During the show I noticed that the boys are clearly drugged, with tense faces and permanent erections as a result of drugs such as Viagra.

It started with a meeting with a young man from Myanmar, a country ravaged by conflict. He was in his late twenties, handsome and, to my surprise, straight. To survive, he worked in a massage parlor in Bangkok’s gay district. “Some men offer a lot of money for sex,” he said, “but I always make it clear to my clients that there’s nothing more to be gained from me than a massage.” He showed me a message on his phone: an older man had sent him a declaration of love. “If only women did that,” he chuckled.

A week later I find myself at a 'boy show', a popular attraction in the same district. It attracts not only customers looking for sexual services, but also curious tourists. A gay couple I know has asked me to come along. "Most of those boys are straight", I tell them. "Gay for pay, exciting ...", they say laughing. A remark I have often heard as an innocent joke among gay friends.

During the show I notice that the boys are clearly drugged, with tight faces and permanent erections as a result of drugs such as Viagra. They all wear a button with a number pinned to their tight swimming trunks. Especially older Western and Chinese men generously put money in their underwear when they walk by. Some offer the boys a drink, after which they sit down with them.

“Every boy decides for himself what to do with customers when they continue drinking in the hotel,” the bar manager explains to me. “And the straight boys don’t go all the way ,” he concludes with a wink. Once outside, a boy from Vietnam tells me he wants to make money quickly. An undocumented boy from Cambodia says he is limited in his options.

A few weeks later, while working for an NGO project against child sexual exploitation, I am standing under a bridge in a suburb. Boys in their twenties are sharing their stories. One of them has a child and a girlfriend, but also paid sex with men; he says he needs the money to support his family. He was born and raised in prison, because his mother was in prison for a drug offence. Around the age of fifteen, he ended up in prostitution. He shares harrowing stories of repeated abuse and how he was sometimes left in hotels without his clients having paid him. He tells me how he tried to end his life and then shows me a scar from a stab wound near his heart.

Another boy sold chewing gum as a child on a beach that turned out to be a meeting place for gay men. At the age of eleven, he was approached by a foreign man who drugged him, abused him and then gave him a large sum of money. After that, he had four to five customers a day. He now rents out lounge chairs on a beach and has left that life behind him, while a third boy says he still lives under the bridge and sees little prospect.

Although some of the boys at the boy show told me earlier that they did this voluntarily, I find it difficult to close my eyes to the dark side of this world. For example, earlier this year one of the establishments was closed after a police raid in which an underage boy was found. The term 'gay for pay' has acquired a particularly bitter aftertaste for me because of these encounters.