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  Around opening time, Gary discovered the Brit was embezzling his funds. Receipts for one million rupiah would equate to two million missing rupiah. After getting rid of the guy, Gary did the sums and found he had lost between 40,000 and 50,000 Australian dollars. On top of that, he now found himself having to start and run an all-gay resort – the first of its kind in Indonesia – completely on his own. Gary sat down and thought, Well, what the fuck do I know about running a hotel?

  ‘What did you know about running a hotel?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing!’ Gary said. ‘I’m a truck driver! I didn’t have a fucking clue!’

  People had tried to capitalise on Bali’s fledgling gay-tourism market in the past by starting hotels similar to Spartacvs, but they had all flopped. Another gay hotel manager, who’d tried what Spartacvs was doing but on a smaller scale, warned Gary off.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ he said. ‘There’s no market for it. Oh, and don’t call it Spartacvs; it’s too gay.’

  ‘Excuse me!’ Gary said. ‘What’s so gay about “Spartacvs”? He was a Greek warrior.’

  After it opened, Spartacvs started turning a profit within months. Gary opened the hotel in September. The books were tipping in his favour by January. While other hotels in Bali went through peak and non-peak seasons, Spartacvs was different. In his office, Gary showed me a computer monitor displaying the resort’s colour-coded bookings. Vacancies were represented by white space, and for months ahead, there was barely any white space at all. The spreadsheet was a wince-inducing rainbow. Visitors streamed in from Australia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. Increasingly, with the global recession, visitors had started to pour in from across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, too. Bookings now came from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and South Africa. International homosexuals had become a non-stop market.

  It helped that the place was clothing-optional. That wasn’t originally in the business plan, but now it was one of Spartacvs’s strongest drawcards.

  When it first opened, guests had asked whether they could just walk around naked. Everyone kept doing it, Gary reasoned, so why not just make it 100 per cent clothing-optional?

  ‘You weren’t a clothing-optional guy yourself?’

  ‘No,’ Gary said, guffawing. ‘You’ll never see me walking around nude with my body.’

  A grinning Spartacvs staff member led me up to my room. An online review had harshly described Spartacvs’s rooms as ‘horrendously camp’ and ‘if Liberace had designed a hotel, this would be it’. That was unfair. The rooms felt more like Jean Paul Gaultier and David LaChapelle had been jointly commissioned to design a wonderful sex dungeon. The walls were painted asphalt, with fuchsia highlights and satin black privacy curtains, and the open-roofed bathroom was fitted with wall-to-wall mirrors, which meant that finally – finally – I could see what it looked like to have my butt reflected into infinity whenever I took a shower. (Overall effect: hypnotic.)

  On my shared balcony, I met an extremely toned Chinese guy from Macau who wore a designer muscle top, shorts and sunglasses. He had magnificent calves. When he said hello to me, he was busily punching things into his phone, and explained he was holidaying in Bali with his Western boyfriend. They were only at Spartacvs to meet up with friends who were staying there. He wasn’t staying at Spartacvs himself, he wanted to emphasise. He would never stay there; he wasn’t that kind of guy.

  ‘What kind of guy?’ I said.

  He laughed conspiratorially. ‘Well so many DOM stay here, you know.’

  ‘Dom?’ I said blankly.

  ‘DOM!’ he said, taking off his sunglasses, appalled. ‘You’ve never heard of DOM? Dee, oh, emm. DOM. It means’ – he whispered – ‘dirty old men. Hahahaha. Me? I’m a DYM: dirty young man.’ He cackled again.

  I headed down to the pool to order a late lunch, still feeling too covered up. I nervously took off my shirt, leaving my shorts on as a salute to decency.

  At this time of day, Spartacvs became an ecosystem worthy of an Attenborough documentary. Back when it first opened, Spartacvs had a problem with local moneyboys loitering outside its doors for business, but they’d solved that by allowing a few in at a time to hang around the pool, order drinks and use the wi-fi. Policy was strict: moneyboys weren’t allowed to approach guests, but guests could approach the moneyboys if they wanted to chat and take them into their rooms without fuss.

