the third sex

A friend just into Bangkok from overseas and raring to get going on the ladyboy scene told me how he called a girl and arranged to meet her in the early afternoon. She turned up in hotpants so brief that he said you could see her pubic hair. She wore strap-up knee-high sandals, a tiny tube-top, and glitter makeup.

Thinking that he might be a trifle conspicuous walking along Sukhumvit Road with this vision at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, he suggested with some urgency that she go straight back to her apartment, which was nearby, and change into something a little less sudden.

Which she did, emerging soon enough in jeans and trainers, and with her face freshly scrubbed. Then she called her brother so that they could all go shopping together. The brother turned out to have bright orange hair, lipstick and long painted fingernails, and to be so overly camp in his behaviour that he made his “sister” look positively restrained.

My friend, who is generally unflappable, said that when they walked through the shopping mall, he began to have some idea of how it feels to live in a zoo. “All I could do,” he told me, “was to smile back at people and try and look as if I did this kind of thing every day.”

I do know what he means. There are times when ladyboys, or some of them, simply do not realise that ordinary folk generally prefer to be considered ordinary.

I remember some while back when I was doing a shoot in Pattaya. I arranged to meet a couple of models on the beachfront at 1 o’clock in the afternoon, and take them to a hotel. They turned up looking as if they had just come off stage at the Crazy Horse: glitter boots, ballerina skirts, and makeup so thick it could have been taken off like a mask. Try walking along the seafront and into a hotel with a couple of girls like that, and you do cause something of a sensation.