by Benjamin Law
Around the site, there were some battered remains of small statues depicting Hindu gods, some embodying the concept of trimurti: the creator Brahma, the preserver Vishnu and the destroyer Shiva. In Hinduism, at all times, there was supposed to be a balance among the three, a cycle of creation, preservation and destruction in order for things to regenerate. Whatever: it wasn’t long before the statues would be bulldozed too.
Next to the bulés sunning themselves at Callego, I was shamefully skinny and pale. One sixty-something Caucasian guy was so alarmingly tanned that he seemed to belong to a new race entirely. He lay flat on his stomach wearing what was technically a G-string, although the way his giant butt consumed the fabric he may as well have been naked. Every so often, he blinked and looked around confusedly, before getting up and shuffling off, smacking his lips and gently flossing his anus as he walked to the bathroom.
At the nearby Callego Café, an old man sat by himself smoking cigarettes while wearing the tiniest white rugby shorts. He had an interesting face that changed depending on the angle. When he took a drag on his cigarette, he looked craggy and villainous – like someone being tried at a war crimes tribunal – but then he exhaled the smoke and looked utterly charming and dapper. The old man smoked languidly alongside a younger, compactly muscled Indonesian guy, and they both caught my eye. Their names were respectively – no joke – Steve and Irwin.
Steve and Irwin were just friends. Australian Steve had an Indonesian boyfriend, while Irwin’s bulé boyfriend had recently passed away. As Steve smoked, he told me about the first time he came to Bali in 2000, having just broken up with his long-term Australian boyfriend back home.
‘You came here looking for a rebound?’ I asked.
‘I wanted to come and fuck everybody I could, actually.’
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘I’d never had sex with an Asian until then,’ he said, ‘so I thought, I’ll go and have a look. And since then, I’ve never been with another bulé.’ Steve laughed to himself.
When he first arrived in Bali, Steve found himself at an Australian bar called Peanuts. It was a standard mixed club, because that’s all he could find. Despite what he’d heard, there were no obvious gay bars and he hadn’t seen any advertisements for them. Steve started talking to the Indonesian barman and asked him if there were any close by.
‘Oh, there are no gays in Bali,’ the barman had said. ‘No gay scene.’
The barman was friendly, but also looked nervous talking about this stuff. Steve was convinced he was covering up, so bought him a few drinks to loosen him up.
‘Okay,’ the barman eventually said. ‘I’ll call somebody. Just wait.’
Soon after, a guy on a motorcycle came to pick Steve up and usher him to the newly opened Hulu Café – the one that would eventually burn down – where a ladyboy greeted him at the bar.
‘No,’ Steve said to the motorcyclist. ‘I want a man who looks like a man.’
Overhearing what Steve was saying, two young Indonesian men immediately approached him.
When I asked whether the men were good-looking, Steve shrugged.
‘Actually, looking back,’ he said, ‘they weren’t so handsome.’ He laughed croakily at me. ‘I looked at some photos yesterday.’
Nonetheless, the next morning, Steve sauntered into the hotel breakfast area, a young Indonesian man on each arm, completely without shame. Only twenty-four hours earlier, he was heartbroken and bereft; now he was in a foreign country having fucked two perfectly lovely young men in one evening. He felt radiant. His fellow hotel guests were appalled. Children at the breakfast tables giggled quietly, silently appealing to their parents for answers while mums and dads shook their heads at each other, absolutely disgusted. As Steve took a seat with his straight friends, the owner of the hotel came to tell him that he was very sorry, but they’d unfortunately made a double booking for his room and he would now have to vacate the premises.
One of Steve’s friends leaned over and said, ‘You dirty old bastard. Bringing two of them over? If you had only one of them, you might’ve gotten away with it.’
Steve wasn’t concerned. He had heard about a gay-friendly hotel in Legian that had just opened up, so the threesome stayed there for a week, fucking each other senseless at every opportunity. Steve was generous with the boys, paying for their taxi rides and shouting them meals at the expensive Jimboran seafood restaurant where they both demanded to be taken every night. He was still getting used to the currency, but everything seemed cheap enough. Just before Steve left, he gave them each an extra 300 dollars before happily waving them goodbye, leaving them to revel in their modest new fortunes.
