No issue has ever politicised sex the way HIV
and AIDS have. In its first stages in the mid-1980s, when most people believed
that only gay men and intravenous drug users got it, the disease was used
by Christian fundamentalists as an example of an Old Testament-style plague
brought down by God to punish the wicked.
The disease sanctioned every strain of racism, as many claimed it came from Africa, supposedly because a black man had copulated with a monkey. Conspiracy theorists claimed that it was bio-engineered by rich Western governments hell-bent on destroying and taking over the Third World, or that it didn’t exist, or that it was a group of previously known viruses that had mutated into a new and far deadlier malady. In the pharmaceutical community, the disease spawned a multi-billion dollar industry after Robert Gallo, an American biomedical researcher, and several of his colleagues, first identified and isolated the retrovirus in 1984.
Two years later, the first official case in Thailand hit the front page of the country’s most popular tabloid, Thai Rath, with a headline that read ‘Gay Man Contracts AIDS from Gay Foreigner’.
Chantawipa ‘Noi’ Apisuk recalled the fear and hysteria sweeping through the bars of Patpong, where she first organised informal English classes for sex workers in the Electric Blue go-go bar, which is still there. “The women working in Patpong were terrified of catching the disease from foreign men and there was a lot of hatred directed towards sex workers for spreading the disease.” The NGO she had just started, Empower (Education Means Protection of Women Engaged in Recreation) became the first such organisation to distribute a pamphlet about HIV and AIDS in the kingdom, as well as giving out free condoms to sex workers and the male patrons of these bars. “The profession of sex work is not the cause of the transmission. Unprotected sex is the cause of the transmission. This is education we are doing, not blaming people,” she said.
Solely funded by a small grant from a Christian organisation in Tokyo, the NGO faced vehement and vocal opposition. Chumporn Apisuk, a Thai artist who has worked with them since the beginning, recalled, “A lot of people wanted to sweep the issue under the carpet. They didn’t like seeing us out there distributing leaflets and condoms. I guess they thought it was bad for business. So Noi and I had to equip ourselves with whiskey, beer and gin before going out to visit the bars of Patpong,” he said with a laugh.
As the fatal affliction turned into a full-blown pandemic scything through every sector of society across the world, it became the catalyst for the NGO’s multi-pronged agenda. “HIV taught us to look at the conflicts of gender, human rights, sex work and many other issues,” said Noi.
At the time, there was only one other NGO in all of Thailand even examining questions of human rights, and no support or recognition from the government. But the pandemic brought Empower’s controversial work to a global audience, winning them as many converts as detractors.
One of the organisation’s earliest supporters was the late and legendary tycoon, Udom Patpongpanich, who lent half his family name to the roads of Patpong 1 and 2, the capital’s biggest tenderloin and nocturnal bazaar for tourists. Noi may be a radical in some ways, but she remains respectfully Thai in many other respects, adding the honorific khun (‘Mister’) every time she speaks of their benefactor. “Khun Udom came down to greet us and meet the women. He thought that English studies were very useful for the women and he rented us a shop-house for a very cheap price of 16,000 baht a month. Having Khun Udom for a benefactor made us look very good.” The shophouse that they first rented back in 1989, hemmed in by go-go bars like Super Pussy on both sides, is still a nexus for sex workers in Bangkok.
Empowerment through education has always been at the forefront of the NGO’s approach. “Some people have accused us of promoting prostitution by teaching English to the women. We are giving education to the women. What’s wrong with that? If other Thai people can go to English and Japanese classes at many other language schools, then why shouldn’t sex workers have the same opportunity? The women in Patpong want to speak up for themselves, they want to express their ideas, they want an education and they want to work, but they don’t have time to go to normal schools,” added Noi.
To this end, the NGO started its own newsletter in 1986. After several name changes, they settled on ‘Bad Girls’ with the cheeky sub-head, “Good girls go to heaven but bad girls go everywhere”, which is both a line from an old Mae West film and a song by Meatloaf. Leaf through some back issues and the contributions from sex workers simmer with rage and buzz with pride. “I don’t care what people say. We give them pleasure and we get money. That’s enough!” Another wrote, “Don’t call us ‘social garbage’, because we make this world a paradise on earth.”
