YOU KNOW HOW hard it is when it comes to making and keeping long-term friendships and acquaintances. But it’s especially difficult when you are a professional person with a job that means you have to travel frequently with work within a region, or with a job that entails fairly regular relocations.
Therefore, it was quite a surprise to me when I literally bumped into an old, old acquaintance of mine recently in Bangkok airport. Someone I’ve known for over 20 + years, but only see infrequently. Indeed, it may well have been five years since we last met up.
And my goodness, what a revealing time it was!
Making plans for the evening.
I was in Bangkok for a few days stopover en-route to Australia and he(she?) was just back “home” to the City of Angels having been in Phuket for a short vacation the preceding week.
We shared a taxi downtown and took the hour or so trip to briefly catch up on past memories, friends and acquaintances But an hour wasn’t long enough so, as we neared our respective destinations, we agreed that we should also catch up for dinner later that night.
I was pleased to see Robert as had always got on well with him but, after the taxi driver had dropped him off, found myself frowning. “It’s very much the same Robert,” I thought. “His personality hasn’t changed much over the years. He still looks slim and fit. But he looks somehow quite different… quite… quite well, how can I say, more sort of feminine…”
We did have a lot to talk about…. and it turned out to be quite an eye-opener.
Needless to say, the events of later that night took a quite unexpected turn. And, I must admit, what we talked about, in some ways, initially left me shocked and almost at a loss for words. Yet, I soon started thinking about many of those other people like Robert whom I’ve met over the years and began to wonder why I was shocked at all….
For those of you who have read some of my previous books, you probably really should not be too surprised about the subject matter of our conversations…. Can you guess?
Yes, you got it in one! Cross dressers, transvestites and transgender people and many of those people in between genders; those who blur gender boundaries, who are neither male nor female, or who can comfortably flit between gender norms. It’s a world I know well, a world that is multi-layered and never fails to fascinate, intrigue and surprise… just like Rob did to me!
Let me tell you some more about Robert.
Robert and worked together in the same office around 20, maybe even 25, years ago. He was about 2 years older than me and we were both based in Hong Kong but both had travelling jobs. Often he’d disappear for, seemingly, weeks on end on projects in The Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia. I tended to focus more on north Asia—certainly the less glamorous places for stunning nightlife adventures.
Although he had a series of quite stunning girlfriends from many of the south east Asian countries he visited such as Indonesia, Thailand or even Vietnam, to the best of my knowledge, Robert never married. Some of us in the office often wondered why, and oftentimes looked on quite jealously at his ability to remain unattached and avoid the consequences of getting into a permanent relationship.
Yet some of the other male colleagues in our office gossiped about him behind his back, casting aspersions about where his real sexual interests lay. There was no real single reason for this, just malicious gossip really—probably due to his amazing ability to constantly attract beautiful women and empathise with them. He was the type of man who women would flock to in a bar or nightclub, or seek out when they had a problem or wanted someone to dine with… and most of the men in the office just couldn’t work out why!
Slight of build, but not short in stature, Rob always presented well. He certainly looked after his physique and was a tee-total, vegetarian. His grooming was great and the other men soon picked up on this and his longer than average finger nails, his pierced ears (he only wore earring outside of work) and other so-called slightly “feminine traits” they identified.
I must admit that I went along with some of these “doubts” to some extent but I have always said that it “matters not to me” what you are or how you live your life as long as you are a good person.
Fast forward to about 5 years ago, the last time I saw Rob (we’d both left the company we’d previously worked for by then) and he was dating a quite stunning (and I mean stunning, like 10++) ladyboy from Thailand. We’d had a quite cryptic conversation about gender and sexuality and I’d come away wondering even more about just where Rob fitted in to the gender spectrum.
