I am a Prisoner in the Bangkok Hilton

If accounts of sexual abuse offend you then you’d be well advised to disregard this blog. I must also add that whilst this report focuses upon sex practices as a ‘power game’ in the men’s prison, I have no doubt whatsoever that incidents in the women’s prison are far, far worse. Equally, and for the record, my personal belief is that adults are free to engage in any consensual indulgence that they want in private. The operative words being: adult, consensual and private. Who am I to say that others should conform to my heterosexual ‘norms’. Thailand, as a country, has managed to blur sexual identity, So much so that a third sex- The katoey, or lady-boy – clamours for official recognition in both public affairs and sporting events. Generally, a katoey (pronounced ka-toy-ee) is a male who has had some or all of their primary sexual characteristics – penis, breasts, surgically modified so that they appear as females. The degree of augmentation mostly is confined to breasts. A small, but s...

Most readers of this blog probably have never heard of the name of the one-time major pharmaceutical company named Distillers. We aren’t on-line here in the Hilton so I don’t know if one of the 20th Century’s biggest medical disaster perpetrators – Distillers, manufacturers of Thalidomide – are still in business. The names Distillers and Thalidomide cause members of the 50s and 60s generation to shudder in horror. On a side issue, that the Directors of Distillers weren’t publically lynched, a-la Saddam Hussain, is a good reason I embraced Atheism during my formative years. Despite my Atheistic beliefs, I still have belief in an overall “Goodness” encapsulated within the human psyche. Perhaps, just perhaps Distillers and its board of Directors festered and withered away in well deserved putrefaction. Please let me know if Google returns a current balance sheet on them or not. As said though, my overall faith in human nature – outside of Thailand naturally – is strong, so I will gamble f...

It has recently been reported that Thailand has restarted executions of Death Row prisoners. The two that were executed were friends of mine that lived with me here in the same building. The two men Bundit Charoenwanich, 45, and Jirawat Phumpruek, 52, were taken in the night and only given 60 minutes to write their last wills and have a one minute phone call to their families before being executed by lethal injection. This was the first executions carried out by Thailand since 2003. As prisoners, some of us were aware that the lethal injections had been delivered to Bang Kwang prison, but it seems that the decision to execute both men from D2 building was the sole decision of Natee Jitsawang, the Director-General of the Department of Corrections. It was not, so it seems, the decision of the Thai Government, a fact also reported by the BBC World Service. Now that the prisoners have been shown that executions can happen at any time “Life Insurance” is now being paid to the Building Chie...