The newsletter underlines Empower’s stance that sex work is just another job that women and men can do. This pragmatic philosophy separates them from many other organisations that issue blanket condemnations of the business of pleasure. Francesca Russo, a volunteer English teacher who spent several years giving classes at the Patpong centre while writing a master’s thesis about the organisation, said, “It’s very, very alternative in terms of its philosophy amongst NGOs in Thailand, which tend to think of sex work as a problem rather than a career. But Empower supports women who wish to continue working in the industry. The other organisations are trying to get women out of the industry, or even trying to prevent them from entering in the first place.” What Francesca said is true of many governmental and NGOs around the world that do not see sex work as a viable profession.
But Empower’s endorsement of this career choice comes with many caveats. The NGO believes that pooying borigan (‘service girls’) should be considered part of the wider service industry. For many years, Empower has been lobbying the Ministry of Labour to bring the bar staff in commercial sex establishments—waitresses, doormen, go-go dancers and cashiers—under the protection of existing labour laws, which would grant them health benefits, severance pay and sick leave. All their efforts have resulted in little more than lip service from the Thai authorities and a lot of unfulfilled promises.
Surang Janyam, the former manager of the Patpong office who moved upstairs to found SWING, an NGO for male and transgendered sex workers, said, “We believe that sex work is one kind of valid work people can do, but how can we make them safe? How can we ensure they have the same rights as other workers do? And how can they protect themselves?”
The only laws in existence in Thailand that really protect them are for those under 18 years of age. If underage girls or guys get caught working in the sex trade, she said, they might get put in a state-sponsored shelter, but they’re soon back in another bar with a different fake ID, and she understands why. “Yes, we have free school in Thailand for twelve years, but if the young girls and boys don’t have the money to pay for food, uniforms, transport, how can they study?” Their newsletters are rife with tales of desperation, poverty and dead-end jobs in factories and on farms that led the women to seek more lucrative alternatives.
For some of these social pariahs, the lack of basic rights has a much more violent impact. Surang has had many run-ins with the Thai police. On one occasion, she took a female sex worker, who’d been beaten bloody by one of her customers, to a police box for help. But when she told the cop that the woman worked in a bar on Patpong, he said they couldn’t do anything to protect her. That issue is not the sole province of sex workers. As Chumporn said, “Any time a Thai woman gets beaten up, the police will usually side with the man.”
Dee, a male sex worker who drops by Empower and SWING to take different classes, recalled how he and two of his male friends from the bar where they worked were taken to Pattaya by a trio of foreign customers. Once inside a resort bungalow, the men set up a video camera and told them to perform a threesome. They refused and were severely beaten. Fearing persecution and public humiliation, the three Thais did not report the incident to the police.
Under the Prostitution Prohibition Law of 1960, sex work is still technically illegal in Thailand. “The women are not sure whether or not they are workers or criminals,” said Chumporn, who hosts workshops on theatre and performance art that mix social and political themes in the Patpong centre. “It’s in the interest of the entertainment places to keep this law in effect, because they don’t have to pay any benefits to the workers.” In fact, it took the NGO three years of lobbying the government to have the application forms at these entertainment venues changed. Until then, Chumporn said, the women did not realise that they were actually filling out the same forms police use after making arrests. So the cops had records of every single woman working in these bars. “The police were not using those records for anything, but they didn’t understand that there was anything wrong with this practise or that it was infringing on basic rights.”
Frustrated by their lack of progress with the Ministry of Labour and club owners, Empower opened the Can Do Bar in Chiang Mai in 2006. Nicely lit and tastefully decorated, the bar defies any seedy stereotypes. In the back is a pool table. Out front is a terrace. The atmosphere is laidback; it’s not one of those ‘hard sell’ bars where patrons are constantly pestered by bargirls spewing the same mercenary inanities (“You buy me cola?”) over and over again. Billed as the only ‘Experitainment Bar’ in Thailand, it may well be one of the few establishments in the world run by sex workers for sex workers.
More importantly, the Can Do Bar is a kind of laboratory where Empower has put many of its hypotheses into practise. True to their word, they adhere to the labour laws governing the hospitality sector. All the female staff members, who also moonlight as sex workers, receive social security, sick leave and proper days off.