The way Steve told the story made it seem happy and idyllic, but I still had my reservations, and the image of this old man with two young boys on each arm burned in my mind. Was this okay? I wondered.
‘Everyone’s got to make money somehow,’ Steve said, as if reading my mind. ‘No one here judges the moneyboys.’
Plus, he added, they made for the most beautiful, loyal boyfriends. And despite anyone’s preconceptions or judgements about sleaze or sordidness, once the locals hooked up with you, Steve said, they were fiercely loyal. Steve’s boyfriend Imam had been a moneyboy when they met, he said. Steve had been walking along the shoreline at dusk when he heard someone call out, ‘Hello, hello.’ In the half-light, Steve couldn’t see anyone, but could discern Imam’s smile: Cheshire-cat teeth glowing white. The young man was deeply tanned from walking up and down the beach all day in the full sun, looking for customers. Steve liked the look of him.
‘He stayed with me that night,’ Steve said. ‘I woke up in the morning and he was still there, and I thought, Wow, okay: he didn’t steal my money.’
‘Your organs hadn’t been removed,’ I joked.
‘No!’ Steve raised his eyebrows and chuckled. ‘Well, almost …’
I nearly spat out my drink. Steve roared with laughter.
Steve and Imam had been together ever since, in a devoted and happily non-monogamous relationship. It was a recurring story with bulé–Indonesian gay couples: many started out with a frisky money-fuelled session of jiggy-jiggy, but often these relationships developed into something far deeper and unexpectedly solid: romances, friendships, partnerships and even business arrangements between equals. Gary, who had started Spartacvs, was another example. The young Indonesian man he had met online years ago was now a business partner in Spartacvs. While they were no longer lovers, Gary’s relationship with him had laid the basis for his future. Often the dynamics of male sex work in Bali were more complicated than basic exploitation. For some moneyboys, it was a quick and creative way out of poverty, if you played your cards right.
By the end of my time in Bali, I caved. I embraced who I was and became a shameless, bona fide tourist. For years, I had avoided travelling to Bali because of the clichés of what it meant to be a foreigner there: the drunk Australians with braided mullets; the Europeans buying shitty souvenirs and pirated Viagra; the sunstroked Brits sporting second-degree sunburn; the vomiting; the hooting.
But it was only when you embraced Bali that the island embraced you back. I had surfing lessons at Kuta that were almost spiritual, experiencing the natural high of standing on a wave, and the agony of fibreglass chafing that nearly eroded the nipples from my chest. I rode my bike to organic restaurants in the middle of nowhere and experienced the specific yet nameless guilt that comes from cycling past Kerobokan Prison to get a luxuriously long twenty-dollar massage at a nearby spa. There were dinners on timber decks overlooking the ocean by night, and afternoon bike rides where I’d get stupidly lost before finding myself watching the sunset in the middle of endless rice paddies, built like the tiered green seating of some natural amphitheatre. If this island wasn’t paradise, it was getting close.
From Spartacvs, I roamed from nudist gay villa to nudist gay villa. One was a giant old Dutch house that had been turned into a gay clothing-optional homestay. It was secluded and homely,
and often played host to married businessmen who liked to fuck men on the side. These guests would check into five-star hotels so their wife and kids had a place to leave phone messages, but in reality they were staying here, having affairs with the foreign and local men who stayed at this place. With everyone under a single roof, it had the feel of a hostel crossed with a colonial-era homosexual harem.
It was sort of gross.
‘I think you’ll have a lot of fun here,’ the manager told me when I arrived. The communal living environment was designed to be conducive to sex, and it wasn’t long before I opened my dorm room one night to find two portly Malaysian men making out and taking off each other’s shirts enthusiastically.
‘Oh shit, sorry!’ I said.
