client. Though at that point, I was not hard up for money, as I had developed a steady flow of regular clients that patronised me. After the initial meeting, they would come back to me for more and I would always agree to every request. Why say no to good money? I reminded myself constantly, and slowly I was convinced of the validity of what I had said.
“Keep the rates fixed,” Shun reminded me for the first few times. “And don’t change them at all. It’s in the best interest of both you and your clients.” Within a few months, I was already getting the hang of the trade, of what needed to be done or was expected from Shun and the clients that he introduced me to. Shun would scout out prospective clients: some were his old clients, some he found through his ingenious means of contact, which he kept hidden from me. Given the secrecy that governed this kind of sex, still banned in Singapore and subject to criminal prosecution, I was genuinely surprised and mildly curious how Shun managed to find these contacts.
He once told me, when we were having dinner in a shopping centre food court in Jurong after our economics classes, that guys would often approach him in gay clubs on the weekends and chat him up. Slowly they would express their interest in knowing him more, some blatant or bold enough might even suggest some action for later. Of course, Shun would assess each person according to his own criteria, which were quite simple actually: he must be rich; he must own at least a Lexus, Mercedes or Porsche; he must live by himself in some District 9 or 10 apartment; and he must hold a high senior-management position in some big-shot company. These criteria were non-negotiable, he said, otherwise one might compromise and lose out in the end. Shun reminded me countless times that I was in it for their money, not for some fucking relationship or friendship.
“They do not care about you — that is why they’d rather pay for sex than invest their time and effort in finding somebody to build a reasonable relationship with. These people do not have the time for such things and that is the reason why we exist. We provide them with the one-stop centre where they can purchase companionship, sex and cheap feelings for a premium price. It is a fair deal.”
As he said these things, Shun’s eyes would often glint with a self-satisfied concentration, as if he had set everything in place and nothing would go wrong. To him, our freelance work was based on a supply-and-demand fulfillment of human needs. The nature and practicality of what we were doing could be set down in simple workable rules and a positive mindset. The ABCs of the gay sex trade, so to speak.
Shun was amoral, and he lived by what he believed in. “Nothing is impossible if you put your mind to it,” he would say, spouting a dead wise man’s often-repeated, dead-of-meaning axiom. But he also had his own salubrious blend of half-fucked ideas and self-thought-out rules of gay life.
I told him once, “Maybe you should write a book, be the voice of our generation, start a new sexual revolution here in Singapore, break new fucking frontiers for us disenfranchised and delusional faggots. Perhaps people would take note of us. We would be the mainstream and they, these normal heterosexual fucks, would finally be sidelined and marginalised, a sideshow of freaks preserving their straight traditions and way of life.” But Shun just shot me a what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about look, as if I was the biggest idiot in this world and my words were all one-cent coins — useless, worth nothing.
“And why the hell would I do this? To tell the big fucking world about what we are doing? The bloody reason why we are able to do well, to get the clients we are getting now, be paid obscenely for our sex, is because we — our deeds, are kept hidden, away from the public eye and this secrecy grants us greater value. Because we are scarce, ‘at a premium,’ we are always in demand.”
“Don’t think too much about what you’re doing. And cut the Pretty Woman crap about not kissing on the lips, okay? It was embarrassing when I called Gabriel to check with him and he told me about this. When did you devise this romantic-crap stuff? Too much movies in your head.” Shun and I were heading for our morning lectures at the university and he was admonishing me on what I had done wrong during the latest weekend assignment. Walking up the stairs towards the lecture theatre at eight forty-five on a cloudy, lazy Monday after a tiring three-tryst weekend, I was far from being awake or alert. But I listened anyway, nodding my head to what Shun had to say, paying what little attention I could muster.
As I listened to him, I looked around at the other students walking alongside us, heading for their respective classes, carrying their haversacks and files of notes, looking fresh and bright eyed. Some were munching on their breakfasts of buttered toast or freshly cut-up fruit, fiddling with packets of coffee or iced Milo; others were talking animatedly on their mobiles, checking on after-class gatherings with their classmates, making lunch appointments with their friends. I wondered what kind of lives they had, what after-school activities they might pursue. Did they, too, have secret lives they kept from their close friends? Did they have sex three times last weekend and earn almost three thousand dollars from it? Would they share this secret with anyone, if they had the chance to do so? Would they be ashamed?
As I stole quick glances at their faces, I realised how far I was from their way of life, their seemingly normal lifestyle of blind dates, late-night movies, furtive kisses, crushes or cramming for tests. I would never be like them, and I was half relieved and half scared by this fact. Half relieved because I did not want to be hiding from what I was, from my sexuality and my needs. Half scared because I was heading nowhere and was fearful of being ostracised by my peers, my family and the whole damn society.
Like any pimp worth his salt, Shun wanted to make sure I got the machinations of this trade into my head, and so he kept drilling these words into me, until I could repeat them word for word. By then, I was already onto my eleventh rich client.
“Just be careful in what you do or what the client wants. Always wear a condom and insist on one if he wants to fuck. Be persistent and show that you are in control over this matter. And never give in to bareback sex. Trust me, you don’t want to die from AIDS at your age. It won’t be the best experience of your life.”
I nodded like a puppet and agreed with what he said. “How long?” I had wanted to ask him several times before, but could not drum up any courage to do so. “Why did you go into this line? Was there no other way?” But I knew he would not entertain my questions.
His secret life as a rent boy was known only to me. “Why me?” I wanted to ask. Did his friends know anything about this life at all? Each time I saw him with his classmates or close friends, in the canteen or library or at the swimming pool, he would look away, ignoring me completely. He would feign that nothing was out of sorts and carry on the conversations with his friends, joking and laughing with them. And every time I would be hurt by his careless actions, no matter how hard I tried not to think about it.
But when he was with me, away from his friends, he displayed a completely different side of himself: a serious no-nonsense Shun, in control of himself and me as well. How could I ever confront him with this disparity?
His eccentric behaviour? He had every reason to back away from me, to head back to his normal life, to have anything and everything he wanted — great looks, peer admiration, good grades, and an attractive personality. What did I have that I could give him? My mouth and my ass? He could have that from anyone, anytime, so why me?
Slowly, Shun began to share other aspects of his secret life with me.
About the middle-aged banker who wanted to keep him as a toy-boy and almost bought him a condominium and a car. But Shun turned him down flatly “because he has a wife and two kids, and there are too many fucking complications.”
And about the creative director of a US-based international advertising agency, who wanted more than just normal sex: “He’s such a pervert and jerk, always asking me to do this and that to him, pull off the S amp;M acts on him.
But it’s hilarious, some of the things he’s asked me to do.” Or about a rich Indonesian-Chinese guy, who claimed to love him and wanted Shun to be his boyfriend: “You should be there, to hear him say the things he says. Taken straight from some trashy magazines or C-grade romance novels. Lovable, but too clingy.”
Where Shun got some of this clientele, I did not know and really did not care to know. But it bothered me to no end, to know that he was with these strange men, let alone having sex with them. And so I didn’t ask him anything about them.
I should have seen it coming sooner or later. Shun was planning to leave me on my own. We had been good friends, but our friendship was not something that could be carried along in our own separate lives. It would be incongruous, even absurd. Of course, by then, I already had a small but growing pool of clients generating a steady flow of comfortable income.