Because the bar is located on a Thai entertainment strip, far away from the Night Bazaar and other tourist enclaves, they don’t receive a lot of walk-in customers. Mostly it’s word-of-mouth that brings in patrons from all over the world. Liz Cameron, an Australian national who has worked with the Chiang Mai centre for many years, said they have entertained everyone from European diplomats and UN officials to a contingent of sex workers from a Canadian NGO. These visitors have made their mark in the bathrooms, leaving an array of gushing graffiti and sympathetic comments. One of their Canadian ‘sisters’ wrote, “The women of Empower are Goddesses!”
Touring the bar’s upper floor, it’s easy to spot the twin embryos of knowledge and language that have fertilised the NGO from the beginning. Much like the classroom in the Patpong office, the walls of the study centre in Chiang Mai are lined with similar slogans and letters that spell out the language of self-reliance for working girls—‘bread winner’, ‘medicine’, ‘condom’, ‘happy’—next to polite expressions the women want to learn, such as “Can you buy me a drink, please?” “Do you want company?”
Empower’s founder, Chantawipa (or Noi), was awakened to the power of the written and spoken word when her family relocated to Boston in 1975, around the same time as end of the Vietnam War. Her early days in the United States were fraught with tension. “They called all of us Asians ‘yellow’.” While studying at Boston College, in between working shifts as a waitress at Pizza Hut, she befriended a number of different Asian minorities and noticed that many women had been leading the protests against the Vietnam War. “It looked to me like women the world over face the same problems of discrimination. We’re all second-class citizens.” Working with different human rights organisations in New York and Boston, covering everything from the forced sterilisation of women in Third World countries to children slaving away in Thai sweatshops, Noi also schooled herself in the protest songs of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, making many useful contacts that she put to good use upon returning to Thailand in 1985. She quickly realised that many of her aspirations were well ahead of her time (the Human Rights Commission of Thailand was only founded in the late 1990s). While drinking beer with her American colleagues in bars around Patpong, she became a default English teacher and translator for many working girls who wanted to communicate with foreign men they had become involved with. Noi broke into a rendition of ‘Dear John’, a popular song of the Vietnam War era that encapsulated the language barrier that the Western man and Asian woman could not surmount.
Teaching the women English and the ideas that inform the lingua franca was the starting line for Empower. “When they learn English and get educated on other subjects like human rights, it minimises exploitation at work, and they can make better decisions and regain their pride and self-confidence,” said Noi.
The language of dehumanisation that keeps the downtrodden in their place is evident in the way the streetwalkers lurking in the shadows of Sanam Luang in Bangkok are referred to as ‘tamarind tree ghosts’, while the hookers working the streets around the capital’s Lumpini Park are referred to as ‘Lumpini ghosts’. Such derogatory terms are hardly unique to Thailand. They are endemic everywhere. In Los Angeles, for example, when a pimp or customer murders a prostitute, the police assign the case a low-priority tag known as ‘AVA, NHI’, which stands for ‘Asshole Versus Asshole, No Human Involved’.
In attempting to rewrite the language of victimisation, Empower, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, published the Bad Girl’s Dictionary in 2007. On sale at the Can Do Bar in Chiang Mai, the dictionary was authored by Pornpit Puckmai and Liz Cameron, with contributions from all the Empower members across the country. Noi and Liz split the editing credits. It’s a fascinating compendium of facts about the sex industry for foreigners in Thailand (although it rarely touches on the much bigger domestic trade), with references to the golden days of Ayuthaya some 400 years ago; the 700,000 GIs from the Vietnam War who came to Thailand for ‘rest and recreation’; the first chrome poles in the go-go bars that came from a strip club in Montreal in the early 1980s; and the fact that the business is second only to rice in generating more foreign exchange. They also quote a report from the International Labour Organisation stating that each year, ‘sex workers send US$300 million dollars home. This is more than any government rural development budget’.
But the book’s core is language, and it’s manifesto to challenge stereotypes and clichés. ‘Bad girls’ they define in both Thai and English as, “Any woman who behaves or thinks outside the space society maps out for them; name of Empower’s newsletter”. As synonyms they list ‘revolutionary or rebel’.
