Gaysia (2 page)

INDONESIA

In which we travel to Bali and stay in establishments catering to foreign homosexual nudists, and encounter various local moneyboys and the men who love them. Things we learn: (1) how to roster several international boyfriends at a time; (2) sometimes sex work ain't so bad (you get a motorcycle!); (3) every man in Bali – at least according to one local – is a slut.

W
E COME TO
B
ALI
after reading
Eat, Pray, Love
, but most of us just come here to eat, drink and fuck. We come for the nasi goreng and Bintang, the towering Kuta waves and luxury resorts, the ten-dollar spa treatments and surf lessons. We come to scuba-dive, bird-watch, elephant-ride and monkey-gawk. We come to trek through sun-drenched rice paddies and find our inner selves at yoga retreats, or have foreign strangers drunkenly fondle our inner selves after too many drinks.

Holiday budgets don't matter in Bali. If you've ever felt poor, come to Bali just for the feeling of going to an ATM and withdrawing a million of something at one time. One million rupiah will get you around 100 US dollars, which will yield a
week's worth of food and drinks on this island if you're smart. Here is a currency so devalued and littered with zeroes that shops give breath mints when change gets impossibly small.

Bali itself is also small – on the right roads, it takes just over three hours to drive across the island – but it manages to cater to every imaginable urge and need. For gay visitors, those needs might include clothing-optional, male-only resorts, gay night clubs, drag performances, go-go boys, 24-hour house staff, nude sunbathing spots and a cute Indonesian moneyboy you can fuck until you're utterly spent and walking like a duck. It's rumoured that there is a place near Denpasar airport where you can go for a special eight-hand massage, where two men massage you while another two masturbate each other for your visual pleasure, and all for a cheap, cheap price.

It wasn't always like this. In a single decade, Bali's gay scene went from almost nothing to being
the
premier hotspot for fabulous homosexuals the world over. If you were a foreigner, especially a
bulé
– a Caucasian Westerner with pockets presumedly lined with cash – you could buy anything you wanted. Or anyone.

A lot of the gay
bulés
in Bali ended up where I'd been invited to stay: Spartacvs Hotel, a men's-only nude resort in the beachside tourist area of Seminyak. What started in 2007 as ‘the only Hotel in Bali dedicate [sic] to those who enjoy an alternative lifestyle' had become the region's only exclusively gay resort that provided a 100 per cent clothing-optional environment. Women and children weren't allowed and neither were ladyboys. It said so on the sign as you walked in.

Everything about the place made me nervous, not just the clothing-optional thing but also the purposeful misspelling of Spartacvs with a V instead of a U (apparently the V made it
more edgy). There was also the email I'd gotten from the owner who had invited me to stay. When I assured him I didn't have a problem with public nudity – looking back, maybe I was trying to convince myself – he responded by simply saying:
So I might get to see you naked around the pool, hmmm nice
.

The driver who picked me up from Denpasar airport was Ketut, a big-toothed, goofy-faced guy in his early thirties. Ketut had worked at Spartacvs since it opened and he'd been promoted over the years from simple housekeeping duties to admin and management. Working at Spartacvs was a good job, Ketut said, but getting there every day was a killer: a two-hour drive and another two back, sometimes in traffic that refused to budge.

Like most of the male staff at Spartacvs, Ketut was straight. He was also local, while most of the other workers had moved from Java, Jogjakarta or Sumatra to find better jobs in Bali. Some of Ketut's friends knew he worked at a nudist hotel for gay men, but his parents didn't. Guests were usually naked, he said, but staff remained uniformed the whole time. I asked Ketut whether the male guests ever hit on him, and he giggled and squirmed, knowing it was unprofessional to answer.

‘Noooooo,' he said. Then, after some encouragement, he said it actually happened pretty regularly. Ketut's approach was to turn them down gently with a boyish laugh and give his standard response: ‘Yeah, but me straight!'

We laughed. ‘Is it weird to work at a place like Spartacvs?' I asked. ‘I mean, every day you're surrounded by naked men …'

‘No! Because I enjoy! Is no problem!' He paused. ‘Maybe at first, was little bit …'

He trailed off.

‘Strange?'

‘Yeah!' he said, grinning. ‘But now, is fine!'

Ketut's funniest memory of working at Spartacvs took place within the first few months of the resort's opening, when three naked foreign men had hooked up poolside in broad daylight, completely going for broke, fucking each other in front of the staff and all the other guests, doing – as Ketut put it – ‘jiggy-jiggy'.

It was the first time Ketut had ever seen anyone have sex in public, much less a gay threesome of foreigners. Spartacvs's Indonesian staff had quietly watched the live sex spectacular from discreet vantage points with their hands over their mouths, curious and happily scandalised by the ways of Western men. Stuff like that didn't happen too often at Spartacvs, Ketut said, to my relief and – if I was completely honest with myself – slight disappointment. It was as if I'd been told about a terrifying natural phenomenon – a volcano exploding, a blood-coloured lunar eclipse – that happened once every few decades, then discovered I was probably going to miss out on seeing it.

When we arrived at Spartacvs, a doorman rolled my suitcase through miniature Jurassic Park gates, and across a stone walkway hovering over a pond filled with koi. Past a small concrete modesty wall, a lush poolside landscape of baby palms and frangipani trees opened up, framed by clusters of two-storey bungalows. Naked middle-aged men lazed around the pool, their bodies spread out on deckchairs. They looked up at me sleepily. I was wearing a t-shirt and shorts, but I had never felt so clothed in my life. A couple of men wore one-inch-on-the-hip speedos, but everyone else went nude. Penises were every where. And these penises weren't just attached to humans, but also appeared as sculptures and decorations: penis-shaped ashtrays and cement water features in the shape of erect phalluses. Timidly, I smiled and politely waved.

