Introduction

Several of the young men in this study, especially those from poor families in the northeast, used their youth and beauty and the promise of the pleasure provided by their bodies as a means to try to improve their lives and that of their families. Many of them tried to find a wealthy boyfriend who could help them and their families financially.

Many of the young men held the perception that viable love relationships are based on complementarity between two differing partners. Implied in this is that for a relationship to work, the partners need to have something to exchange with each other. In the case of many of the men discussed in this chapter, this involved an exchange of their beauty and youth for financial security and stability. Often this complementarity was also gendered in the imagination of the men in the study, with the desired boyfriend seen in the role of the providing husband, and they themselves in the role of the housewife.

Five out of the twenty-five participants in the study had some experience in sex work; four of them worked for brief periods of time in male sex work establishments in Pattaya, Bangkok and Phuket, and one of the five still occasionally engaged in sex work via the Internet at the time of the final interview. Sex work is usually seen as being purely about casual sex-for-money encounters, and it seems to have little to do with longer-term love and romance. However, the young men in this chapter downplayed the importance of payment and money in the stories they told about their sex work experiences. Their most important motive for engaging in it, at least at the beginning, was to find a long-term partner who could ‘take care’ of them and their families.

The chapter will start with an overview of studies on male sex work in Thailand, followed by a description of three study participants’ experiences with it.