In the introduction of the book, Pornpit, the coordinator of the Chiang Mai office, wrote about how thrilled she was to attend the AWID 10th International Forum (Association for Women’s Rights in Development) held in Bangkok in 2005. At the same time, she said, “It was also hard to be labelled a ‘victim’ and a ‘prostituted woman’ rather than be respected as the hard working sex worker, family provider, community leader and human rights defender that I am. It was hard to be the only sex worker in a room when the USAID representative declared that the mighty US government and herself believe that my work degrades all women.”
Only a few months before that conference, Pornpit had won the inaugural prize as a ‘Women’s Rights Defender’ from the Thai National Human Rights Commission. That left her wondering, “How could I be both… a recognised women’s rights defender and a disgrace to women at the same time?”
The dictionary addresses these contradictions and academic constructs. “The right to define, to create, to adapt words and language is often seen as the right of academics alone. They alone claim the right to invent terms like ‘indirect prostitute’ and have them accepted even though the very people it refers to do not use, acknowledge or identify with the terms in any way As sex workers, we must be one of the most talked and written about groups in the world, but most of the words used about us have not come from us. We have our own vibrant living language and understanding of the terms used about us.”
Incorporating their signature style of cheekiness and outrage, Empower shuns the expression ‘flesh trade’: “Not our business…we don’t cut off our flesh and trade it! We entertain our customers. We sell services not meat. That would be a butcher or abattoir. Preferred: Entertainment Industry.” They are quite right in noting that terms like ‘prostitute’ and ‘whore’ have become meaningless. Everyone has misappropriated variations on them, from Nirvana satirising themselves on the band’s T-shirts that sported the slogan ‘Corporate Rock Whores’ to Thai politicians flinging the insult at their rivals to label them as ‘corrupt’ or for buying votes.
Noi believes that their work over the last 27 years has opened up wider channels of communication on the debate about the ins and outs of sex work. Having delivered lectures at universities in New York and Seattle, as well as at many international conferences, and becoming a Harvard Law School fellow in the International Human Rights programme, Noi said the dialogue is not as shrill or scholarly as it used to be. “We can talk about sex work now in universities. Before we could only talk about sexual abuse. Everyone took it that women selling their bodies equalled sexual abuse.”
Does she feel much freer now to discuss her pet peeves and passions at conferences?
“Everywhere I speak, I don’t care, I don’t mind, I will say what I want. People can listen or not,” she said with a grin. “But I only accept invitations to speak on the subjects that Empower specialises in: HIV and AIDS, tourism and sex work, and the cross-border migration of sex workers in Southeast Asia, from countries like Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Vietnam and China. It’s a growing problem. If tourists can travel freely through these countries, then why can’t women in search of work?” (A 2003 report published by the NGO spelled out the differences between ‘migrant sex workers’ and women forced into prostitution.)
Thanks to their worldwide reputation as iconoclasts, the Empower centres have become hotbeds of intellectual tumult, with scholars, lawmakers, policemen and representatives from both governmental and non-governmental organisations descending upon them. Many visitors have their preconceptions challenged. Tanyaporn Wansom, a Thai who grew up in America and returned to her homeland on a prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to do work on HIV/AIDS, had some of her feminist theories called into question through teaching English at the centre. “I’d just graduated from a kind of liberal school in the United States which was big on women’s rights and women’s studies, and I think I had more of a black and white view [of commercial sex], like it’s all disgusting and it’s all bad. But after working here and meeting some of the people, I can see both sides more and I’m less judgmental.”
Having young scholars like Tanyaporn as volunteer teachers has also boosted the learning levels of the students and their self-esteem. Chumporn noted a dramatic improvement in the English and educational levels of the women who come to the Patpong office. “Five or ten years ago some of the women could barely read and write. Today they’re much better. I don’t think the education system has improved, but women are going to school for longer now.” As an art instructor at other schools for the young, who puts on ‘imagination workshops’ in performance art and socio-political theatre for the women of Empower, he said their creativity is no greater than many of his other students, but “their life experiences are totally different. They’re better able to deal with society and take care of themselves. They’re also much less shy, and when you’re less shy you can produce a lot more.”