The atmosphere was a cross between a relaxing island getaway and a marine zoo, with everyone lounging around like so many seals – or walruses, depending on the body. Most were over fifty and nearly all were
bulés
, except for a lone sixty-something Japanese guy who was skinny and completely hairless from the neck down, roasting his skin in the sun to a rich shade of gravy brown. From his deckchair, he smiled at me though John Lennon sunglasses (the only thing he was wearing) as he continued to oil himself with the loving intensity of someone polishing their favourite boot.

Gary, Spartacvs's owner – the one who had encouraged me to get comfortable and naked,
hmmm nice
– was a super-friendly bald Australian who was fifty-nine years old and had a generous barrel-shaped body. Gary's accent was thick, the kind that comes with spending most of your life driving giant, 25-metre-long trucks between Australian towns. When Gary first started holidaying in Bali in the mid 1970s, he wasn't openly gay. He had originally come here with a straight travel buddy who liked to surf. When he was by himself, Gary would try looking for something gay in town, but all he encountered were droves of female prostitutes.

Then in the late '90s, Gary came back to Bali and fell in love with a local guy he had met on the internet. Around this time, he also met a British entrepreneur who pitched the Spartacvs idea to him: a proper hotel that could fit between twelve and twenty-four men at a time, exclusively gay, targeted at foreign homosexuals. The British guy would take care of the logistics – there was already a failed family resort on the market that would be perfect to renovate – so all Gary needed to do was supply the money.

Around opening time, Gary discovered the Brit was embezzling
his funds. Receipts for one million rupiah would equate to two million missing rupiah. After getting rid of the guy, Gary did the sums and found he had lost between 40,000 and 50,000 Australian dollars. On top of that, he now found himself having to start and run an all-gay resort – the first of its kind in Indonesia – completely on his own. Gary sat down and thought,
Well, what the fuck do I know about running a hotel?

‘What
did
you know about running a hotel?' I asked.

‘Nothing!' Gary said. ‘I'm a truck driver! I didn't have a fucking clue!'

People had tried to capitalise on Bali's fledgling gay-tourism market in the past by starting hotels similar to Spartacvs, but they had all flopped. Another gay hotel manager, who'd tried what Spartacvs was doing but on a smaller scale, warned Gary off.

‘You're wasting your time,' he said. ‘There's no market for it. Oh, and don't call it Spartacvs; it's too gay.'

‘Excuse me!' Gary said. ‘What's so gay about “Spartacvs”? He was a Greek warrior.'

After it opened, Spartacvs started turning a profit within months. Gary opened the hotel in September. The books were tipping in his favour by January. While other hotels in Bali went through peak and non-peak seasons, Spartacvs was different. In his office, Gary showed me a computer monitor displaying the resort's colour-coded bookings. Vacancies were represented by white space, and for months ahead, there was barely any white space at all. The spreadsheet was a wince-inducing rainbow. Visitors streamed in from Australia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Increasingly, with the global recession, visitors had started to pour in from across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, too. Bookings now
came from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and South Africa. International homosexuals had become a non-stop market.

It helped that the place was clothing-optional. That wasn't originally in the business plan, but now it was one of Spartacvs's strongest drawcards.

When it first opened, guests had asked whether they could just walk around naked. Everyone kept doing it, Gary reasoned, so why not just make it 100 per cent clothing-optional?

‘You weren't a clothing-optional guy yourself?'

‘No,' Gary said, guffawing. ‘You'll never see me walking around nude with my body.'

A grinning Spartacvs staff member led me up to my room. An online review had harshly described Spartacvs's rooms as ‘horrendously camp' and ‘if Liberace had designed a hotel, this would be it'. That was unfair. The rooms felt more like Jean Paul Gaultier and David LaChapelle had been jointly commissioned to design a wonderful sex dungeon. The walls were painted asphalt, with fuchsia highlights and satin black privacy curtains, and the open-roofed bathroom was fitted with wall-to-wall mirrors, which meant that finally –
finally
– I could see what it looked like to have my butt reflected into infinity whenever I took a shower. (Overall effect: hypnotic.)

On my shared balcony, I met an extremely toned Chinese guy from Macau who wore a designer muscle top, shorts and sunglasses. He had magnificent calves. When he said hello to me, he was busily punching things into his phone, and explained he was holidaying in Bali with his Western boyfriend. They were only at Spartacvs to meet up with friends who were staying there. He wasn't staying at Spartacvs himself, he wanted to emphasise. He would
never
stay there; he wasn't that kind of guy.

‘What kind of guy?' I said.

He laughed conspiratorially. ‘Well so many DOM stay here, you know.'

‘Dom?' I said blankly.

‘DOM!' he said, taking off his sunglasses, appalled. ‘You've never heard of DOM? Dee, oh, emm. DOM. It means' – he whispered – ‘
dirty old men
. Hahahaha. Me? I'm a DYM: dirty young man.' He cackled again.

I headed down to the pool to order a late lunch, still feeling too covered up. I nervously took off my shirt, leaving my shorts on as a salute to decency.

At this time of day, Spartacvs became an ecosystem worthy of an Attenborough documentary. Back when it first opened, Spartacvs had a problem with local moneyboys loitering outside its doors for business, but they'd solved that by allowing a few in at a time to hang around the pool, order drinks and use the wi-fi. Policy was strict: moneyboys weren't allowed to approach guests, but guests could approach the moneyboys if they wanted to chat and take them into their rooms without fuss.