Neither of them paid attention to me and they kept making out, grabbing each other’s bulky chests and licking each other’s nipples. It was a long time before I went back to the room to sleep that night. Because the one communal shower was almost constantly in use, I’d just take my showers in the open by the pool.
At another four-bedroom villa, I had the place to myself while it was being done up. Yandi, the houseboy who lived on-site – a tall, lean and muscled guy with teeth as white as bleached paper – walked around wearing nothing but brash designer underwear in colourful patterns. He was quite forward when introducing himself.
‘I’m Yandi!’ he said. ‘I like Asians! Japanese, Chinese, Singapore. Like you.’
‘Okay!’ We stared at each other. ‘And do you live here, Yandi?’
‘Yeah, I live here, live here all alone,’ he said, lowering his eyes seductively. ‘But tonight, I sleep with you.’
‘Uh …’
‘You like?’ he said.
‘Yandi, I have a boyfriend.’
He barked with laughter. ‘Ah, you have boyfriend!’ he shrieked. ‘I’m naughty!’
Then he lowered his eyes again and looked me up and down. ‘But you can still call me,’ he said, rhyming, ‘if you’re horny.’
‘You are bad, Yandi,’ I said.
Yandi laughed really loudly, then looked me up and down again.
At night, when Yandi had gone to bed and I had the house to myself, I’d strip off and float in the pool, making the most of the dark and washing off the day’s sweat and weird conversations. As I floated in the warm water, staring past the silhouettes of palms and into the starry night, I felt like a really small kid floating in a giant bath.
I was a little conflicted. Bali’s tourism had lifted the island out of poverty, but there were other costs. The island’s entire tourism model was a Catch-22: the pace of tourism steadily eroded Bali’s native culture, environment, language and religion, but economically Bali couldn’t live without foreigners. Tourism was the island’s lifeblood. After the bombs in 2002 and 2005, visitor numbers contracted by a third and employment figures sank. People got poor quickly and non-Balinese workers returned to their home islands and awful jobs. People still spoke about that period like a recent horror they had only barely scraped through.
Meanwhile, sex work had become such an ingrained part of Bali’s gay scene that nearly all young gay men in Bali – and a lot of straight ones – had scored money from sex with bulés at some stage. They tried it for fun, out of boredom or because they wanted an instant hit of money. It had almost become a rite of passage.
Made was thirty-two, a skinny guy who seemed to be formed entirely out of sharp-angled, crane-like limbs. He was native Balinese. For young gay Indonesians from other islands, Bali represented an amnesty zone where they could be openly queer for the first time, away from the prying eyes of their family in Sumatra or Jakarta. It was different if you were Balinese like Made. Bali was a small island, and it didn’t take long for word to spread from family to family. You had to be more discreet. While other gay boys openly cruised each other and bulés at Dhyana Pura, Balinese boys either went online or did old-school cruising along the riverbanks or in old derelict buildings: uma hatu, or ghost houses.
Despite this, Made told me he still went to the bars on Dhyana Pura Street occasionally. When he was in his twenties – when he was more foolhardy and less aware of the consequences – he’d go there nearly every night looking for action. Usually he looked for other Indonesian men, but occasionally he went out sniffing for bulés or they’d come and approach him. Locals were fun, Made said, but the bulés were potentially lucrative. Made even once scored a motorcycle out of one old Australian.
‘A motorcycle!’ I said. ‘How did that happen?’
‘It was difficult. I didn’t speak English,’ Made said, grinning, ‘so I had to use the language of my body instead.’
I nodded. ‘Right.’
Made said the Australian bulé had been more than twice his age – in his sixties or older. Made had been only in his mid twenties. The age difference was so big that it made him a little embarrassed to think about it now.
‘Was he good-looking, though?’ I asked. ‘Some older guys can still be handsome.’
Made grimaced and clarified for me: this particular dude was super-old and super-ugly. Made didn’t say it in a callous or deliberately mean way. He was describing the bulé objectively, the way you’d describe someone’s hair colour or the shape of their ears. This guy just happened to be ancient and had a seriously unfortunate face. But the old, ugly bulé also had money, so Made went through with it.