  On this day, there were only a couple of men trading themselves. One moneyboy was less ‘boy’ and more ‘tank’. He was rugged, with tightly coiled muscles covered in barbed tattoos. Another moneyboy was clean-cut in preppy white shorts, looking like a Tommy Hilfiger advertisement, with his hair cut short back and sides. They were the only clothed men around the pool besides me. Because they weren’t allowed to talk, they ogled and seduced with their eyes, zoning in on the naked bulé Spartacvs guests with silent intense stares.

  As I ate my sandwich, I watched one of the bulés approach the moneyboys. He was an Australian man in his fifties with a kind face and a soft belly who wore black speedos with an opal pattern on the hip. The tattooed guy grinned and made staggered small-talk with the bulé, before the pair silently headed back to a private room, drawing the black satin curtains shut. Everyone else around the pool casually pretended that nothing was happening. I stared and chewed on my lunch, cow-like, unable to turn away.

  This place is amazing, I thought.

  Another Australian man – white and in his late thirties – now approached the pool completely naked. He was one of the younger bulés here, tall and toned. It was hard not to notice his penis: an enormous, semi-erect thing that hovered in mid-air like a fairground ride threatening to go higher. Behind him, his short, cute Indonesian boyfriend – or maybe he was a moneyboy too, it was hard to tell – approached the pool in high-cut running shorts that made him appear practically naked from the side. Giggling, they dived in the pool together. As they surfaced for air, the naked Australian guy swam over to his boyfriend and wrapped his legs around him, making out with him hungrily, like a large animal trying to eat some smaller creature’s face.

  It felt as if I’d stumbled across some wonderful sex matinée. It was riveting. This was the closest I’d ever come to watching another couple have sex right in front of me, and the realisation was both exciting and depressing.

  Though he was in the water, it was clear the Australian guy had a full erection now and was enthusiastically humping his Indonesian boyfriend through his wet shorts. After making sloppy kissing noises that sounded like a draining sink, the Indonesian guy climbed onto his boyfriend’s back, and they swam across the pool like the scene in Whale Rider where Keisha Castle-Hughes rides a humpback.

  ‘You two are so cute!’ I wanted to call out to them, but realised this might send the wrong message.

  When they got out of the pool and towelled each other off, the height difference between them was stark. From behind, the tall bulé reminded me of a parent drying off his young son after swimming lessons. The two of them then disappeared into their room, drew the curtains and shut the door.

  The entire pool was now silent, except for the PA system that was playing the Joe Dolce 1980 hit novelty song ‘Shaddap You Face’. I had finished my lunch. I felt both full of food and moderately aroused, which wasn’t a great combination. I stared at the empty water, wondering whether I could bring myself to swim in it, considering what I’d just seen.

  People said Bali’s gay scene had only taken off in the past decade, but the island had actually been quietly hosting foreign homosexuals for close to a century. In 1925, the German artist and writer Walter Spies landed in Bali after travelling through Java and Jogjakarta, and was instantly smitten by the island’s glassy blue water, lush rainforest and chirpy, handsome locals. He started an artists’ colony first, then built a house in Karangasem that became his famous mountain hut boasting unending views of lakes, rice paddies and mountains. It was here that Spies hosted guests such as Charlie Chap
lin, Noël Coward and the anthropologist Margaret Mead during the day, before making love to his handsome Balinese lovers at night. Spies romanticised Bali in his dreamy art and writing, casting the island in heady myth with a homoerotic undercurrent. The artists came, the gays came, then everyone else followed.

  From the late 1960s onwards, large groups of gay and lesbian travellers would fly to Bali on cheap flights bound for Denpasar airport, making it their holiday hide-out. At the time, the airport was little more than landing strips cut into thickets of coconut trees. Even then, it wasn’t hard for gay visitors to find masseurs who were willing to be extra-accommodating with their massages, or poolside boys who said they would be your special friend for your entire stay.

