"You want? I have condom," he whispered.
Yet, for the umpteenth time, I doubted if my message got through.
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.
(Yet other days, I choose the downmarket dumps, for the sheer pleasure wallowing in dirt, but I'm not about to tell you about those.)
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 maximise tips is for the masseurs to offer "special services" to round off a session.
It's an open secret that sex is available, in fact, almost obligatory, to the extent that on the petite tray that these masseurs take with them into the room, one finds not just the essential oil and the decorative orchid, but often two packets of condoms as well, artfully tucked under the said orchid.
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 you're having sanook (meaning "fun" in Thai) with 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. To illustrate the extent of the traffic, when Weng and I booked our flight to Bangkok two months ago, we thought it'd just be the two of us on holiday. By the time we landed, we could name 11 more friends who were separately going to be in the city the same weekend. It would have been a good dozen if one fickle-minded queen didn't detour to Phuket at the last minute.
Given all this travelling, let's not imagine we are safe from the growing epidemic in the country we love.
I am frustrated that I've been too lazy to learn Thai. It's just too easy to get by with English in the usual gay tourist haunts. Yet it is moments like these in the massage room where I really needed to be able to explain to the young man why oil and condoms don't mix. Between my broken Thai and his broken English, it was alas too difficult.
The more crucial question is: Why aren't the proprietors of these places ensuring that their staff know 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 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 shortsighted 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 minimum tip one thousand baht." If he's saying that openly, what's stopping him from being frank with the employees about risks?
One can't help but conclude that if the masseurs are still uninformed or unconvinced about the seriousness of the risk, it's just negligence. Not enough effort has been made to get the message through. And 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. And none of us are taking responsibility for the lives of these working boys... and ourselves?