“Shagging birds is for poofs!” I always loved that line in the alleged gangster film Layer Cake. I didn’t like the film that much; I always found Daniel Craig to be like an ergonomic man, but I loved that line.

Ladyboys are as synonymous with Thailand as Buddhism and government coups, but that’s only if you’re an actual cultured person with cultured interests cultivated from a cultured experience. For the average person who watches Love Island and cried when they found their favourite Disney Plus show was cancelled prematurely, Ladyboys are as synonymous with Thailand as green curry and mail order brides. Some people come to Thailand just for the ladyboys. Some people come just for a holiday and stay longer because they’ve discovered ladyboys.

I met an older gent at a makeshift bar on the side of the road in Bangkok one drunken—and, for once, not drugged up—late night. He was probably called Terry or Arthur because he was from east London. He’d only been in Thailand for two days—his first time—and had already gotten into a holiday romance with a ladyboy I had met a couple of days prior.

Our conversation started with the usual where are you from and why are you here shit.

“A lot of white men leaving England now, innit?”

“I guess so,” I replied. There were, I suppose, but the obvious connotations of applying a colour adjective before a species always had me on edge, waiting for some wild comment about mud huts, banana boats, or sticking to our own. That didn’t come. He was a nice guy. What did come was fun, refreshing, and brain-scraping.

The ladyboy, who I think was called Nak, came over to serve us new drinks and sat on Terry or Arthur’s lap. They weren’t a big, stomping, “I’m gonna rip your batty hole up you cunt” type of ladyboy. They were very skinny with short, dyed blonde hair, but they were all dudes except for the tits and love of celebrity gossip.

“Hello baby,” they said.

"Alright, gorgeous,” Terry or Arthur said.

Then they snogged each other’s jaws off. I forgot to mention, this was how I found out that they were getting busy in the sheets with each other, so my torpedoed out of my skull and knocked an Australian sex-pervert off of their Tuk Tuk ride.

After some more snogging and exchanges of half-arsed soppy talk, Nak went back about her work.

“You can’t even tell, can ya, know what I mean?”

No Terry or Arthur; you can tell by the dick, balls, and Adam’s apple. But fuck it, I nodded.

“I’ve never done anything like this before, mate. I’m straight… Fuck… If someone told me I’d be doing this a few years ago, I’d fucking knock the cunt out.”

Probably best to knock yourself out now, Terry or Arthur.

“I couldn’t tell any of my mates about this!” He laughed.

I laughed. He was right. He was being mad gay, and he wasn’t an anomaly.

There are thousands, maybe even tens of thousands, of men who will scream and cry and punch and scream that they’re straight who end up back-ending ladyboys or finger-blasting their reasonably constructed pussy. And this goes way back. This is before the western world lost its box and started believing all kinds of abstract lunacy about what being straight or male or female or even human actually is. These ladyboy fuckers were incredibly progressive.

Before that night in Bangkok, I had engaged in mind-bending conversation-come-argument with expats I knew on a Thai island we shall not name for reasons of effort to remember the correct spelling.

A friend, who I’ll call Ben, and his work colleague, who I’ll call Bob, who are both interchangeable because I can’t quite remember who said what exactly, were drinking and bingeing on the very best products the pharmacy had to offer. This was following an excursion to a very wacky beach bar where all the staff constantly danced and clapped and were all either gay, ladyboys, or accidental fag-hags.

One of the ladyboys was nicknamed Tom Po, after the huge kickboxer in the Van Dame classic, Kickboxer. Tom Po was about 7 feet tall, slender and pale, and absolutely terrifying. Not terrifying like Tom Po in the film, but terrifying like a mutilated ghost that steals your dreams. They called Tom Po over to introduce themselves just to fuck with me—and fuck with me it did! My brain, that is, I’ve never intentionally or accidentally been with a ladyboy—I’m straight, hetero, non-gay, totally non-progressive.

Tom Po was a specimen like no other, except the Final Boss Ladyboy I saw one time. Tom Po gave me nightmares during my waking hours. Tom Po wasn’t as terrifying as the image of Ben ramming his little baby-harpoon up Tom Po’s dinner exit valve. This is what he was revealing to me when we had returned to Bob’s place for drugs, drink, and drama.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Are you serious?”

“Best fuck I’ve had. She’s got the most kissable lips,” Ben revealed.

“But she’s like a dream demon!” I cried.

Ben just shrugged.

“Best blowjob I’ve ever had was from a ladyboy.” Bob decided to add this because, I don’t know, they hated my perception of reality?

“Shut up!” I said.

“Seriously, best you’ll ever have.”

“Definitely,” confirmed Ben.

“Boys! This is proper gay shit!”

“No it ain’t!” Bob protested.

“Fuck that gay shit mate,” coped Ben.

“It’s not gay!” Bob protested again.

“So does Tom Po have dick and balls?”

“Yes,” said Ben.

