Gaysia (7 page)

Adding to his shame, every one of Made's siblings – four brothers and two sisters – was already married. One of his nieces and another nephew were now married off too, and
their
kids were old enough to talk and refer to him jokingly as ‘grandfather'. Made laughed as he said this, but the laughter came out uncomfortably.

At thirty-two, Made felt too old – and was definitely too gay – for marriage now. But he was also beyond chasing
bulés
. There was way too much competition in Seminyak, with each new batch of gays moving to the island more handsome, muscled, charming and willing than the last. Nowadays, one Westerner would have between five and ten Indonesians close to him, trying to catch him.

‘Locals have to be more aggressive,' Made said. ‘And Westerners, they are the king here. They have money, so they get to choose which boy they want.'

Made's gay friends told me that none of this stuff – the gay villas, the gay clubs, the unceasing packs of rich gay
bulés
– existed when they were teenagers. Part of them still wished it didn't. Now it was crowded in Seminyak and tourists came and went, treating boys like trash. Boys became superficial, and it was all about comparing the gifts that
bulés
left behind. It was common for Balinese guys to pick up
bulés
and be given widescreen televisions they'd install in comically tiny bedrooms, despite not even having a flushable toilet.

‘All this is good for the economy,' one of Made's friends told me, ‘but maybe not good for our culture. Maybe more Balinese will forget the culture also. We're really afraid Bali will become a sex destination for tourists, like Bangkok, you know.'

He looked at his lap.

‘Nowadays,' he said, ‘tourists like drag queens more than they like Balinese dancers.'

He laughed a little at his own joke.

You heard this a lot: locals mournfully speculating that Bali was about to become the next Bangkok, that the island was on the tipping point from being famous for its culture to being
synonymous with sex. There were other emerging problems too: in Bali, only around 26 per cent of sex workers reportedly used condoms. The rise of gay tourism, the blurring of occupational and incidental sex work, combined with a lack of sex education, meant HIV rates on the island amongst men who had sex with men had increased by 10 per cent in the past year alone.

I swam naked in the villa's pool at night, my junk floating about, stars shooting across the night sky. The luxury here was almost obscene: the frangipani flowers that dropped into the water would be removed by morning. I mulled over the stories and arguments: ethics versus economics; selling sex to know your worth. It was hard to think about, but it didn't take long to figure out what was distracting me. In the back of my mind, I was planning my next holiday here. Next time, I decided, I would bring my boyfriend too. It was both wonderful and awful, the way this island made everything – and every one – so easy.

THAILAND

In which we attend the world's biggest beauty pageant for transsexual women. Key question: ‘So why are there more transsexual women in Thailand anyway?' Key quote: ‘You are a man who wants to live as a woman? But you're not a woman!' Average temperature for this story: forty degrees Celsius.

I
T WAS THE KIND
of weather where it felt dangerous to be wearing pants. By early morning, Bangkok's air was already thick and warm like bathwater; by midday, it was scorching. On my walk over to the Si-Yak Bang-Na intersection, I worried about how the heat would affect the busload of twenty-eight glamorous young beauty contestants I was scheduled to meet. I was particularly worried about what it would do to their meticulously applied make-up and hair extensions. I hoped they'd brought tissues.

This wasn't a regular beauty pageant. In a country synonymous with sex-change, Miss Tiffany's Universe was Thailand's most famous pageant for transsexual women, and reputedly the world's biggest such event. All that you needed to enter was
documentation proving you were born male and were between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. The contestants had been culled from a larger national pool of sixty and I'd been told they were supernaturally beautiful. Today marked the beginning of a gruelling week of sponsorship commitments between Bangkok and Pattaya, leading up to a live TV broadcast finale that attracted 15 million viewers nationwide – roughly a third of the number of Americans who tuned in to the Oscars every year. The stakes were high. The winner received 100,000 baht (3000 US dollars), lucrative advertising deals, performance contracts, a new car and an automatic spot in Miss International Queen, which saw transsexual women from countries including Brazil, Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Sri Lanka, China, Russia, Columbia, India, Lebanon, Japan, South Korea, Nigeria, the Philippines and Argentina compete head-on.

By the time I got to the intersection, I was sweating freely and had soaked right through my shirt. Si-Yak Bang-Na intersection wasn't really an intersection at all, but a flat island of sticky dirt and gravel, an ugly patch of rubble in the middle of one of Bangkok's busiest traffic zones. Above and around us, cars, motorcycles, scooters and buses wove their way through a multi-level concrete braid of bypasses and turnpikes. Everything was loud and smelled of mould and exhaust fumes. It didn't exactly scream ‘glamour'.

In the middle was a large chartered coach, parked with the engine still running. Outside, a small crew of TV camera operators from Thai broadcaster VTR milled about alongside publicists and photographers, gossiping and smoking cigarettes. Everyone was waiting for something to happen. Not knowing anyone, I popped my head inside the coach to introduce myself. I climbed up the stairs and let the coach's air-conditioning
caress me.

‘Hello?'

A motherly-looking Thai woman with a bob haircut spun around, blocking my view of the girls sitting behind her. This was Kuan Lek, one of the organisers. I smiled as I introduced myself, trying to look over her shoulder.

‘Benjamin!' Kuan Lek said, waving her hands. ‘Please wait outside! Girls are still doing make-up and hair.'

‘Oh!' I said.

