by Benjamin Law
We finished our beers so KT could get Punkfuck’s rates. The other sex workers gravitated towards us too, just in case. I smiled at them and waved, trying to defuse the sexual tension by indicating I was a deranged foreign idiot.
Punkfuck turned out to be expensive by Yangon standards. He charged 7000 kyat (nine US dollars) per hour. KT came back to us, nervous and anxious, asking us whether we thought it was a good price.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘By Myanmar’s standards, you mean?’
‘He’s more expensive than others,’ KT said. ‘He knows he can charge more.’
‘You’re going to have sex with him tonight?’
‘Why?’ KT asked, panicked. ‘Do you think he’s too expensive?’
David and I looked at each other.
‘Ah, do you have the money?’
KT said he had the money, but still thought it was a lot. Punkfuck leaned against the bridge and surveyed the Yangon skyline as though he didn’t care either way. But this deal would be important to him. Getting work was the difference between sleeping with a full stomach or not. KT walked over to Punkfuck for another quiet conversation, before Punkfuck nodded and disappeared.
‘Where did he go?’ I asked.
‘We’re meeting him down the street,’ KT said.
KT, David and I left Godfrey behind, who was animatedly talking to another of the working boys. The three of us walked down the overpass stairs together as KT’s nervous chatter bounced around.
‘He’s so cute!’ KT said. ‘I like his hair! Didn’t you think his hair was cute?’
‘Um,’ I said.
‘How thick do you think his cock is?’
‘Jesus, I don’t know!’ I said.
David smiled at the exchange.
‘And how big are you, Ben?’ KT asked. ‘Tell me again!’
‘I didn’t tell you the first time!’
KT laughed. ‘Oh, I’m excited,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had him before. He’s new, I think.’ It was only later that I realised KT was implying he’d already had sex with all the others.
Punkfuck met us in the middle of the busy main street. I smiled at him, but his expression was unreadable. Poor guy, I thought. I hoped he didn’t think all three of us were going to have sex with him at once. Punkfuck crossed the road to a guesthouse’s grimy elevator entrance.
‘You have a condom, right?’ I asked KT.
KT gave me an exasperated look. David and I said we’d wait for him at a nearby noodle stall, waving him off like parents whose child was being bused off to school camp. Have fun! We watched them disappear, the elevator doors closing on Punkfuck’s sombre face and KT’s big gay smile.
David and I stood side by side, not saying much.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘This is weird.’
David, a soulful guy who always seemed deep in thought, nodded.
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty weird.’
At the noodle stall, we sat on the kids’ plastic stools they had lined up on the roadside. We ordered some noodles that came out swimming in vegetable oil and tasted like metal. Washing the oily noodles down with tea, I thought about what could be happening between KT and Punkfuck at that very moment. KT had told us he liked getting fucked, so Punkfuck probably had him bent over the bed. I was more worried about Punkfuck than KT, to be honest. What kind of life led someone to have PUNK and FUCK tattooed on his forearms and charge nine US dollars to repeatedly place himself inside strangers?
KT wandered out less than half an hour later, even though he’d booked Punkfuck for the full hour. His clothes didn’t look any different or ruffled, and his hair didn’t look wet from a shower. He just looked blissfully post-coital. Punkfuck wasn’t with him. I adopted a faux-concerned parental voice.
‘You used that condom, right?’
‘Of course!’ KT said, grinning with big white teeth.
We hailed a taxi to take us home and we drove in silence. I wondered what David and KT had on their minds. Even though my windowless Yangon guesthouse smelled of mildew and garlic, I just wanted to get to bed. It was only the next day that I even questioned how appropriate it was for HIV community workers to have sex with the people they were supposed to be protecting.
Let’s take a brief detour through a Beginner’s Guide to Homosexual Slang in Myanmar. Repeat after me. Achauk (pronounced ‘ah-chowk’) is a handy, all-encompassing term for any man who has sex with other men. Use it carefully, because it’s the Burmese equivalent of ‘faggot’: derogatory when straight people say it, but used freely between gay guys as a term of bitchy affection.
