Bangkok Babylon
Bangkok Babylon

Author: Jerry Hopkins

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Published: 2011-04-11

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1462900038

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In the colorful tradition of Orwell and Hemingway, Jerry Hopkins recalls his first decade as a Bangkok expatriate by profiling twenty-five of the city's most unforgettable characters. In 25 vivid profiles, Hopkins explores what motivates people to leave home and the unforeseen adventures that can befall them once abroad. Hopkin's knack for the biography is evident in his coverage of individuals ranging from famous performers to ordinary businesspeople. The 25 true stories include the lives of: The Real Colonel Kurtz? --An American soldier who allegedly was the model for Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. The Oscar Winner --An acclaimed screenwriter who moves to the city of Bangkok to die. Urban Gorilla Priest --A Catholic priest who founded Mercy Centre in one of the city's harshest slums. The Odd Couple -- A circus clown turned computer programmer turned restaurateur. Professor Elephant-- A documentary filmmaker living with elephants. All of these individuals "escaped" to Thailand to re-invent themselves and live out their fantasies in one of the world's most notorious cities. Bangkok Babylon shares their exciting true stories, many of which are stranger than fiction.

Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys
Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys

Author: Peter A. Jackson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-25

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 1317994582

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Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys: Male and Female Homosexualities in Contemporary Thailand offers methods that will help social workers, researchers, and students create HIV/AIDS intervention services for gay men, lesbians, and transgender individuals in or from Thailand. Many of these methods can also be used by practitioners or HIV/AIDS educators in North America and developing countries to address issues of culturally diverse clientele. In response to Western and Thai sexuality studies that fail to accurately represent the diverse sexualities of Thailand, this book discusses and describes certain factors that need to be taken into consideration when developing intervention programs. Demonstrating how cultural and social factors influence services, Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys will help you provide clients with effective and relevant services. Drawing attention to Eurocentric ideology that may hinder cross-cultural collaboration for Thai-Western service provisions, this book offers you information that will help you understand how cultural, political, and economic systems shape sexuality and gender roles in Thai society. Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys provides you with the necessary knowledge for providing successful services, including: how Thai sexualities are identified by examining the meaning of terms such as “toms” (masculine Thai lesbians), “dee” (feminine-identified women who have relations with other women), “kathoey” (males that dress like women and wear make-up), or “lady boys” (transsexual or transvestite males) how Thai society actually defines ”having sex” and recognizing the differences from Western connotations of sex to effectively teach individuals about the risk of HIV/AIDS ways Western views of confidentiality and privacy differ from Thai views in order to understand why individuals hesitate to get tested for or seek counselling about HIV/AIDS the relationship between occupation and sexual identity in movies and magazines that reveal how sexuality is characterized in Thailand the unique social identity of “toms” and how Thai society labels what is masculine and feminine reasons for hiding sexual identity, such as rejection, fear of stereotypes, and having a relationship that is viewed by society as wrong and meaningless protecting commercial sex workers (CSW) from infection by developing culturally appropriate interventions One of the only books to address HIV/AIDS issues of gay and transgender individuals in Thailand, Lady Boys, Tom Boys, Rent Boys will help you increase awareness about HIV/AIDS and create successful intervention programs for clients.

Thailand: Deadly Destination
Thailand: Deadly Destination

Author: John Stapleton

Publisher: A Sense Of Place Publishing

Published: 2014-11-17

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 099254873X

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The daily robbing, bashing, drugging, extortion and murder of foreign tourists on Thai soil, along with numerous scandals involving unsafe facilities and well established scams, has led to frequent predictions that Thailand's multi-billion dollar tourist industry will self-destruct. Instead tourist numbers more than doubled in the decade to 2014. The world might not have come to the hometowns of the many visitors fascinated by Thailand, but it certainly came to the Land of Smiles. While the Thai media is heavily censored, and bad news stories about tourists suppressed, nonetheless there is more than enough evidence to demonstrate that something has gone seriously awry with the nation's tourist industry. In 2014, just as in the years preceding it, there were train, bus, ferry, speedboat, motorbike and car accidents, murders, knifings, unexplained deaths, numerous suicides, diving accidents, robberies gone wrong, anonymous bodies washing up on the shores and a string of alcohol and drug related incidents. Thailand had a dying king and serious succession problems, weak democratic institutions, an economy slipping into recession, faced issues of corruption across many of its key services and was host to international crime syndicates, awash with despised foreigners and drifting perilously towards civil war. Tourists choose one destination over another for a number of reasons, most of which Thailand scores highly on. But on the core issue of tourist safety, Thailand scores very badly indeed.

Bizarre Thailand
Bizarre Thailand

Author: Jim Algie

Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd

Published: 2011-04-15

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 9814351865

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Bizarre Thailand takes readers off the well-rutted road of tourist hotspots into the darkest and sexiest hinterlands. Welcome to a twilight zone where travellers become soldiers and cowboys, a black magician courts politicians and film stars, sacred tortoises mate on the streets of a small town, and Fertility Goddesses are wooed with massive phalluses.In this strange land, nothing is what it seems: a prison becomes a tourist attraction, a 20-storey robot is a building, a man becomes a beauty queen, a Buddhist temple turns into hell on earth, a loving wife is immortalized as the most famous and ferocious of all phantoms, and a serial killer’s corpse is reincarnated as a museum exhibit.Bizarre Thailand takes an irreverent look at how the profound, profane and frankly quite odd intertwine with the rhythms and flows of everyday Thai life, paying homage to the quintessential culture of one of Southeast Asia's most captivating destinations.

