The most wonderful thing a lover has ever done for me was to give me my life. I didn’t understand it at the time, but if he had loved me as I wanted him to—as I begged him to—I would be long dead today.

The days of my sexual coming of age in Bangkok, Thailand, during the mid seventies through the mid eighties were paradise followed by a rude awakening, a realization of how life can come back at you hard that I didn’t fully realize until I had left the City of the Angels the first time I lived there. Bangkok was an open city with no sense of moral wrong. If you could afford it and enjoyed it, more power to you, and no one would pass judgment, let alone hassle you. It was the tail end of the “free love” hippy era, before the realization of the existence of AIDS or the widespread use of condoms. It was flesh on and in flesh and do whatever jacks you off.

I ached for David, who, along with the hairdresser lover he had finagled into the country with a diplomatic passport, lived in the same apartment compound I did. David was a U.S. diplomat, who made flights every other week in and out of Saigon to register and transport the bastard children of U.S. servicemen from the recent war who the Hanoi regime was permitting to leave the country for a high price. A price being quietly covered by the U.S. government.

David was a magnificent black man, solidly built and beautiful in every way. His lover had come over officially as the tutor of David’s three children, but the children had returned to their mother in the States within two months and the hairdresser stayed on and became the darling of the international set—or at least the part of that set which wanted it's hair down to U.S. professional standards. David’s wife was obviously one of the most understanding of human beings, but she never visited Bangkok while David was there, as far as I knew.

The hairdresser, Tommy, was also nice to look at; a lithe blond, cute but submissive, with fluid moves and bent wrists. But it was David who I had my eyes on. I did everything I could to get myself close to David and to make him understand that he could have me any way he wanted me. And he was very friendly to me, and slowly let me enter his circle of friends, mostly local Thai gay boys, who didn’t attract me all that much. But he didn’t even touch me for the longest time.

I knew he could give good sex, because I walked in on him and the hairdresser doing the hot and heavy in their apartment one day and stayed around to watch. It was an inspiring and deeply sensual performance of coffee and cream. Both were naked. David was as beautiful in the nude as I could have imagined him to be in my wildest dreams. His cock was long and hard and thick, and when I walked in, he was slowly stroking it in and out of Tommy’s ass in a languid, fluid motion. Tommy’s back was flat on the bed, and David was standing below him and arched over his body. One of Tommy’s legs ran up David’s torso and David was holding the other one up and out. David was running his free hand over Tommy’s chest, belly, thighs, cock, and balls. Occasionally he would