“So when you’re banging it up the arse and you balls are smacking against its dick and balls, doesn’t your brain say, gay! Gay! Gay!?”

“It’s not a man,” Ben coped harder.

This was madness. Ben and Bob—shit, their whole social group—were all terribly homophobic. I’m not talking average phobia; I’m talking about hell, fire, and brimstone. Stoning them to death for their dirty gay ways kind of phobia. I have never had any issue with gays or ladyboys or anyone else you care to throw under that umbrella—I just never liked seeing them smooching. It makes me feel a little queazy. I told a gay work colleague this many years back, and they said I was a little homophobic. I said probably yes. I asked him if he liked seeing straight people smooching; he said no; it made him feel sick.

“Exactly, it’s unnatural for you! Why the hell would you want to see it?”

He agreed. I also don’t like three-quarter-length shorts and nose rings, but, like seeing gays, I don’t feel angry or want to burn people; that’s clearly for nutters.

“Would you suck their dick?”

“No, that’s for faggots!” Ben almost shouted.

“But bumming geezers is straight?”

“Never touch their dick and balls; that’s gay,” Bob interjected.

“Ok! But, again, bumming geezers in straight?”

“They’re not geezers, or dudes, or whatever; they’re fucking ladyboys!” Ben was flipping his binlid at that point. Ben, the man who said gays were the lowest of low, disgusting aids-spreading deviants designed in some lab by the zionists to destroy mankind. This fucking guy! This fucking guy! This fucking guy shoves his rod up man-bottom!

“Mate, I don’t appreciate you saying we’re gay; that’s not funny,” said Bob. Bob! The man who thought lesbians were ok if they were just faking it for men to bust their loads to! Bob! The man whose cousin said gays were an abomination and ladyboys were disgusting, and Bob agreed, and then his cousin married a ladyboy, and Bob was the best man and delivered a loving speech and raised a glass to his cousin's new ‘wife!’

“Not funny! I don’t know if you two fuckers are taking me for a ride!”

The pun was not intended, and luckily it went over their heads, much the same way the concept of homosexuality had.

“I’d never fuck a man; that’s guaranteed to give you aids!” Ben said.

I should have rebutted this with the facts about anal sex and the spread of HIV and that it wasn’t exclusive to man anus, even though we were discussing sex with a man’s anus, but I wasn’t so informed 10 years back.

“When does the anus change from man’s anus to lady’s anus?”

“After surgery to tit!” Bob smirked.

“They get an anus transplant?”

“Mate, you’d fuck a ladyboy and love it, so stop this bullshit!” Ben was so angry now, like a blue-haired ugly girl with a nose ring you’d see in a YouTube video titled ‘Lib-tard Fem Karens Getting Owned Part 9,” who’d just been told there were only two genders and Brexit was a great idea.

“Why you so angry?”

This was rhetorical. I knew. Everyone knows.

This phenomenon is probably not exclusive to Thailand, but it seems many people arrive at the airport, and as soon as they have cleared immigration, they completely forget all their beliefs and lose their perception of reality. The world becomes an abstract mess they can no longer consciously navigate, so they just jump on a strange, mystical guiding force of flow into territories that should disgust and amuse them.

The man in Bangkok was literally a black is black and white is white heterosexual before he got into a taxi at Suvarnabhumi airport. Once he arrived at his hotel, he’d developed a sudden hunger for man-dick. Thailand can warp the brain even after a few hours. Ben and Bob had been there for over a decade, so up was down, which was also left, and night was day and also a frosted-window catalogue.

“You’re the one who bummed Lily Savage and says it ain’t gay! You’re insulting my intelligence!”

Ben reacted with grace and threw a beer bottle at the wall. As it smashed and the liquid slopped over Bob’s horrid rug, he went for me. Bob intervened; I didn’t move because the tramadol had weighted me into the lazyboy chair.

“Fuck sake, mate, what are you doing?” Bob said.

Ben stormed out to Bob’s pool, lit a cigarette, and paced up and down to calm himself?

“Fuck is wrong with him?”

“We all like jokes, mate, but you’re going way too far.”

“Look…” Even in my most fucked-up states, I could remember when to keep my mouth shut (back then at least), “I’m sorry man. I’d clean that bottle up, but I don’t think I can stand up!”

“Fuck it, I can’t be arsed either; I’ll let the cleaning girl deal with that bullshit.”

Ben did eventually come back inside, and we hugged, and then we bantered about British soap operas and sitcoms from our childhood. Each-to-his own, I say, you can bang who you like—within the realms of the non-evil, of course—just don’t tell me you ain’t gay when you’re doing very gay things, gay things you apparently hate!

Ben, Bob, and the rest of them were very ahead of their time, because now, in the year of our Lord, that is 2024, a huge majority of mainstream reality in the west is the same as those who just stepped off of a plane in Thailand, but they don’t have that as an excuse.