The only catch, Made said, was doing exactly what the bulé told him. But Made was usually passive in sex anyway, so he just lay there while the bulé did his thing. To Made’s surprise, he managed to put on a convincing performance, and even got a boner.
‘I don’t think I need someone to be handsome,’ Made said. ‘I think I need someone to comfort me. I mean, at first I didn’t exactly love this guy, but then slowly, slowly, I learned to like him.’
After a few months though, Made decided the bulé wasn’t really his thing. He was young, and this guy was so old he may as well have been his grandfather, or a wizard. And there wasn’t really a spark to speak of, so Made casually called the arrangement off. Furious, the Australian bulé took back the motorcycle he’d given Made, which made Made upset. But he knew better than to argue back. Made’s problem was that he wasn’t open about being gay to his family, and he didn’t want the bulé to expose him.
Made was the sixth of seven siblings and none of his brothers or sisters knew he was gay. Neither did his parents. He suspected his family had their suspicions, but no one ever asked questions and Made never said anything. In his Hindu family, questions about his sexuality were framed by talking about how Made wasn’t yet married, which was embarrassing for everyone involved.
‘The difficult is with the community and the banjar,’ he said. Banjars were the traditional councils upon which Balinese society was based, discrete micro authorities on the island. Even now, male heads of most Balinese families met every fortnight to discuss matters affecting the community, including marriage. ‘I’m getting old,’ Made said, ‘so everyone in my family is asking me: “When are you going to get married?” In Bali culture, a man has to be married, but I’m not ready to be open to the family yet.’
Adding to his shame, every one of Made’s siblings – four brothers and two sisters – was already married. One of his nieces and another nephew were now married off too, and their kids were old enough to talk and refer to him jokingly as ‘grandfather’. Made laughed as he said this, but the laughter came out uncomfortably.
At thirty-two, Made felt too old – and was definitely too gay – for marriage now. But he was also beyond chasing bulés. There was way too much competition in Seminyak, with each new batch of gays moving to the island more handsome, muscled, charming and willing than the last. Nowadays, one Westerner would have between five and ten Indonesians close to him, trying to catch him.
‘Locals have to be more aggressive,’ Made said. ‘And Westerners, they are the king here. They have money, so they get to choose which boy they want.’
Made’s
gay friends told me that none of this stuff – the gay villas, the gay clubs, the unceasing packs of rich gay bulés – existed when they were teenagers. Part of them still wished it didn’t. Now it was crowded in Seminyak and tourists came and went, treating boys like trash. Boys became superficial, and it was all about comparing the gifts that bulés left behind. It was common for Balinese guys to pick up bulés and be given widescreen televisions they’d install in comically tiny bedrooms, despite not even having a flushable toilet.
‘All this is good for the economy,’ one of Made’s friends told me, ‘but maybe not good for our culture. Maybe more Balinese will forget the culture also. We’re really afraid Bali will become a sex destination for tourists, like Bangkok, you know.’
He looked at his lap.
‘Nowadays,’ he said, ‘tourists like drag queens more than they like Balinese dancers.’
He laughed a little at his own joke.
You heard this a lot: locals mournfully speculating that Bali was about to become the next Bangkok, that the island was on the tipping point from being famous for its culture to being synonymous with sex. There were other emerging problems too: in Bali, only around 26 per cent of sex workers reportedly used condoms. The rise of gay tourism, the blurring of occupational and incidental sex work, combined with a lack of sex education, meant HIV rates on the island amongst men who had sex with men had increased by 10 per cent in the past year alone.
I swam naked in the villa’s pool at night, my junk floating about, stars shooting across the night sky. The luxury here was almost obscene: the frangipani flowers that dropped into the water would be removed by morning. I mulled over the stories and arguments: ethics versus economics; selling sex to know your worth. It was hard to think about, but it didn’t take long to figure out what was distracting me. In the back of my mind, I was planning my next holiday here. Next time, I decided, I would bring my boyfriend too. It was both wonderful and awful, the way this island made everything – and every one – so easy.