The 38 Million Dollar Smile
The 38 Million Dollar Smile

Author: Richard Stevenson

Publisher: ManLove Romance Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1608200132

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Gary Griswold goes missing, and his ex-wife wants to know what's happened to him and his $38 million in cash. Religious dilettante Gary and his money have disappeared into Thailand. Gay P.I. Don Strachey is out of his element, and his lover Timmy is way out of his comfort zone as they comb the Land of Smiles for a man with an unerring weakness for the poorest choice possible.

Far Out
Far Out

Author: Wendy Barker

Publisher: Wings Press

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 387

ISBN-13: 1609405021

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Far Out: Poems of the '60s includes poems by over 80 poets who remember that tumultuous decade from a wide range of vantage points. This collection brings to life the experiences of people who vividly remember the effects of the assassinations of Medgar Evars, JFK, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, who lived through the period of the Vietnam War and the protests against it, and who experienced the rise of Second-Wave Feminism, the Civil Rights Act and the emergence of the Black Power Movement, as well as the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Imagining Gay Paradise
Imagining Gay Paradise

Author: Gary L. Atkins

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Published: 2012-01-01

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 9888083236

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This look at gay paradises in Southeast Asia and the men who created them considers the obstacles gay men have faced in securing a voice as citizens, and how they have used images of paradise in Bali, Bangkok and Singapore to create a sense of refuge, construct homes for themselves, and dissent from typical notions of manhood and masculinity. It focuses on Walter Spies, a gay German painter who in the 1930s depicted Bali as an ideal male aesthetic state; Khun Toc, who founded an architectural paradise called Babylon in Thailand; and the "cyber-paradise" of Fridae.com created by a young Singaporean named Stuart Koe. Collectively, Atkins examines their pursuit of sexual justice, the ideologies of manhood they challenged, the different types of gay spaces they created (geographic, architectural, online), and political obstacles they have encountered. Gary Atkinsis professor of communication at Seattle University. He is the author ofGay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging.

Romancing the East
Romancing the East

Author: Jerry Hopkins

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Published: 2013-03-26

Total Pages: 310

ISBN-13: 1462911870

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Profiling individual, legendary authors, best-selling author Jerry Hopkins combines his research and his own experiences as a longtime expatriate with an intimate knowledge of Asia and offers us a unique perspective on the impact of Eastern culture in Western literature. From the time of Marco Polo's trek across the Central Asian desert to the empire of the mighty Kahn, no other place on earth, not the languid South Pacific or even deepest, darkest Africa has so challenged and enchanted the Western imagination as have the fabled lands of the East! However soaked in blood its history and no matter how unsettling its social conditions and poverty, Asia has never lost its irresistible attraction or mystic. It has long been an inspiration for Western novelists, so much so that more than 5000 novels have been set in Asia in the English language alone. Storied names like Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Pearl S. Buck, George Orwell, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster and many more have used their experiences in Asia as a vibrant backdrop for some of the world's most famous works of literature.

Thai Stick
Thai Stick

Author: Peter Maguire

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2013-11-19

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0231161344

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Thailand’s capital, Krungtep, known as Bangkok to Westerners and “the City of Angels” to Thais, has been home to smugglers and adventurers since the late eighteenth century. During the 1970s, it became a modern Casablanca to a new generation of treasure seekers: from surfers looking to finance their endless summers to wide-eyed hippie true believers and lethal marauders leftover from the Vietnam War. Moving a shipment of Thai sticks from northeast Thailand farms to American consumers meant navigating one of the most complex smuggling channels in the history of the drug trade. Peter Maguire and Mike Ritter are the first historians to document this underground industry, the only record of its existence rooted in the fading memories of its elusive participants. Conducting hundreds of interviews with smugglers and law enforcement agents, the authors recount the buy, the delivery, the voyage home, and the product offload. They capture the eccentric personalities who transformed the Thai marijuana trade from a GI cottage industry into one of the world’s most lucrative commodities, unraveling a rare history from the smugglers’ perspective.

Thailand Confidential
Thailand Confidential

Author: Jerry Hopkins

Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

Published: 2011-05-03

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1462900240

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"Wanna stand in the face of a charging elephant, get hit by a motorcycle, eat giant water bugs, blowtorch your mouth on some of the hottest chili peppers on earth, then go watch a sex change operation? Of course you don't, but, happily, Jerry Hopkins has done all that and more--lots more--in this darkly humorous, deeply affectionate, clear-eyed but never patronizing portrait of Thailand, his adopted home. Highly recommended." --Tim Cahill, author of Lost in My Own Backyard, Hold the Enlightenment and Jaguars Ripped My Flesh "After over a decade in the country, Hopkins knows and loves his subject dearly--that much is obvious--and his vivid portrait projects that love from every page." --Jann Wenner, editor and founder of Rolling Stone Magazine "A loving expose of everything that's wonderful about Thailand, and much that isn't. Should be required reading for all newcomers." --Joe Cummings, author of the Lonely Planet Thailand Guide Writer Jerry Hopkins came to Thailand for a visit in the 1980s, and ended up a permanent resident with a temporary visa--a big, white farang haunting the bars and back alleys of Bangkok. His essays explore the mystery and mayhem of "The Land of Smiles" to hilarious--and sometimes disturbing--effect. Travel with him to a place where whisky is rum, water buffaloes are gay, insects are dinner, dildos are lucky charms, and your wildest adolescent fantasies can come true (for a nominal fee).