Gaysia (30 page)

Meanwhile, KT talked animatedly about how he'd recently broken up with his husband and was feeling sad, but, to be honest, ‘also kind of horny!' Outside on the overpass, KT had seen a new face he thought was cute: a kid who looked sweet and terrifyingly rough at the same time, like a Rottweiler puppy. The kid sported a mini-mohawk and two huge Gothic-script tattoos of English words on his forearms. One said ‘PUNK'; the other said ‘FUCK'. These were the kind of tattoos that made
you wish his mother had run screaming into the tattoo parlour and pulled him out of there. Red-haired David later told me he'd met Punkfuck previously at the cruising tea house under the Sule overpass. When David asked why he'd chosen those words for his tattoos, Punkfuck said that they summed him up well. He was a punk who liked to fuck.

We finished our beers so KT could get Punkfuck's rates. The other sex workers gravitated towards us too, just in case. I smiled at them and waved, trying to defuse the sexual tension by indicating I was a deranged foreign idiot.

Punkfuck turned out to be expensive by Yangon standards. He charged 7000 kyat (nine US dollars) per hour. KT came back to us, nervous and anxious, asking us whether we thought it was a good price.

‘I don't know,' I said. ‘By Myanmar's standards, you mean?'

‘He's more expensive than others,' KT said. ‘He knows he can charge more.'

‘You're going to have sex with him
tonight
?'

‘Why?' KT asked, panicked. ‘Do you think he's too expensive?'

David and I looked at each other.

‘Ah, do you have the money?'

KT said he had the money, but still thought it was a lot. Punkfuck leaned against the bridge and surveyed the Yangon skyline as though he didn't care either way. But this deal would be important to him. Getting work was the difference between sleeping with a full stomach or not. KT walked over to Punkfuck for another quiet conversation, before Punkfuck nodded and disappeared.

‘Where did he go?' I asked.

‘We're meeting him down the street,' KT said.

KT, David and I left Godfrey behind, who was animatedly
talking to another of the working boys. The three of us walked down the overpass stairs together as KT's nervous chatter bounced around.

‘He's so cute!' KT said. ‘I like his hair! Didn't you think his hair was
cute
?'

‘Um,' I said.

‘How thick do you think his cock is?'

‘Jesus, I don't know!' I said.

David smiled at the exchange.

‘And how big are
you
, Ben?' KT asked. ‘Tell me again!'

‘I didn't tell you the first time!'

KT laughed. ‘Oh, I'm
excited
,' he said. ‘I haven't had him before. He's new, I think.' It was only later that I realised KT was implying he'd already had sex with all the others.

Punkfuck met us in the middle of the busy main street. I smiled at him, but his expression was unreadable.
Poor guy,
I thought. I hoped he didn't think all three of us were going to have sex with him at once. Punkfuck crossed the road to a guesthouse's grimy elevator entrance.

‘You have a condom, right?' I asked KT.

KT gave me an exasperated look. David and I said we'd wait for him at a nearby noodle stall, waving him off like parents whose child was being bused off to school camp.
Have fun!
We watched them disappear, the elevator doors closing on Punkfuck's sombre face and KT's big gay smile.

David and I stood side by side, not saying much.

‘Well,' I said. ‘This is weird.'

David, a soulful guy who always seemed deep in thought, nodded.

‘Yep,' he said. ‘It's pretty weird.'

At the noodle stall, we sat on the kids' plastic stools they
had lined up on the roadside. We ordered some noodles that came out swimming in vegetable oil and tasted like metal. Washing the oily noodles down with tea, I thought about what could be happening between KT and Punkfuck at that very moment. KT had told us he liked getting fucked, so Punkfuck probably had him bent over the bed. I was more worried about Punkfuck than KT, to be honest. What kind of life led someone to have PUNK and FUCK tattooed on his forearms and charge nine US dollars to repeatedly place himself inside strangers?

KT wandered out less than half an hour later, even though he'd booked Punkfuck for the full hour. His clothes didn't look any different or ruffled, and his hair didn't look wet from a shower. He just looked blissfully post-coital. Punkfuck wasn't with him. I adopted a faux-concerned parental voice.

‘You used that condom, right?'

‘Of course!' KT said, grinning with big white teeth.

We hailed a taxi to take us home and we drove in silence. I wondered what David and KT had on their minds. Even though my windowless Yangon guesthouse smelled of mildew and garlic, I just wanted to get to bed. It was only the next day that I even questioned how appropriate it was for HIV community workers to have sex with the people they were supposed to be protecting.

Let's take a brief detour through a Beginner's Guide to Homosexual Slang in Myanmar. Repeat after me.
Achauk
(pronounced ‘ah-chowk') is a handy, all-encompassing term for any man who has sex with other men. Use it carefully, because it's the Burmese equivalent of ‘faggot': derogatory when straight people say it, but used freely between gay guys as a term of bitchy affection.

Then there are three subcategories of
achauk
, each of which comes with a defined sex role.
Apwint
(‘ah-pwint', meaning ‘open') are Myanmar's queens, who live and dress as women and are always –
always
– on the receiving end of anal sex. The femme sex worker with the bloody smile on the Lion World overpass would have identified as
apwint
. Many are on female hormones for breast development, but few undergo genital sex reassignment. Even if they wanted it, it was unthinkably expensive in this country.
Apwint
were often found dancing in
nat
spirit celebrations or working in hair salons and make-up parlours. If you were an urban Burmese bride-to-be, it'd probably be
apwint
who would design your dress, do your make-up and curl your hair on the day.