  By the ’90s, Bali had Hulu Café, its first proper gay bar. It was a basic set-up over two wooden floors, where muscled men would perform scantily clad dances with giant pythons suggestively wrapped around shoulders and between legs as homo erotic homages to the Balinese snake gods. Hulu had since fittingly gone down in flames, but the island’s appetite for the pink dollar had only grown and grown. Now there was Club Cosmo for the rich kids, Mixwell’s for the tourists, Face Bar for the ladyboys, Bali Joe for the moneyboys and the seedy Bottoms Up for those who were either lost or too drunk to know where they were. Gay villas were everywhere. Tourist guides told me they couldn’t keep up with the new ones being built.

  Local attitudes towards gay travellers ranged from happily oblivious to outright welcoming. Everyone now knew there was a buck to be earned, especially from commission.

  ‘You travel in Bali one person?’ local taxi drivers would ask me.

  ‘I’m by myself, yeah,’ I’d say.

  ‘No wife? No girlfriend?’ they’d say.

  ‘No,’ I’d say. Sometimes I’d add, ‘But I have a boyfriend.’

  After a moment’s realisation they’d say, ‘Ah, boyfriend! Maybe you look for Balinese boyfriend too? I can take you!’ They’d whisper, ‘You know, beautiful, beautiful boys in Bali …’

  If you were an entrepreneur, it made sense to start your venture in Bali. Before long, tourism would account for 10 per cent of Indonesia’s GDP and nearly half of all foreign visitors to the country would make their way through Bali’s international airport. Occupying only 5632 square kilometres, Bali had become a crucial economic hub, and the island’s standard of living far outstripped the rest of the archipelago’s. If you had a vision and a dream, you came to Bali to build your empire. And if you were building a gay empire, you were almost guaranteed a good return.

  Josh was one businessman who knew this well. Ethnically Chinese, he had grown up in Bali and did most of his business there. He was in his late forties, but looked alarmingly young in his white t-shirt with its fashionably small pocket, and pants cut in a fabric you could tell was expensive just by looking. At all hours, he was hooked to his Samsung Galaxy Tab, checking emails and taking calls.

  Josh was the owner of Bali’s Antique brand, which encompassed a luxury spa, villa and restaurant. Although he had studied business in Australia, most of his projects – including the hotel he was currently building – were based in Bali. No regulations, lower costs: it was just far easier to build here. Even when Josh was growing up in Bali as a kid, the local tourism industry had been robust.

  ‘In some ways, it was much better,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t commercial, really more cultural. Before the development, it was more about family holidays. It was more …’

  He looked up, searching for the right word.

  ‘Wholesome?’ I said.

  He laughed and pointed at me. ‘Right. Everyone used to come to Bali for the culture. Now, having a good time is more important. It’s more about singles. And all those gay bars there are actually quite new. Nothing was basically a gay place until I opened the Antique restaurant, then that whole area started to become very specific. Gay bars, gay restaurants, gay villas.’

  Not that Josh minded. If anything, it was working to his benefit. On Dhyana Pura Street, between Mixwell’s and Bali Joe, Josh was building a new upmarket gay club called the Bird-cage that was scheduled to open in a few months. There was also his upcoming hotel – the nearly completed Grey Hotel – that was perched between Legian and Seminyak and would aggressively target the gay market. It wouldn’t be a gay-exclusive place like Spartacvs (Josh didn’t think it was nice to discriminate against straight people), but zoning in on the gay market was crucial to its success. For instance, at Josh’s Antique day spa, over 70 per cent of the spa clients were gay, so Josh ensured most of his massage therapists were handsome men.

  ‘I’m always thinking about that,’ he said. ‘If you want to make something, you have to ask the gay people. They know. They’re always setting the trend. Where the gays go, the straight people go. They spend money and they have no kids, nothing. They know how to live in style. They spend and they want to have a good time. So Bali is like Bangkok now, except we don’t have go-go boys to pick up at the bar.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘But I’ve noticed heaps.’

  ‘There are moneyboys, but they’re more discreet,’ Josh said. ‘We have a border – a social, cultural border – because we’re a mix of Hindus and Muslims here.’

  Josh thought about how to phrase it properly, how to best draw the distinction between his island home and a seedy city like Bangkok. ‘There is a line,’ he finally said. ‘There is a line.’

