Center ministers to Bangkok sex workers: American heads work with young victims - Brother Raymond Taylor - Thailand

National Catholic Reporter, Nov 5, 1993 by Tony Gillotte

BANGKOK, Thailand - long a place of culture, spiritualism and tradition, Thailand has watched its reputation as the "land of smiles" fade with the spread AIDS, an epidemic due mostly to a wide-open sex industry.

While petty arguments rage in local newspapers over whether foreigners or historical patterns of Thai life are most to blame for the profligate sex trade, the World Health Organization has a grim prediction: The incidence of AIDS in Thailand will top 1 million by the year 2000.

Thailand's notorious child-prostitution rings, the "gay boy" sex scene and a host of other outlets use up and casually discard their young male and female victims, particularly those who have contracted AIDS or tested positive for HIV.

"I go out in the streets to find them almost every night," said Br. Raymond Taylor, a former Salvatorian monk and director of Mercy Center, a Bangkok hospice for people who have AIDS or are HIV-positive. Taylor now works under the auspices of the Bangkok archdiocese.

"Some work in the 'service sex' industry in Bangkok and their families don't know about it or they don't tell them," said the tall, bespectacled brother, "especially when they've tested positive for HIV.

"Worst of all, many of my residents have been completely abandoned, some by well-to-do families. They're afraid of contracting AIDS by touching or living with their HIV-positive children" - this, he notes, in a nation whose government prides itself on its AIDS education program.

Taylor, 50, originally from the Detroit area, attracts a great deal of attention among Christian and Buddhist communities for his nocturnal prowls through Bangkok's netherworld of sex haunts.

Despite the occasional seminar and a well-publicized AIDS education campaign, Thai authorities are doing little to stop the flesh trade, Taylor said. "Prime Minister [Chuan] Leekpai makes me disappointed because he says we shouldn't over-advertise AIDS. It will have an adverse impact on tourism."

The AIDS problem, frequently blamed on the influx of foreign visitors, many of them men on short-time sex tours, has its roots closer to home. It has been estimated that every day 450,000 Thai men visit prostitutes. WHO says HIV transmission is increasing among heterosexuals, especially women and children, even as it is decreasing among homosexual men.

Taylor said his work at Mercy Center has become the logical outgrowth of his activist religious life begun in the early 1960s. "My twin inspirations were towering figures," he add, :Thomas Merton ... and Martin Luther King Jr. Now, there are a couple of real saints."

Sitting behind his desk in his cramped office, a picture of deceased Atlanta Archbishop James Lyke peering over his shoulder from a bookcase, Taylor said, "King didn't just talk about God in the church, he went out to work in the most active fields of the Lord. That's where you find God today, out in the streets."

While not denying his spiritual grounding in the traditional Catholic church, Taylor emphasizes his unique development as a black man growing up in America and his love-hate affair with the church. "I grew up in the St. Francis Home for Boys," he said, "where one of the nuns used to call me a pickaninny. When I tried to join a religious community [order] in 1965, they wouldn't accept me. And then I learned that the Jesuits were one of the largest holders of slaves."

Following a winding path from his early undergraduate days at Mount St. Paul College in Wisconsin, Taylor wound up in Gethsemane, Ky., where John Howard Griffin, author of Black Like Me, was writing a Merton biography at the time. A white Southemer who underwent treatment to turn his skin black, Griffin lived like a black person and claimed his experience profoundly changed him.

"He could never be the same," Taylor said. "So he could identify with the pain I was going through (as a black man)."

While the rest of the world suffers from a recession, money still flows freely in Thailand, thanks to the continuing economic boom. However, the gap between its entrepreneurial class and the vast rural population, mostly poor farmers, continues to grow. Sex-industry barons depend on this growing economic chasm to provide them with an endless supply of young Thais.

"Mostly the young [sex workers] come from the north, where they have family problems and poverty," taylor said. "They watch TV and see all the consumer goods. So they come to the city to get money to buy things or help their families. Many can't even read the AIDS warnings."

To reach them, Taylor said, he employs the methods he used "in the streets of Seattle in the late 1970s to help young Asian refugees with psychological problems. ... Then I invite them to visit Mercy Center."

Housed in a nondescript, four-story building on a busy commercial strip, Mercy Center opened three years ago with the guidance and support of Bangkok's famous "slum priest," Fr. Joe Maier, who invited Taylor to work here.

Operated by a staff of 15, the center is home to 38 Thais, 23 of them HIV-positive, many of them referred by various hospitals in the Bangkok area. Christian organizations in Thailand have had to take the lead because Buddhist leaders still harbor certain hesitancies about AIDS.