Things to Know
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“You want? I have condom,” he whispered.
I’m a massage mole; I love going for massages. And there is no better place for the sheer variety of offerings than Bangkok.
Some days, I choose the highly skilled professional massage places complete with burning aroma, rose petals, ginger tea, and staff bowing so frequently you fear they’d soon be hunchbacked. Other days, I want the friskier places.
The frisky places are where the dangers lurk. The price of the massage tells you that the establishment cannot quite afford to pay the masseurs decent salaries and they have to depend on tips. Naturally, the way to maximize tips is for the masseurs to offer “special services” to round off a session.
But massage, to mean anything, has to involve oil, and especially since these boys aren’t professionally trained, they tend to slather on the oil like one might baste a pig for roasting. And then after all that oiling, to still expect condoms to provide a reliable barrier… well, wake up. (Oil and oil-based lubricants such as hand creams, baby oil, and Vaseline can damage latex and cause latex condoms to tear more easily. So use only water-based lube such as KY Jelly, Astroglide, Wet.)
How many other customers do it nonetheless? “It” being penetrative sex, lubricated with oil, for surely that is what they’re going to use as lubricant since I have yet to see water-based lube in a massage room. I fear many do. Or worse, many do without…the condom!
The HIV prevalence rate among men who have sex with men (MSM) in Thailand is getting very serious. A survey conducted in 2007 found that nearly 31 percent of MSM were HIV-positive, a 3-percentage point increase from an earlier survey conducted in 2005.
With these numbers, it would be foolish if you did not assume that
the partner with whom you’re having sanook (meaning “fun” in Thai) is
HIV-positive, and take appropriate precautions.
Nor is this just a Thai problem, since tens of thousands of
Singaporeans, Hongkongers, Taiwanese, Japanese, and Malaysians make
annual “pilgrimages” to the City of Angels on the Chao Phraya.
Given all this travelling, let’s not imagine we are safe from the growing epidemic in the country we love.
The more crucial question is: Why aren’t the proprietors of these places ensuring that their staff knows what not to do?
One possibility is that they wish to maintain deniability; they don’t
want to acknowledge officially that sex takes place on the premises, so
the less they raise the subject with their staff, the better. But as we
all know from years of experience in other countries, denial is one of
HIV’s best friends.
Do the Thai authorities create problems for these places unless they maintain deniability? I don’t know, but it is a distinct possibility. If so, then, it is extremely short-sighted of the authorities.
On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that this can be the reason. After all, the condoms are neatly slipped under the orchid, and the manager goes out of his way to remind customers that the tip for the boy is 500 baht (US$14), but “if something special happens, then the minimum tip is one thousand baht.” If he’s saying that openly, what’s stopping him from being frank with the employees about risks?
It’s a really shameful reflection on the gay community, since most proprietors of these establishments are gay, and virtually all the customers are too.
Source: www.fridae.com
Two other caveats from the editors of SPICE!:
1. While an 18-year-old go-go employee can be “offed,” he must be 20 to go into another club or bar.
2. Poppers are illegal in Thailand.