Gaysia (8 page)

At first I thought I wouldn't be able to tell any of them apart. When they had disembarked from the bus, they had been a blur of long legs and pretty faces, but now I was able to
make distinctions. There was the Disney Cartoon Princess, the Bright-Eyed Kids TV Host, the James Bond Glamour-Puss, the Hot High School Slut and the softly spoken Nervous Wreck Who Constantly Looked Like She Was About to Spew, who had clearly surprised even herself by getting this far in the competition.

For me, Contestant #8 – Numpath Prasopchok; nickname: Nadia – was the prettiest. Her doe eyes, cut-glass cheekbones and lioness mouth belonged on billboards. When she caught me staring at her, she smiled and waved in my direction. I bashfully looked to the ground like a pigeon-toed, twelve-year-old doofus.

In among all the white t-shirts and jeans was the Vixen. Instead of the generic white outfit of the finalists, the Vixen wore an intricate gown of turquoise and purple sequins, with a bright yellow sash across her torso. The crown on her head was a series of spikes so long that they could have impaled a small animal. Her multi-level earrings dangled like tiny anvils.

‘Who,' I asked Pear, pointing at the woman discreetly, ‘is that?'

‘Sorrawee,' Pear said. ‘She was the winner of Miss Tiffany's last year.'

Apart from a smallpox vaccination scar on her left shoulder, Sorrawee Natee's skin was flawless. Statuesque and poised, she was not the most feminine-looking of the group but was definitely the most striking. Unlike this year's finalists, she didn't smile for the cameras. She smouldered. She looked at you like she was going to eat you and you would be completely grateful if she did. It was as if she were emitting raw heat through her eyes.

When I spoke to Sorrawee later, she beamed about the competition and spoke Thai in a slightly nasal, honking voice. She
looked like Tyra Banks and sounded like Fran Drescher.

‘I've had such great opportunities,' she said. ‘Life's changed a lot. Winning Miss Tiffany's was already a big award, but after I won, it meant I could also get a better job. Now I have new opportunities to work and education.' She had been studying fashion design at a college, but she was now in her senior year and had national attention. ‘This year's winner's life can be expected to change, the same way my life has changed. What I have experienced here, she'll get it too.'

I watched as Sorrawee knocked on the passenger side of a cab to hand the driver a G-Net flyer. When the cab driver refused to wind down his window, Sorrawee turned to us and raised her eyebrows – as if to say,
watch this
– and opened the door to climb right in. Everyone hooted and laughed. All of this traffic-stalling activity felt very dangerous and illegal. At one point, the girls simply stood in the middle of the road, posing for photos with onlookers and leaning on the braked cars as props. They had literally stopped traffic. Traffic police officers approached us in severe, tailored black uniforms and I flinched. Instead of arresting us, the officers directed traffic around the girls. When it was all under control, they asked for photos too.

On the taxi ride from Bangkok's airport, my cab driver – an enthusiastic guy in his late fifties called Mr T – had asked me what I was doing in Thailand. When I told him I was writing a story on the Miss Tiffany's pageant, he chuckled to himself.

‘Oh, so you like
this
sort of thing,' he said, lowering his voice.

I wasn't sure what he was getting at, but I could guess. ‘You
know of Miss Tiffany's, then?' I asked.

‘Yes, yes. Many people in Thailand know and see this.'

‘Do you think there are more ladyboys here than in other countries?'

‘In Thailand? Yes, I think so.'

‘Any idea why?'

He laughed again, then shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why?' he said. ‘I don't know!'

Thailand has a long history of transsexualism. Before the 1960s, it had three gender categories:
chai
(masculine);
ying
(feminine); and
kathoey
, a sort of umbrella term that referred to in-betweeners – effeminate men, masculine women and people with intersex conditions. Afterwards, those categories splintered further into super-specific identities like
gay
,
tom
(masculine lesbian) and
dee
(feminine lesbian). Now, many Thai children and teenagers had a basic understanding of how to pinpoint their gender or sexual orientation if it deviated from the norm. Schools had an unusually high proportion of boys who identified as girls and openly declared themselves to be female from an early age. In 2008, a BBC journalist had gone to a secondary school in Thailand's north-east and found the school offered its pupils a transsexual bathroom option, signposted by a half-man, half-woman picture. Throughout Thailand's cities and villages, ladyboys were often the women who served drinks and meals at restaurants and worked in beauty parlours, grocery shops and 7-Elevens. No one knew why there seemed to be more transsexuals in Thailand. Maybe there was something in the water. Something fabulous.

The Miss Tiffany's entourage reconvened for lunch at a place called the Royal Dragon, a Chinese restaurant that had made the
Guinness Book of Records
in 1991 for having the world's largest
seating capacity (5000) and the most staff (1200). It was spread over eight acres, as vast as it was absurd. We laughed as a man in a polyester Qing Dynasty outfit flew past our window strapped to a flying fox, sailing over an artificial lake with a tray of hot food in his free hand. We ate shredded chicken, seafood chow mein, deep-fried fish intestines with cashews, dim sum served with century egg, fungus and mushroom soup, crispy-skinned duck, Buddha's delight and tom yum fish soup. Going against my expectations of beauty contestants, the girls pigged out.

