Thailand is as famous for its transsexuals as for its Buddhism and postcard beaches. So perhaps I was naïve for not realizing the woman who'd just blown me on a cliff in Ko Pha Ngan was, in fact, a man. But a straight guy likes to think he has sharp trannydar, and in seconds I had gone from innocently getting sucked off by a hot Thai girl to deciding if I should fuck a Thai boy's ass. You'll understand if I went from disbelief to shock to embarrassment to curiosity faster than you can say "beer goggles."

Equally bewildering was the speed with which the entire episode occurred. Only minutes earlier I had been on Haad Rin Beach, old-fashionedly trying to fuck women with actual vaginas. I was at the Full Moon Party, the famed all-night beach rave that attracts 20,000 to 30,000 western tourists every time the Moon is precisely in opposition to the Sun.

The Party begins at about five p.m. and continues until sunrise. Bars stay open the whole night, thudding and thumping with whatever dance music was trendy in Europe five years prior. Dozens of vendors sell "buckets," pails of improperly-mixed alcohol laced with anything that knocks drinkers out, for ten bucks or less. Rumors abound in Ko Pha Ngan of tourists overdosing on buckets, but of course that only entices partygoers even more. And the prostitutes come even cheaper than the booze and drugs.

Thai hookers flock to the Full Moon Party, knowing that desperate men who don't score with western women will settle for paying twenty to thirty dollars to fuck hookers instead. By midnight, literally hundreds of prostitutes line the shore, propositioning the guys who temporarily leave the bars to take a piss in the ocean. It's not pretty, but it's a monthly ritual.

It was my first week into a two-month-long solo backpacking excursion around Southeast Asia, that upper-middle-class ritual that traditionally follows grad school. I was sharing a place in Ko Pha Ngan for five days with Uri, an Israeli guy I'd met on the ferry from the mainland. We were hanging out with two New York girls we'd met the day before. By the time the Party commenced, Uri was falling for one of them. Travel inspires such excitement and novelty and intensity, it's easy to pretend those feelings signal a genuine connection with someone. I had flirted with an Israeli girl a few nights earlier, but blown it by opting to see a Mauy Thai match instead of taking her to dinner. As Uri and our friends drank and danced amid the pressure of the music and dancing, I was feeling lonely in my usual way, lonely in the travelling-alone way, and lonely in the my-friend-has-a-girl-but-I-

don't way. It was a combination every bit as toxic as the chemicals in our buckets.

We drifted from bar to bar on the beach, and I slowly distanced myself from my friends. I would dance with them, pretending I wasn't lonely or eyeing every girl. As the night progressed and the alcohol seeped into my bloodstream, I began dancing with any willing woman. Most — okay, all — showed zero interest, until I caught an Asian girl glancing at me repeatedly. Now, I'm average-looking at best, no matter how much booze a girl has had, so I knew her glances were ocular invitations. I stumbled toward her and we began dancing, eventually grinding our bodies together like sticks trying to catch fire. I put my arm around her slender waist, pulling her towards me as I smelled her neck and black hair. I was worried that she was a hooker; I'd been in Thailand only a week but had already encountered dozens of them. Prostitutes in Thailand are proactive and have a Madison Avenue-worthy sales pitch — they engage you in conversation for twenty minutes before casually mentioning how they're looking for some way to make extra cash.