To keep up with the students’ learning prowess and shifting interests, the classes at Empower have changed over the years. “We don’t need to teach them so much about IT and computers now,” said Chumporn. “They know more about these subjects than we do.” He smiled. “But we’d like to do more with ‘tourist guide English’ as many of the women are escorting their customers on trips throughout the country.”
For Empower, and many other such NGOs, decriminalising prostitution is the biggest concern. Doing so, they say, would usher in more protection in the form of laws and rights for male and female sex workers, while ridding the profession of criminal elements and police corruption. In this regard, they have allies in high places. Liz Cameron of their Chiang Mai office pointed out that decriminalising prostitution was endorsed by Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, during the UN High Level Meeting on HIV/AIDS in 2008. The secretary-general claimed that this would also help to stem the flow of HIV/AIDS, which has been making a comeback in recent years.
During the 15th International Conference on HIV/AIDS held in Bangkok in 2004, Empower stole the show with one of their performances. They set up a small bar where women danced in bikinis. As Noi recalled, “You should have seen all the different people lining up to watch the women pole dancing. There were religious leaders, NGO people, cops and even the security guards. It was fun and people should have something different at these conferences. But it wasn’t like a porn movie and the dancers didn’t take off their clothes. It was part of a demonstration about different lubricants, such as water or oil based, and how these can affect or even break various kinds of condoms. Many people still don’t know about this.”
Among the 20,000 delegates at that conference were more than 100 sex workers from 21 countries, as well as a large contingent from Empower who, in the middle of the ‘Global Village’, created the ‘Bangkok A-Go-Go Bar’ with a mamasan, bartenders, MCs and dancers. The multi-nationality contingent of sex workers put on plays and puppet shows, ran workshops, did poetry readings and even presented research papers. Many of them also took part in different demonstrations against pharmaceutical companies, as well as in the official parade.
Quintessentially Thai in many respects (as is Noi with her laugh-a-minute personae), Empower has always coupled entertainment with edification. Besides the dictionary, they have put out T-shirts, a ‘Bad Girls’ calendar featuring sex workers in provocative poses but sporting serious slogans such as ‘Free Trade Agony’ stenciled across a mini-skirted bottom. Up north they run radio shows. In Bangkok they sponsored a pole-dancing competition where Thai health officials watched from the sidelines. No matter how earnest their messages are, Noi said, “We still have to make it fun.”
In recent years, the NGO has spun 360 degrees. With support from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, Empower has embarked on a new HIV/AIDS awareness programme that includes 50 volunteers handing out condoms and leaflets at hotspots for sex workers and their customers in Bangkok.
But they have also remained true to their grassroots in that their 11 offices across the country still serve as community centres. One of the most demoralising aspects of the job is bearing the social stigma attached to it and the estrangement from families and friends. Dee, the male go-go dancer, said, “I don’t trust people outside the ‘business’ and all my old friends deserted me when they found out I work in a bar.” With downcast eyes, he added, “I really wanted to be a good example for my brother and sister, but it was impossible to do so and still make enough money to help them.”
Dee and many of the women who come to their offices are drawn by a similar spirit of solidarity. On this afternoon in July 2010, a male and female duo of music teachers was giving singing lessons to about 20 women and several ladyboys in the karaoke room of the Patpong centre, which also serves as the Sex Worker’s Museum. Do not expect to be titillated by the sight of a few photos of go-go dancers, a story taped to the wall about the smash hit ‘One Night in Bangkok’, a few sex toys in a glass case and an enlarged map made in Berlin back in the 1980s that exposed different enclaves of male, female and transgendered sex workers in the capital.
Dressed in casual clothes and chit-chatting about the same subjects that obsess young women all over the planet—clothes, makeup, family problems and gossip—no one would have pictured these women as ‘ladies of the night’.
The students had decided that they wanted to learn an R&B hit by one of their heroines, Tata Young, a half-Thai/half-American singer who has amassed a considerable following all across Asia for tunes such as ‘Naughty, Sexy, Bitchy’. Lined with lyrics that mock the good-girl fairytales of Snow White and Cinderella, the song the students wanted to learn had struck a few power chords with them through its message of self-determination. As the chorus of ‘Cinderella’ kicked in, 20 voices rose in an outcry of disquieting harmonies: