Nagusami / 27

(Bangkok, 2006)

Four hundred years ago in Edo the bakufu built walled cities within cities to house the pleasure quarters. Now, when the prosperous queers of Tokyo want space plus permission, they go to Bangkok, to the Babylon. Surrounded by stone in the diplomatic enclave as if it were the Babylonian Embassy. It might as well be—an outpost of queer permission and excess in Asia.

Begin in the middle: a long blue pool, the only place where the management requests you, please, wear clothes. Twin sphinxes crouch at one end and the perimeter is all palms and flowering trees but you never see a flower fallen into the pool. Facing the pool are two high glass walls which contain a gleaming mirrored gym and an elegant restaurant with the photos of black and white American movie stars on the seat backs. If you’re dining I recommend the duck and there’s a woman who sings soul in the evenings, the only woman permitted in the whole establishment, beside the two gorgeous post-op ladyboys who take your money at the door.

On the opposite side of that restaurant—both walls are glass—is an open courtyard with a bar and two towering Egyptians with tasteful Art Deco penises who preside over the men in towels and their evening cocktails. Everything is tasteful and elegant, from the stenciled menus to the monsoon clouds overhead. And a man may do exactly as he likes.

The trouble in this Heaven is the usual one: our paradise runs ahead of us and leaves us in our accustomed dust. We are not ready for it.

The management has made allowances for this and so, from every garden, every courtyard, tunnels extend with all the dim passages and dark corners to which we are habituated. This is what we’re here for: to chase each other in the near dark. Men are still visible, their age obscured, in the tiled wet area where the halls empty into steamrooms, darker still, and showers with curved walls. Down a metal spiral staircase there’s a basement for men who desire more darkness. Of course there is corridor after corridor of individual cubicles with doors that lock and each one comes with a dimming switch so that you may decide how much light you can endure. It’s part of the routine of sex between strangers. One man turns up the light, the other dims it down again.

We do as we like and try not to see too much of it.

To first-time visitors, the corridors seem infinite. Later, that feeling fades. Still, the maze is large enough so that, going through it once, you’re sure there's someone you’ve missed and you circle back through again.

Babylon, with its vast decorated shell and the damp curved walls of its spiraling interior is exactly like an gigantic mollusc and the dark animal, mysterious and vulnerable, that fills every corner within is called desire.