On 2 July 1989, I set foot on Thai soil for the first time. I felt miserable and had thrown up several times after the last meal served during my 27-hour, four stop-over flight from Amsterdam to Bangkok on Biman Bangladesh Airlines. My Dutch companion dragged me along from Don Meuang International Airport to Bangkok's Southern Bus Terminal, where we took the cheapest possible bus to the famous river town of Kanchanaburi. Seeing how pale I looked, the young male bus employee vacated the last seat in the bus, next to a window, so I could throw up if needed. Despite my sense of misery I could not help noticing how beautiful he was, and I smiled at him gratefully. When the bus started moving and the wind blew through the open windows, I felt better. I tried to sleep a little, but woke up when I felt a hand on my leg. The bus employee had taken the seat next to me and smiled at me broadly when I looked his way. I was in shock. How had he picked me out? How did he know I was gay? I had hidden my homosexuality from everybody I knew in The Netherlands for the past five years or so – including from my travel companion who, I worried, might be upset if he found out; I quickly glanced at him, but he was fast asleep in the other corner of the bus. Half a minute later, the young man removed his hand from my leg and jumped up to help an elderly passenger disembark. My heart was beating fast – was this country, indeed, the tolerant paradise I had heard about?

Later I discovered that physicality between Thai men has, more often than not, nothing to do with homosexual desire. This first Thai ‘erotic moment’ I had experienced in the bus to Kanchanaburi was most likely not a shared one. The young man's hand on my leg and his broad beaming smile were signs of his solidarity with my miserable state – they were not an acknowledgement of any erotic interest or ‘spark’, let alone an invitation for sex or a long and happy relationship.

This incident was the first in many that came to trigger my interest in Thai masculinity and homosexuality.