Apwint
never couple with each other. They team up either with
thange
(‘tongue-eh') – macho guys who are relatively open about their sexuality and always on top in sex – or
abone
(‘ah-bone', meaning ‘hiders'), straight-acting, masculine-presenting men who can be versatile with sexual positions. As their name suggests,
abone
are usually closeted when it comes to their sexual identity.

Some English vernacular has slipped through too. As we've learned already, if you have a steady boyfriend, he is your
husband. Gay
is interchangable with
apwint
, while
homo
is the term for
abone
or
thange
guys. If you're a foreigner, don't confuse locals by introducing yourself as ‘gay' unless you're wearing make-up or jewellery, and flailing your hands about.

Most of this slang was harmless and funny, but there was also slang for tremendously unfunny things too, such as contracting HIV, which happened often enough in Myanmar to warrant its own suite of euphemisms. If a guy received a positive HIV diagnosis, he might say he'd gotten
thazin
, the name of a
native Burmese wildflower that had become synonymous with HIV here, since Médecins Sans Frontières Holland – one of the few organisations in Myanmar that both tested for HIV/AIDS and treated patients with life-saving ARTs – ran clinics named after the flower.

Men might also say they had just won the Myanmar Academy Award for Best Male Actor, gallows-humour code for contracting HIV. When guys explained the slang's origin to me, they laughed uproariously. ‘See, the Academy Awards is so hard to get, but HIV is so easy!' they said. ‘This is why it's funny. See, you got the Academy!'

‘Ha, ha?' I said again.

After the evening with KT, Godfrey and Dave, I returned to the same cruising site during the day with Kyaw Swe, a peer educator with PSI, another NGO focused on preventing HIV. Kyaw Swe distributed condoms, talked to people about their problems and invited them into PSI's drop-in centre for HIV tests. Not all sex workers protected themselves during sex, he told me. I was still troubled by what had happened with KT and Punkfuck. I told Kyaw Swe the story and asked for his opinion.

‘This was after hours?' Kyaw Swe asked. ‘He was off-duty from his job?'

I nodded. Kyaw Swe thought about it.

‘Well, I don't see any problem then,' he said.

Kyaw Swe was handsome: lean and ropey with dark skin, spiked hair and black glasses that framed sad-looking eyes. He was still young – thirty, only a little older than me – but already had two sons aged ten and eight. His eldest was really smart, he said, and had won all sorts of academic awards, especially in maths.

Although Kyaw Swe now had kids and a wife, he had once
been a sex worker, having worked the same streets as Punkfuck for half a decade. He had fallen into sex work by accident. As a teenager, he sold betel nuts in Yangon's local markets for pitiable pay. The markets were a drawcard for tourists, and one night, two American guys took a shine to Kyaw Swe. They offered him money to have sex with them – at least 100 US dollars, maybe more – that converted to a wad of kyats so thick that it supported him for months.

The money Kyaw Swe brought in from sex work was far more reliable than what he made selling betel, so when he got married, his wife let him continue. The idea of him fucking men for cash upset her, but this was Myanmar and their options were limited.

Kyaw Swe was twenty-three when a German client asked him for a tour of things in Yangon that foreigners wouldn't usually see. Kyaw Swe took him to a downtown pagoda festival that attracted huge numbers of locals. There were children everywhere, some of them desperately poor, like the two boys – aged around eight or ten – who caught the German tourist's eye.

‘Oh, they are lovely,' the German client said to Kyaw Swe. ‘They look very poor, though. Can you bring them to me? I'd like to help them.'

After he introduced the German man to the two boys, Kyaw Swe didn't see them again. But when he was arrested for facilitating child prostitution, he discovered what had happened next: the German tourist raped the boys; he loaded them with money; the boys' parents asked where the money had come from; the police were called in.

‘I just thought he wanted to say hello and help the children,' Kyaw Swe said.

Kyaw Swe was sent to Myanmar's notorious Insein Prison for two years. The cells were stinking hot and Kyaw Swe slept shoulder
to shoulder on the cement floor with his fellow prisoners, 120 people to a small room. Some Insein inmates were forced to crush rocks, like prisoners in cartoons, making rubble for bitumen and paving. Some, like Kyaw Swe, were assigned to work in lung-corroding mines that were prone to collapsing. Every day, they worked from seven in the morning to six at night with a one-hour break for lunch. When I asked him to describe prison, Kyaw Swe responded in a dead voice.

‘It was like hell,' he said.

After his release, Kyaw Swe no longer saw the allure of sex work, but didn't feel he had much choice. He went back to the bridge outside Lion World, but now there was more competition, less pay and new police crackdowns. It wasn't long before HIV peer educators intercepted Kyaw Swe on the bridge. Kyaw Swe educated himself about HIV and sexual health at PSI's Top Centre, meeting other sex workers in a social space for the first time. Soon, PSI offered him a paid job to educate his peers. For the first time, he was thinking about the future for himself, his wife and two boys. He wanted to own a small business, like a tea house, and have one day off a week. He wanted a simpler life with time to hang out with his family and – because he was
thange
– his boyfriend on the side.

To the management at PSI, Kyaw Swe was the perfect candidate for a peer educator: he knew how to talk to working boys. PSI's safe-sex message might have been easy to deliver, but it was a hard sell convincing the boys to use a condom every time. When Kyaw Swe was a sex worker, he often had to pay for the guesthouse and the hotel deposit.