In a country where club floors open with Buddhist chants and Ladyboys offer dawn alms in corsets and stilettos, Elizabeth Waterman has found a world of contradictions too vivid to ignore. Over the past three years, and across four extended trips, the American photographer known for her images of strip club culture has embedded herself in Thailand’s red-light districts; from the chrome-lit GoGo bars of Bangkok to the humid neon maze of Pattaya City.
The result of these trips now forms the body of work MONEYGAME Thailand, a Southeast Asian update of her sold-out book, MONEYGAME; a document of stripped from five cities across the United States. An analogue portrait of the women and Ladyboys who work the streets, massage parlours and ‘Pleasure Palaces’ of one of the world’s most paradoxical sex tourism destinations, the goal of this series is to publish a book with Unicorn Press UK following a final trip scheduled for this year.
There’s a common Western illusion of Thailand as a carefree haven for LGBTQ+ life, and Ladyboys — or Katoeys, as they are locally known — often serve as the country’s most visible queer export. But Waterman’s camera resists the postcard view. Her photographs dig deeper, into the lives and labour of those whose gender identity both makes them iconic and traps them in a system of limited possibility.
Shot entirely on 35mm film (“I am drawn to the Leica M6 with the shallow Leica Noctilux lens for its distinct dreamy look, as well as the more rapid-fire Nikon F6,” she tells us), the images are charged with presence. Sometimes exuberant, sometimes exhausted, always real.
“It’s kind of hard for me. I got no plans, to be honest,” says Chrissy, a Ladyboy in her early twenties who taught herself English via Instagram videos after a suicide attempt and estrangement from her family. She now works in the tightly choreographed chaos of Walking Street, a narrow corridor of bars and brothels lit in sodium pink.
Chrissy dreams of college, but her 19.00 to 03.00 shifts leave little room for study. Instead, she winds down by walking barefoot along the beach at sunrise, joking with friends, flirting with tourists, and buying knock-off jewellery under an already-scorching sky.
Despite the glamorised image of Thai Ladyboys, discrimination remains systemic. Gender markers on national ID cards can’t be changed. Access to jobs outside the entertainment or sex industries often requires presenting as male. “You know, I’m no different than anyone else,” says Bam, who shares a cramped one-bedroom apartment with two others in Pattaya. “I was born with two hands. Two feet.”
Waterman’s lens doesn’t separate these stories into the tragic and the triumphant. It captures the rituals of daily survival and the flashes of joy. A group of dancers laugh over sticky rice. A performer touches up her lipstick in the haze of a bathroom mirror. Outside, the bars prepare for opening; salt thrown across the floor in ritual, prayers mumbled beneath strobe lighting. Some clubs conduct full Buddhist ceremonies before curtain call. Faith and performance intertwine.
There’s Maria, who’s been in the business over a decade. She lives alone in a modern apartment in Bangkok and recalls her mother’s early acceptance: “Are you sure you want to be a Ladyboy?” she’d asked. “You know it’s hard.” Maria had no doubts. And then there are the cisgender women, often overlooked in conversations about Thailand’s adult industries. Many of those Waterman met were mothers, sending earnings back home to support children raised by relatives.
Abortion may have been decriminalised in Thailand, but in practice remains hard to access. A twenty-something GoGo dancer might have two or three children depending on her. The familial structure here is different — support is communal, obligation cultural — and sex work, while criminalised, is not cloaked in the same shame it is in the West.
“People view themselves as extensions of their family in Thailand,” Waterman explains. “It is therefore honourable and respectable for women and Ladyboys to turn to sex work to support their families financially. They are not looked down upon, and they don’t have shame about their work.”
That tension, between visibility and marginalisation, glamour and precarity, is the emotional spine of MONEYGAME Thailand. Waterman doesn’t smooth over the complexities of it all, rather lays the whole story out as it unfolds, allowing the viewer to be absorbed into their world through her unflinching portraiture.
A selection from this brilliant series has already been exhibited at Leica Gallery LA and published in The Advocate, and a full exhibition is in the pipeline for Anderson Yezerski, Boston; Albumen Gallery, London; and again at Leica Gallery, Los Angeles. Further coverage is expected in the Los Angeles Times, L’Oeil de la Photographie, and British Journal of Photography.