Then there are three subcategories of achauk, each of which comes with a defined sex role. Apwint (‘ah-pwint’, meaning ‘open’) are Myanmar’s queens, who live and dress as women and are always – always – on the receiving end of anal sex. The femme sex worker with the bloody smile on the Lion World overpass would have identified as apwint. Many are on female hormones for breast development, but few undergo genital sex reassignment. Even if they wanted it, it was unthinkably expensive in this country. Apwint were often found dancing in nat spirit celebrations or working in hair salons and make-up parlours. If you were an urban Burmese bride-to-be, it’d probably be apwint who would design your dress, do your make-up and curl your hair on the day.
Apwint never couple with each other. They team up either with thange (‘tongue-eh’) – macho guys who are relatively open about their sexuality and always on top in sex – or abone (‘ah-bone’, meaning ‘hiders’), straight-acting, masculine-presenting men who can be versatile with sexual positions. As their name suggests, abone are usually closeted when it comes to their sexual identity.
Some English vernacular has slipped through too. As we’ve learned already, if you have a steady boyfriend, he is your husband. Gay is interchangable with apwint, while homo is the term for abone or thange guys. If you’re a foreigner, don’t confuse locals by introducing yourself as ‘gay’ unless you’re wearing make-up or jewellery, and flailing your hands about.
Most of this slang was harmless and funny, but there was also slang for tremendously unfunny things too, such as contracting HIV, which happened often enough in Myanmar to warrant its own suite of euphemisms. If a guy received a positive HIV diagnosis, he might say he’d gotten thazin, the name of a native Burmese wildflower that had become synonymous with HIV here, since Médecins Sans Frontières Holland – one of the few organisations in Myanmar that both tested for HIV/AIDS and treated patients with life-saving ARTs – ran clinics named after the flower.
Men might also say they had just won the Myanmar Academy Award for Best Male Actor, gallows-humour code for contracting HIV. When guys explained the slang’s origin to me, they laughed uproariously. ‘See, the Academy Awards is so hard to get, but HIV is so easy!’ they said. ‘This is why it’s funny. See, you got the Academy!’
‘Ha, ha?’ I said again.
After the evening with KT, Godfrey and Dave, I returned to the same cruising site during the day with Kyaw Swe, a peer educator with PSI, another NGO focused on preventing HIV. Kyaw Swe distributed condoms, talked to people about their problems and invited them into PSI’s drop-in centre for HIV tests. Not all sex workers protected themselves during sex, he told me. I was still troubled by what had happened with KT and Punkfuck. I told Kyaw Swe the story and asked for his opinion.
‘This was after hours?’ Kyaw Swe asked. ‘He was off-duty from his job?’
I nodded. Kyaw Swe thought about it.
‘Well, I don’t see any problem then,’ he said.
Kyaw Swe was handsome: lean and ropey with dark skin, spiked hair and black glasses that framed sad-looking eyes. He was still young – thirty, only a little older than me – but already had two sons aged ten and eight. His eldest was really smart, he said, and had won all sorts of academic awards, especially in maths.
Although Kyaw Swe now had kids and a wife, he had once been a sex worker, having worked the same streets as Punkfuck for half a decade. He had fallen
into sex work by accident. As a teenager, he sold betel nuts in Yangon’s local markets for pitiable pay. The markets were a drawcard for tourists, and one night, two American guys took a shine to Kyaw Swe. They offered him money to have sex with them – at least 100 US dollars, maybe more – that converted to a wad of kyats so thick that it supported him for months.
The money Kyaw Swe brought in from sex work was far more reliable than what he made selling betel, so when he got married, his wife let him continue. The idea of him fucking men for cash upset her, but this was Myanmar and their options were limited.
Kyaw Swe was twenty-three when a German client asked him for a tour of things in Yangon that foreigners wouldn’t usually see. Kyaw Swe took him to a downtown pagoda festival that attracted huge numbers of locals. There were children everywhere, some of them desperately poor, like the two boys – aged around eight or ten – who caught the German tourist’s eye.
