Borrowed Intimacy

Episode #605: Note: this podcast episode, as well as the following text describing it, includes frank language about sexuality, male sex work, and self-harm. Reader and listener discretion is advised.

The AAS Conference in Vancouver brought together thousands of scholars and practitioners working across Asia, creating a wide-ranging space for exchange, debate, and reflection. Within that broader setting, Burma emerged as one of several urgent areas of focus amid its ongoing crisis. Insight Myanmar Podcast was invited to record on site, setting up a small space to capture a series of short, real-time conversations with participants moving through the conference. These interviews were shaped by immediacy—thoughts shared in the moment, rather than after the fact—and are now being extended to a wider global audience. This episode is the final in a four-part series.

Amnuaypond Kidpromma, a lecturer at Chiang Mai University’s Faculty of Humanities, studies a rarely discussed dimension of Myanmar’s post-coup displacement into Thailand — the rise of Myanmar male sex workers who enter the trade not as a planned profession but as an extension of migrant labor that no longer pays enough to survive.

In her research, these men usually arrive from rural Myanmar as they flee conflict and conscription, and take whatever work they can find, often in construction or restaurants. When wages fail to cover daily life, visa costs, work permits, and remittances back home, sex work becomes another shift. What interests Kidpromma is not only the economic pressure but the language the men use to absorb it. “They just say, ‘I am a man who takes the job,’” she explains. The phrase turns sex work into temporary labor rather than a fixed identity, and links it to a masculine obligation to provide.

That Burmese masculine frame shapes everything. Most of the men she interviewed entered the work still understanding themselves as straight, still calling themselves “real men,” and not speaking of the job in the same moral register that female sex workers often do. Where women in her earlier research described guilt, bad karma, religious striving, and the need to make merit, the men more often treated the work as harsh necessity. Many had once been ordained as novices or monks, and Kidpromma argues that they seem to feel they retain a kind of religious legitimacy even after entering the trade, while women work much harder to repair spiritual damage.

The movement into sex work is often gradual. Friends introduce them. They begin by drinking with clients, then allowing touch, then accepting money that far exceeds anything available in ordinary migrant labor. One man told her that after being kissed and touched, he received 5,000 baht — “this is like the whole month I earned.” From there, the line moved quickly to sexual relations.

Kidpromma does not present these men as symbols or moral lessons. She presents them as people cornered by a border economy that keeps widening after the coup. What she hears most often is not self-expression but sacrifice — the insistence that whatever is happening to them is being endured so that someone else might eat, study, or survive a little more safely.