I hadn't seen a thing, but her reaction made me feel as though I'd caught the women naked. Apologising, I stepped back onto the dirt as the coach doors closed behind me. It had rained the night before. Mud steamed up and stank beneath my shoes as if I'd stepped on a hot turd. Embarrassed, I smiled at the TV crew and staffers. Some jutted their chins in cool acknowledgement, then turned their backs on me to talk in Thai and smoke cigarettes.

I tried spying on the contestants through the coach's tinted windows like a sweaty, dreadful pervert. All of the girls had hand mirrors and were grooming themselves. One girl had a mirror in the shape of a gerbera. There was one in the shape of Hello Kitty's face; another, a teddy bear. Through the tinted windows, I could make out one girl touching every single strand of hair in her fringe, arranging it meticulously with the back of her comb. Her neighbour had curlers in her bangs and was applying mascara. I grew up in a household of women but had never met any girls who paid this much attention to their appearance. Then again, I had never hung around many women like these.

‘This year's ladyboys are so beautiful,' someone said. ‘You'll see soon.'

Behind me was a petite, lithe and effortlessly pretty woman. Pear (‘like the fruit') smiled at me, shielding her eyes with a pair of oversized designer glasses. At first I thought she might have been a ladyboy herself, but Pear was actually a rarity on this tour – what people called a ‘genetic girl', a woman who had been born in a female body.

‘You actually call them “ladyboys”?' I asked Pear. ‘I thought maybe that was offensive.'

Before she could answer, the coach's doors opened. The crew lifted video cameras to their shoulders and photographers sprung into action. Kuan Lek stepped out first, beaming proudly as she made way for the girls.

‘Sawadee-
kah
,' the first girl said, putting her hands together and bowing at the TVR video camera.

Finalist #1 – Chanya Denfanapapol; nickname: ‘Bank' – looked like a Thai version of Scarlett Johansson, all cheekbones and pillowy lips. With her hair held back in a simple ponytail, she was naturally and alarmingly attractive. Bank had a blue-and-white #1 tied to her wrist – all finalists were required to wear their number for the duration of the competition – and was already the odds-on favourite to win.

Other girls strutted out of the bus and introduced themselves for the cameras, each one a vision in white. They wore white jeans so tight it was as if they had been born wearing them, and low-plunging white V-neck shirts that clung to their breasts like plastic wrap, emblazoned with the neon-pink Miss Tiffany logo. Their skinny waists led to curvy hips that shimmied and swayed, their white clothes catching the midday sun like sails in a brightly lit sea. The effect was blinding.

‘Sawadee-
kah,
' they said, one after the other, pouting-smiling-flirting at the cameras.

After posing for the cameras, the girls walked off-screen and stumbled badly, giggling. They all wore sharp, long stilettos that looked capable of breaking their ankles with a wrong step. I felt a rush of sympathy for them.

Poor things
, I thought.
They must still be getting used to heels.

Then I remembered they were walking in mud.

We all gathered at the other end of the intersection as an assistant handed the girls a neat stack of flyers for G-Net, a Thai mobile phone company. The girls were instructed to wait until the lights turned red, then weave their way between cars to hand out flyers to passengers and drivers, before racing back to the kerbside when the lights turned green.

‘Isn't this dangerous?' I whispered to Pear. I'd had enough experience to know that Bangkok drivers ignored road signs and drove straight over lane markings. ‘It's not like traffic here is exactly … polite.'

‘Oh, it's definitely safe,' Pear said. ‘Don't worry.'

When the lights turned red, the girls shot out, twenty-eight white-clad gazelle-like women wading among grimy traffic in heels. Pear was right. Bangkok traffic might have been unwieldy, but it was also so congested that the girls had plenty of time to hand out flyers even when the lights were green. A man dressed as G-Net's mascot – a blue bumblebee–robot hybrid – walked among them while G-Net reps waved advertising placards around the group. Onlookers smiled. Kids waved.

Pear saw me smiling at the scene. Ladyboys hadn't always been embraced in Thailand, she said, but over the last thirteen years or so, more and more people in Thai society had begun to accept transsexual women. In Pear's mind, it wasn't a coincidence that Miss Tiffany's had been running for exactly that length of time.

‘Before then,' Pear said, ‘people saw them as a joke, only for funny or comedy, something like that. Ladyboys weren't as public.'

‘So they were there, but hidden.'

Pear nodded. ‘You'll find out, a lot of these girls have been through a lot with their families. You see what they're like now, but it's been hard to get to this point. Especially with their fathers: they expect their son to be a boy. They have to work very hard for their family to accept them. That's why they have really good manners. These girls are very polite. They go to university, go to school, study hard to get a good job.'

‘So they won't disappoint their families further,' I said.

Pear looked solemn and nodded.

Keang, the pageant's young, smartly dressed choreographer, came over to hand the girls tissues, Wet Ones, disposable cotton towelettes and bottles of ice water. I was surprised the girls' make-up wasn't dripping off their faces. The G-Net mascot removed his costume's head, revealing a young man's pink face drenched with sweat, his hair stuck to his temples like seaweed. When I smiled at him, he smiled deliriously back and gave me the thumbs-up.

The Miss Tiffany's girls dabbed themselves with tissues, swabbing their foreheads and pulling down their shirts to collect the sweat around their boobs. I couldn't help but stare. Some of the girls caught my eye and smiled. I felt myself blush. It didn't matter whether you were attracted to men or women. Sometimes there were people in the world so gorgeous, so remarkably beautiful, that they made you feel as though you didn't belong in the same dimension as them.