‘Oh, they are lovely,’ the German client said to Kyaw Swe. ‘They look very poor, though. Can you bring them to me? I’d like to help them.’
After he introduced the German man to the two boys, Kyaw Swe didn’t see them again. But when he was arrested for facilitating child prostitution, he discovered what had happened next: the German tourist raped the boys; he loaded them with money; the boys’ parents asked where the money had come from; the police were called in.
‘I just thought he wanted to say hello and help the children,’ Kyaw Swe said.
Kyaw Swe was sent to Myanmar’s notorious Insein Prison for two years. The cells were stinking hot and Kyaw Swe slept shoulder to shoulder on the cement floor with his fellow prisoners, 120 people to a small room. Some Insein inmates were forced to crush rocks, like prisoners in cartoons, making rubble for bitumen and paving. Some, like Kyaw Swe, were assigned to work in lung-corroding mines that were prone to collapsing. Every day, they worked from seven in the morning to six at night with a one-hour break for lunch. When I asked him to describe prison, Kyaw Swe responded in a dead voice.
‘It was like hell,’ he said.
After his release, Kyaw Swe no longer saw the allure of sex work, but didn’t feel he had much choice. He went back to the bridge outside Lion World, but now there was more competition, less pay and new police crackdowns. It wasn’t long before HIV peer educators intercepted Kyaw Swe on the bridge. Kyaw Swe educated himself about HIV and sexual health at PSI’s Top Centre, meeting other sex workers in a social space for the first time. Soon, PSI offered him a paid job to educate his peers. For the first time, he was thinking about the future for himself, his wife and two boys. He wanted to own a small business, like a tea house, and have one day off a week. He wanted a simpler life with time to hang out with his family and – because he was thange – his boyfriend on the side.
To the management at PSI, Kyaw Swe was the perfect candidate for a peer educator: he knew how to talk to working boys. PSI’s safe-sex message might have been easy to deliver, but it was a hard sell convincing the boys to use a condom every time. When Kyaw Swe was a sex worker, he often had to pay for the guesthouse and the hotel deposit.
‘If you’re a customer, you might pay me 10,000. And then you’ll say, “And if you don’t use a condom, I will give you an extra 10,000 kyats.” How can I decide? I would take the money, because this short-term problem is more important.’
It was a common attitude in Myanmar. Existence was so hand to mouth that the idea of later getting sick and dying wasn’t even worth thinking about. You literally couldn’t afford to think about it.
If it hadn’t been for PSI, Kyaw Swe would still have been out there, often having unprotected sex. Statistically speaking, if he’d kept on working the streets, it was likely that he would have contracted HIV by now.
Myths about HIV were prevalent in Myanmar. The most pervasive belief was that if someone had HIV, you would be able to see evidence of it. The logic was messy but understandable: if someone was incubating a deadly virus, then surely that person would look as though they were dying. They would look weak and bony, and have lesions that oozed pus. In most people’s minds HIV looked like, well, AIDS.
These beliefs were held even by more-educated Burmese. Zin Min Htet was thirty-two years old and an engineer with a PhD. He was smart, had held a government engineering post for years and had even been accepted into international postgraduate courses. When I met him in Yangon, he was dressed like a businessman on casual Friday, wearing an ironed, pink-collared shirt and smelling of cologne.
Zin Min Htet was also HIV-positive. Originally, we’d been scheduled to talk about his work for Myanmar’s International HIV/AIDS Alliance, but during a walk to a hotel bar, Zin Min Htet told me the story of how he’d gotten HIV from a long-term boyfriend. The boyfriend had since gone off to work in Singapore, and Zin Min Htet had no way of contacting him. Zin Min Htet wasn’t sure if the boyfriend knew he was HIV-positive.
‘I didn’t suspect him,’ he said, ‘because he looked very handsome and strong.’
‘Macho, you mean?’
He nodded.
‘And you didn’t think anyone like that could get HIV?’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘I wrongly stereotyped that HIV cannot exist in a person who is handsome. This is my misconception.’
