could fear was the case for some of the Casanova girls. Umi and Tong find themselves higher up in the social hierarchy than many of the Casanova habitués, most of whom arrived on the afternoon train directly from dirt-poor rural villages in the North or Northeastern part of Thailand (Isaan), supported their family back home with money made from prostitution and undoubtedly did not have any other alternative to making a career out of their gender manipulation than hard physical agricultural or factory assembly line labor. These are women with an uncertain future when the beauty of youth begins to wither and the man, hidden up until then under their feminine camouflage, returns with a vengeance from a distant, nearly forgotten past.

Over the next month, we meet more of these teenage girlboys through Umi and Tong who are still playing with the new gender possibilities and are on a euphoric high over having become almost-women, over having sprung out of their cocoons and spreading out their delicate butterfly wings. The majority of them aren’t even old enough to get into the promised land of the bars, night clubs and discothèques, as the minimum age is 18 and everyone gets carded, so we sit on the stairs next to a fountain on Sukhumvit Road in the warm nights, smoking endless cigarettess and drinking cool soda and eating chicken skewers, as they tell about hormone treatments and saving up for cosmetic or sex reassignment surgery; about ideal boyfriends and more realistic family conflicts – conflicts with parents that in some cases (logically enough) would have rather seen that they had remained the boys they were born as.

Otherwise, it seems as if tolerance for ladyboys is widespread in the relaxed and smiling Thailand – as in so many places in Asia, where Buddhism (in contrast to Christianity) does not interfere in peoples’ individual sex lives, and where the phenomenon has existed for centuries – and in some places (Burma, for example) it has even inspired a cult worship of transvestites as gurus and mediums, believed to have a direct line to the spirits because they hold both the masculine and feminine sides at once. There is a certain level of legislative discrimination against ladyboys, as they cannot have their sex changed on their ID cards or passports and therefore cannot technically be raped (because according to Thai laws, a man simply cannot be physically raped!) Many regular middle class Thais probably still view them as a necessary evil along the lines of bar girls, go-go dancers or prostitutes: A fact of life about which one can do nothing. But it is only the fewest that raise an eyebrow when one, as a farang, comes strolling down the street with a ladyboy in tow. One Sunday, we took Umi and Tong to the huge weekend market, Chatuchak in northern Bangkok, an anthill of locals, to purchase sunglasses for The Photographer and Thai pop CDs for me. The girls performed like supermodels on a runway without harvesting a single evil eye or turned head in disbelief. This of course would hardly be the case if one had perused a main street in an European downtown area in broad daylight with girls like them in hand.

According to “Middlesex”, a documentary from the serious British TV station, Channel 4, it is estimated that there are around 300,000 ladyboys out of a general population of 63 million in Thailand. That is, approximately one out of 100 Thai men are ladyboys, an amazingly high number that at the same time seems entirely realistic to travelers who have noted their widespread visibility throughout the country. Ladyboys are an integrated part of the traditional and popular Thai culture. Every other TV show has an ugly and a beautiful transvestite on the cast, a foolish clown and a sophisticated beauty respectively, and the annual Miss Tiffany beauty pageant receives just as much media coverage as the official Miss Thailand. The winner in 2002, 26 year old Thanyaporn Thanyasiri went on to Miss Queen of The Universe in the United States, which she also won, making her so self assured that she declared her future goal was to be the world’s first transsexual head of state as the Prime Minister of Thailand. And, actually, why not?!

National stars, such as the boyband idol, Sunny UFO and the fashion model Go only consolidated their fame in their home country via their sex change operations from man to woman. The so-called ladyboy cabarets[5], where some of the most strikingly beautiful transvestites and transsexuals perform in glamorous stage numbers, draw both Thais and tourists in streams, and the feature film, “The Iron Ladies” – a true story about a team of ladyboys and gays winning the Thai championship in volleyball for men – was one of the most seen Thai titles ever in local cinemas. The country’s most famous ladyboy, Nong Toom, was given permission to wear make-up in the ring and became a professional champion in the violent national sport of muay thai/kickboxing (for men) before assuming her current role as TV host, celebrity and actor in a film about her own life entitled “Beautiful Boxer” – with the PR catch phrase, “He fights like a man so he can become a woman.”

Advertisements very directly offer sex reassignment surgery in newspapers and magazines, ladyboys are seen as hairdressers, clerks or entrepreneurs in their own street shops peddling snacks, clothing or shoes, and a 33 year old teacher broke a new social barrier while we were in Thailand, becoming the first declared ladyboy to gain official permission to teach in primary school. This led to a string of interviews – without a hint of moral reproach – in numerous local newspapers. How would editorial writers react in a Western country if a primary school teacher met up for class one Monday morning in drag?!

A flirt between Umi and me has begun to develop through the long, smolderingly erotic nights on Sukhumvit Road, and one of the other, even younger girlboys, Bow, hangs shyly in the periphery and writes cute doodle greetings on scraps of paper, frequently calling the apartment to ask if we aren’t “going to come by the fountain” if she hasn’t seen me there for a couple of days. To a bio-girl like Fun, I am an ATM, a walking money machine that must be milked for sperm and cash, but, contrarily, the attention from these girlboys seems innocent and romantic. To them, one is not just a kek (john) that is to contribute to supporting the family back in the village, but a “real” man, a potential boyfriend that can confirm to them that they are sweet and beautiful women in bloom – and not simply lanky, feminine teenage boys that are trying to look like sweet and beautiful girls.

In any case, Umi is interested in being more than a friend, and the steady, virtuous goodbye kiss has moved inch by inch from my cheek to my lips. We smile at each other in the night and stand for a moment hand in hand in the gutter before she whispers “bye-bye Enlik” and disappears into a noisy tuk-tuk: going home to mother and father to sleep among all her pink stuffed animals, I imagine. One last glimpse of the cutesy doll face, the loosely flowing hair and the lip-gloss-shiny pucker, turned towards me in the headlights of oncoming cars... The other girlboys giggle and cling to one another, nervously oscillating of arousal, as the belittled Bow lowers her white-powdered face and hides her gaze behind black bangs.

One could fall in love with Umi; one could fall in love with Bow. If one was ten years younger and twenty pounds lighter, and not...

Further information: www.shoo.dk or www.henriklist.dk