“The hidden situation was so difficult, hidden from the family, friends and the public. Back home in the evening, his wife helped him learn English from radio and books. Every day at 8 am, Kyaw Zayar Swe took an hour-long train trip to downtown to look for customers. As for the source, he told her he had become a tour guide. He bought food, medicine and gave the rest money to his wife. He earned US$1,000, a flood of money he couldn’t have imagined, just for four nights. But after I received money from him, I was happy,” he recalled. Only then could he, a straight man, have sex with another man, he said. He asked his first customer to get him drunk. Thinking of his sick mother and one-year-old son, he says, this time he did not say no. He had never done sex work - until one day an American tourist offered him more than US$200 for a night of sex. Promising to help the man find sex workers, he became a regular at the same-sex markets.
Three months later, he still couldn’t find a job and went back to the businessman. Looking for a new job, Kyaw Zayar Swe said in in an interview that he met the owner of a jewelry store who asked him for sex. After he married at 18 and had his first son, the last straw came he lost his job as a clerk. But as with millions of other Myanmar families, money was an endless headache. The eldest of three children, he dropped out of school at 15 to work to support the family. He describes himself as the king of the male sex trade in Yangon. It has been 20 years since the 38-year-old Kyaw Zayar Swe accidentally got into this shadowy world. They hide in Bogyoke market, Chinatown and Sule Road, where the neon lights pour into their searching eyes. Most are not gay but service gay clients, driven into the profession by poverty, lack of education and far too often by the need to feed their wives and children. “Consequently, in 2016, just over half (52 percent) of those living with HIV knew their status.”Įven so, around 5,000 Yangon men take the risk. Stigma and discrimination continue to contribute to the low levels of access to HIV services, with just 50-75 percent of men who have sex with men reporting having an HIV test in 2015,” the NGO said. Myanmar has the highest recorded rate of HIV prevalence in Southeast Asia for men who have sex with men, referred to as MSM, at 26.6 percent, even higher than Bangkok at 24.4 percent according to the UK-based NGO AVERT, which has been working on HIV education for three decades. Male sex workers are criminalized by section 377 of the Penal Code, which is usually called the “homosexuality law.” The male sex workers dare punishment with life-long exile or 10 years’ imprisonment because of their “carnal intercourse against the order of nature” and they equally dare the scourge of HIV in a country where medical sources to combat the virus are woefully inadequate. In Myanmar, the Suppression of Prostitution Act only applies to women.
This part of the spectral world of male-to-male sex in Myanmar, a country with a stiff moral code that universally frowns on sex for sale, but especially by males. He makes small talk with an old customer.Ī tourist next to the two, taking photos of the graceful spire of the pagoda, probably has no idea he is standing in Yangon’s same-sex market, the surrounding shadows filled by either male sex workers or their customers. One is Kyaw Zayar Swe, dressed in jeans with two shining studs in his right ear rather than the traditional longyi. Shadows in the night-time glow of Yangon’s magnificent, gold leaf-encrusted Sule Pagoda, several men stroll the Sule Bridge.