The lunch was a thank-you for sponsors and a recap of Miss Tiffany's pageants gone by. Now in its thirteenth year, the pageant had been running long enough to have created legends. One of the previous winners – 23-year-old Treechada Marnyaporn; nickname: Nong Poy – had been voted most beautiful ladyboy of all time. She was now one of G-Net's primary spokespeople. Poy was gorgeous and looked like the kid sister of Gong Li. Her voice was feminine – almost remarkably so, since a deep voice was something neither surgery nor hormones could really ‘fix'. At age nineteen, Poy had won Miss Tiffany's before being crowned Miss International Queen in 2004. Since then, she had scored roles in two Thai soap operas –
Rak Ter Took Wan
(‘Love You Every Day') and
Muay Inter
(‘The Chinese Girl') – as genetically female characters, without any references made to her sex change. She was also the star of the hit Thai pop music video ‘
Mai Chai Poo Chai
' (‘I Am Not a Guy') for an artist called Doo Ba Doo. She was living the dream.

Alongside G-Net, there were thirty major sponsors for Miss Tiffany's Universe, ranging from the big guns – the Tourism Authority of Thailand, Coca-Cola, the
Pattaya Mail
newspaper – to ones that had subliminally humiliating connotations, like Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum (‘Come see the freaks!')
and Louis Tussaud's Waxworks (‘Feast your eyes on people who aren't real!').

Another sponsor was a computer chain called Banana IT. After lunch, we visited the computer store where the girls were made to pose sexily for the cameras with giant plush bananas, their lips brushing the toys sensuously. As far as marketing partnerships went, it was either a stroke of genius or hideously offensive, or possibly a hideously offensive stroke of genius. Another sponsor was something called the Asoke Skin Hospital.
That's nice
, I thought.
This thing isn't all about business. It's good to see the pageant supports burns victims too
. As it turned out, Asoke Skin Hospital was a cosmetic beauty centre that specialised in laser peels. For a facility that resembled the lobby of a Marriott Hotel, ‘hospital' seemed an overly dramatic term.

By the end of the day, the girls were beaming but sleepy from all the public appearances. I still hadn't had a proper conversation with any of the finalists, just passing hellos and stupid giggles. I desperately wanted more. What were their stories? What did their parents think? What were their strategies for winning? Where could I buy a Hello Kitty hand mirror? As we waved goodbye to Asoke Skin Hospital, the girls boarded the Miss Tiffany's coach headed for Pattaya, while the staff and I boarded our own air-conditioned minibus.

After the brutal heat of that day, the two-hour bus ride was soothing and cool. Tech-heads fell asleep around me and the radio softly played old soft-rock classics. When we reached the highway, a power ballad from the '90s came on by a band I'd long forgotten. The song was called ‘Wind of Change'.

When I woke up in Pattaya, it was night-time and my mouth was dry. Our minibus had parked outside a bar called the Bed,
an ultra-chic, über-modern place that had avant-garde furniture in the lobby, the kind you can't actually sit on. We'd arrived before the Miss Tiffany's coach, so the staff and media got out and together we stretched our legs.

Pear introduced me to a fellow Australian called Kristian, a Eurasian guy in his thirties who was now based in LA as a freelance photographer. He'd shot Angelina and Justin, Zac and Miranda, and talked about them on a first-name basis. Affable and talkative, Kristian told me he'd been trailing the pageant for a few days already, but had decided to skip the Bangkok sponsorship trail.

‘Did I miss any good photo opportunities?'

‘You did miss their stint with a shop called Banana IT,' I said. ‘There were plush bananas involved.'

I leaned over and showed him photos on my crappy point-and-shoot camera.

Kristian winced. He knew a missed photo opportunity when he saw one.

When the girls arrived, we were all ushered into the bar for rounds of alcohol-free cocktails. As Kristian, Pear and I stacked food from the buffet onto our plates, we talked about our lives back home. Kristian talked about his wife and daughter. I talked about my boyfriend. That piqued Kristian's interest.

‘Can I ask you a question?' Kristian said.

‘Sure,' I said.

‘So, you're attracted to guys, right?'

I nodded.

Kristian glanced over our shoulders at the contestants, lowering his voice. ‘So knowing these girls were – well, actually,
are
– guys. I mean, does that do anything for you?'

I looked at him blankly, then laughed. ‘No, I'm attracted to
guys
. There's nothing remotely guy-like about these girls.'

He nodded, watching the girls, weighing things up in his mind. ‘It's just, you wouldn't be able to tell with some of them, would you? Well, I mean, some of them you
can.
'

He gestured to one of the contestants whose cheekbones were stronger and had pretty broad shoulders.

‘Well, what about you?' I asked. ‘If you started having a relationship with one of these girls and everything about them was female – their brains, their mannerisms, their bodies – would you have a problem if you found out they were born male? Would that matter?'

‘I don't know,' he said. He hesitated. ‘There's just still
something
about it. I'm just being honest, you know. I think I would be shocked –'

‘And then you'd end the relationship?'

He made the face of a seven-year-old kid who'd been asked a difficult ethical question. ‘Probably,' he said, sighing. ‘I don't know. I
think
so?'

Later, during evenings I spent in Pattaya's and Bangkok's tourist bars, drunken male tourists would have similar but far less subtle variations of these conversations with me. For them, ladyboys were nothing more than the punchline to every loud, obnoxious joke they told. ‘Be careful which girl you take home!' they slurred. ‘'Cos she mightn't actually be a
real girl
, ya know!'

They laughed, but I also sensed a palpable fear. Or maybe it was arousal. Or both. These men invariably knew of someone – always ‘a friend' – who had ‘accidentally' ended up sleeping with a transsexual Thai woman. In most cases, the story was the same: the friend in question was drunk, before being fooled by a beautiful woman who –
quelle horreur –
had a penis. Or not! Maybe she had a surgically constructed vagina, but felt
obliged to tell the man about her past anyway. And then – only because the guy was so helplessly drunk – they would have sex. Truly, they just weren't to know! Still, I suspected all these men had been willingly fooled. And it felt wrong to me that it was the woman who was always the butt of the joke.