  On my first night at Spartacvs, a Dutch couple checked into the room next to me. I only found this out when one of them started spying on me through my blinds. I was working on my laptop wearing nothing but Y-fronts (it was hot), before looking up to see a white-haired Gianni Versace lookalike in his fifties locking eyes with me. I nearly screamed.

  To defuse the situation, I leaped up to open the door with the giddy, sexless enthusiasm of an American housewife welcoming a new neighbour to town. ‘Hello!’ I said, opening the door to shake his hand enthusiastically. ‘My name is Benjamin! I am from Australia! And where are you from?! Did you just arrive?!’

  Perhaps he thought I was brain-damaged. But with all the lights on and the volume of my voice turned up high, every potential trace of sexual tension between us quickly evaporated. Unimpressed, the Dutchman cleared his throat and introduced himself and his boyfriend, who was unpacking in the room next door. His boyfriend was a few years younger – balding, with a handsome, equine face – and merrily said hello. After standing at the doorway awkwardly for a while, we made our excuses and the older Dutch guy grumpily crept back into his room with his partner.

  Some time later, a twenty-something Indonesian swaggered past my room. I didn’t see his face, but heard murmurs between him and the Dutch guys at their door. The Indonesian guy went inside and everything went quiet. Outside on our shared balcony, they had left half their curtains open, almost like an invitation. All the lights were still on, which meant that anyone could easily make out something weird was happening on the bed: a single organism made of three torsos and twelve limbs; a six-armed beast thrusting into itself; a tanned butt nestled into a mound of pale Dutch flesh. Seeing them made me feel simultaneously perverted and curious, like a kid who’d caught his parents screwing on top of the washing machine and couldn’t stop watching.

  Quietly, I went back inside my room, closed the door, showered and prepared to head out. At Spartacvs’s reception, the guys at the front desk told me to go to Dhyana Pura Street. Not only was it the gayest street in Bali – full of drag queens and bulés and moneyboys and muscly-butted go-go dancers – but it also had decent places to eat.

  Just as I was about to walk down the road for a taxi, the Indonesian guy who had just visited the Dutch couple appeared next to me. He had mischievous eyes, big puffer-fish cheeks and wore his hair in a heavy-fringed boy-band cut. His cotton shirt was unbuttoned right down to his navel. Big wooden beads framed his torso suggestively, giving him the look of someone who’d been cast as a seaside monk in a gay porno.

  ‘You need a taxi?’ I s
aid. ‘I’m about to catch one if you want to share.’

  ‘No, I have one of these,’ he said, mounting one of the scooters parked outside. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Dhyana Pura Street,’ I said.

  He gave me a look. ‘I live at Dhyana Pura,’ he said.

  ‘Shut up.’

  He backed his scooter onto the dirt road and cocked his head at me in a way that told me to get on. As I straddled the bike behind him, he grabbed my thigh and pulled me close into him.

  ‘Closer,’ he said. ‘Like this.’

  My groin was right up against his butt.

  ‘Comfortable?’ he said.

  ‘Uh –’

  Before I could answer, we were speeding off down the road.

  The dirt road leading out of Spartacvs took us past a narrow creek that snaked its way between other newly built villas and luxury homes. It was perfumed with a hundred smells, none of them good. When I later walked past it in the daytime, I discovered that it looked exactly like it smelled: choked and strangled with hastily disposed-of chemicals and garbage. It was a place where things came to die. Every street around here was a construction site, with the foundations of homes emerging from mounds of stone, rubble and crap, and the detritus of the sites seeping right back into nature.

  On the ride, I learned my new friend’s name was Bumi. Bumi was twenty-two years old and worked at Club Cosmo, one of the more expensive and exclusive gay clubs. He usually served drinks but sometimes worked as the guy who stood at the front of the club, flirting with male tourists, kissing them on the cheek and dragging them in by the hand.

  Like most guys who worked Seminyak’s gay circuit, Bumi wasn’t Balinese himself. He came from Jakarta and a rich Muslim family. He was one of ten children, each of whom had grown up with their own room in a giant house in the country’s most expensive city.

  As Bumi and I settled in at a pasta restaurant, he bemoaned conditions in Jakarta.