Now he is back as ShamelessMack2. As importantly his blog is back. I hope all readers of this forum will check it and bookmark it. The posts are long but he has a wonderfully vivid and fluent writing style, calls everything as it is and gives extremely valuable insights into Thailand's gay nightlife.
Here is a short excerpt from his latest post about Spas in Bangkok.
https://shamelessmacktwo.travel.blogTired after a flight, horny, not particularly fussy, I headed straight to Arena Massage midway down Silom Road. It’s a trusty ol’ place with no pretensions. The building, which has a sort of courtyard in the centre, always looks run down, and half the shop units seem either to have no tenants, or tenants who are slowly going out of business. Siam Paragon, this most certainly is not.
The building has (had?) a twin in Sukhumvit near Nana station — almost exactly the same architectural design, also with a central courtyard — and there used to be an M2M massage parlour in the twin too. If my memory serves me well, it was called Body Club at first, then Uniman later. Both the Sukhumvit building and its Silom twin were equally run down. It was always a tough contest between the two which could boast of more torpor and neglect.
Turning into the courtyard of the Silom building, I wondered whether the Sukhumvit twin was still standing. And if there was still an M2M massage parlour there. The Sukhumvit location was more desirable real estate and could have been redeveloped by now. Maybe I’ll go over for a look-see another day.
Anyway, at Arena, around 18:00h, some 22 guys stood up and formed a semi-circle to be selected. With mostly gym-fit bodies but average-looking faces, the line-up wasn’t as instantly captivating as I’d like. By “instantly captivating”, I mean the feeling that you’re entranced, with four or five lovely lads raising your heart rate and triggering excited anticipation of a sexy massage. Not today. The feeling was more workman-like, “Well, I’m here, and now I have to choose.” No one really caught my eye but it would be unpleasant (and not my plan anyway) to just leave.
I reckoned the average age was 30 or 32, but then Arena’s been like that for a long while. I can’t say that anything has really changed. The place has no airs; the boys have no airs. And I mean that as a compliment.
More importantly, it clearly has a viable formula for business sustainability, which is way more than can be said for many other flash-in-the-pan places.
I seldom take long to pick a guy from a line-up. I go largely by intuition, fully aware that ultimately, it’s all a matter of luck what I’ll get as service in the room. So out of maybe 4 – 5 possibilities in today’s line-up, I picked the guy at the extreme left. He was younger and slimmer than most of the rest, but not by much — an S2 in my physique classification system. He would be the first of a string of massage boys with names beginning with “J”. Here, I will call him J-One.
As before, Arena’s massage room was small and depressingly functional. There was a shower stall in one corner complete with crumbling plaster on the wall near it and J-One observed the Arena custom of showering with the customer. Naturally, he remained nude through the rest of the session.
I think the Sukhumvit twin building that he mentions was what is called Korea Town. At one time there were two gay massage spas there, then one - and finally it closed. I do not know of any there now.