Zin Min Htet was abone like his boyfriend – versatile and masculine-presenting. They both assumed HIV exclusively affected apwint, transgender or feminine men. These were the men usually targeted for HIV tests by NGOs, which came back to sex roles: apwint were always on the receiving end of anal sex. Zin Min Htet said he’d learned how HIV was spread only after becoming HIV-positive himself – far too late.
Zin Min Htet grew up in the northernmost part of the Yangon region, in a township called Mingaladon, but moved to the city to attend university. Afterwards, he got a job with Myanmar’s Ministry of Science and Technology, regularly transferring from city to city. When he was offered the opportunity to study in Germany and India, he had a mandatory health check, including blood test, standard policy for anyone intending to leave the country. Zin Min Htet was posted in Mandalay at the time and didn’t think there would be anything wrong with the results.
But he had been getting weird fevers on and off, with increasing frequency. He thought it was just his immune system playing up. When he went back to Yangon’s National Health Laboratory to get the test results, they told him he was HIV-positive. The doctor gave him the results unceremoniously – without counselling, referrals or words of comfort – then let him go. His doctor did say one thing, though. Because he knew Zin Min Htet worked for the ministry, he told him very clearly: ‘Don’t talk about your blood test results to the government.’
Perhaps it was the shock of the results, or just a coincidence in timing, but his fever took hold properly soon after his diagnosis. Zin Min Htet’s lymph nodes swelled up, his body temperature spiked and constant diarrhoea left him badly dehydrated. He was away from home and on his own in a Yangon hostel. He called in sick from work, closed the doors to his dorm room and stayed in bed for a week.
At the end of that week, one of Zin Min Htet’s friends came to visit, worried about his health. Knowing he looked ravaged, Zin Min Htet told his friend he was HIV-positive. His friend didn’t flinch, and said his sister worked at Médecins Sans Frontières Holland.
Staff at MSF Holland’s Thazin clinic diagnosed Zin Min Htet as also having tuberculosis, a disease that commonly affects Burmese people with HIV. It’s known as an opportunistic infection, because it’s easy to infect an HIV-weakened body. For the first few weeks, Zin Min Htet was on powerful anti-TB drugs. In the meantime, his CD4 count – the gauge of his immune system’s strength – was plummeting, but he would have to wait another four months to go on ARTs, since they couldn’t overlap with TB medications.
As Zin Min Htet recovered from TB, he tried sorting out the logistics of his job. His government post was in Mandalay, an overnight bus ride from Yangon, but he’d need to stay in Yangon to commit himself to his forthcoming
ART regime. If he slipped off the strict ART schedule, he would have to start it again. There were far fewer ART supplies in Mandalay than in Yangon, and no guarantees he would receive his required dosage.
Zin Min Htet’s work supervisor was the rector of Yangon University, someone with connections and power, so he took a gamble. He told her he was HIV-positive and asked her whether he could work in Yangon. Troubled, she urged him to disclose his status to the minister responsible for his job. She hoped that the ministry would be able to issue him with an official transfer.
Zin Min Htet sat down and wrote the letter, ignoring his doctor’s advice never to tell the government that he was HIV-positive. For the next eight months, he stayed in Yangon on a temporary transfer, started ART treatments and worked as a university lecturer while he completed his PhD. He recovered from the TB, and despite the initial side effects of the ARTs, his health returned.
Then Zin Min Htet’s professor received a phone call from the minister himself. Zin Min Htet’s file had come to his personal attention, and he demanded that Zin Min Htet take long-term sick leave from his ministry job. Zin Min Htet could be reaccepted into his ministry role, the minister said, but only once his blood tests came back HIV-negative. Everyone knew that was impossible. The message was blunt: Don’t come back. Knowing this part of his life was over, Zin Min Htet folded and resigned.
Zin Min Htet caught the bus back home to Mingaladon. His parents, two younger brothers and one sister still lived together in relative poverty, and the family relied on Zin Min Htet’s income to survive. It was impossible to explain why he’d lost his job without also disclosing his HIV status. He braced himself and told them the news.
