In the limited interactions you have with locals here in Thailand, you can’t miss the growing resistance to foreigners. And who can blame them? Just recently, a creep from the Australian state of Victoria was arrested at Bangkok airport trying to leave the country, and was charged with underage sex and murder. It is alleged, still has to go to trial, that he picked up a seventeen-year-old girl on a beach in Pattaya, took her back to his hotel, and murdered her during an argument over how much she expected him to pay. She wanted 1,000 baht, but he was only willing to pay 500. In Australian dollars, she wanted about fifty, and he only wanted to pay about twenty-five. Here in Thailand, he faces the death penalty or life in jail.
It reminds me of a French gay man I ran into years ago on a ferry from Samui to the mainland. He told me how nervous he was “doing ‘this’ alone without his husband” and how disappointed he was that the boy who came with the hotel room failed to get an erection. I got him to admit the boy was sixteen, which means the child was probably younger. In that conversation, I invited him to consider how he would have felt at that boy’s age. “Impensable,” (unthinkable) he said. He put his head down. I didn’t tell him I had been a Piccadilly Circus boy, but the look in my eyes must have betrayed me, and he fled. Honestly, we are human beings and can have fantasies, and humans have limited control over their feelings, but there is a red line that should never be crossed. A young girl’s life was violently taken from her, as was that of the young boy, probably trafficked and part of a hotel package deal.