The KL Pink Districts: KLCC

Market Place:
Finally, here comes an invigorating breath of fresh air in the KL’s clubbing scene, away from the ill-maintained and cikus-infested tasteless La Queen. The name ‘MarketPlace’ sounds rather unglam at first, but it may be truly reflective of what happens in a gay club where rumours fly and tomorrow’s breaking news for local pink blogs and Fridae profiles are exchanged, debated and confirmed.

The dance floor is miserably small, but at least it now comes equipped with the magical podiums where semi-decent folks are immediately transformed into attention-whoring half-naked gyrating bodies of flesh.

MarketPlace’s real gem lies in the abundance of outdoor patio areas to catch your breath and get away from the dizzying disco lights and perhaps finally catch up with the hot hunk that you’ve been eyeing the whole night at. Check out the outdoor bar area that affords you a glimpse of the semi-hidden twin towers up close. Plus, if you’re feeling cheapskate, there’s a huge bright curry house next door to adjourn to for more drinks and supper.

The BravingKL Fridae Guide: On Handling Messages

There is a certain kind of message that you should avoid like a plague in Fridae – the DBKL Message. These are the mass-produced, impersonal messages that are copied and pasted to Fridae from a template, and sent over and over again by their owners, to whoever members they fancy.

One shining example can be seen here.

The (in)famous traits of the DBKL Message are:

• Your name is missing from the message. For example, it starts with just a ‘Hi.’, instead of a ‘Hi Kelvin’.
• It comes with questions asking about at least 5 of the following details of you - name, hometown, current location, stat, msn address, contact number, top or bottom, hobbies and work. This is regardless of whether or not you have already included them in your profile - they are in an awful hurry and cannot be expected to go through your stuff.

It normally ends with a way of getting in touch with them, either via msn, mobile number, or email.

Obviously, their behaviours are closely related to those of Active DBKL, as their rather low QC means that they simply find themselves overwhelmed with too many profiles to send messages to, such that they have no time to personalized each and every one of these messages.

Analysing the traits above will then produce an anti-thesis of DBKL Message – the extremely more successful Class A Message that is a unique, more personalized effort in establishing the first contact with the Type A of your dream.

Here are some tips on composing a Class A Message:

• Address him by his name. We know that may not be obvious at first, but more often, it can be, if you pay attention to the profile name.
• Keep it short and simple. Don’t offer to give a lengthy account of your day or explain the grandmother story of how you came out of the closet in your first message to him.
• Personalised! Give comments and ask relevant questions that are more likely to interest him. Run through his photos and profiles to get an idea. For example, ask him where he took the picture of the beautiful sunset in one of his photos, or tell him how adorable the dog that appears in over 60% of his photos is.
• Always ensure that your messages have questions in them, so that he will feel more motivated to reply you. If all you do is to answer all his questions, but never post any for him, it may just end the entire exchange prematurely, as you risk coming across as a self-centered, self-infatuated Princess.
  

One important note that we’ll like to stress: 70% of Fridae message exchanges end after the exchange of MSN addresses. Some members somehow appear to be avid collectors of MSN addresses, because once they obtained this piece of information about you, it seems like you’ll never hear from them again.

Two possible explanations arise:

• The comfort that they now have your MSN addresses means that they are sure they’ll be able to get in touch with you whenever they want to, but they always end up occupied and so will never do. Psychologically, this is not unlike the fact that you do not visit a tourist attraction in your vicinity because you know that it’ll always be there for you when you finally feel like visiting it.
• Your may be drown in their MSN contact list, of which member count tallies at 1000 and is growing by the day. They simply do not notice you as they browse through their contact list.
  

Thus for higher success rate, keep the conversation going in Fridae for at least 5-8 rounds, or until you feel positive that an MSN contact will be sustained, before revealing this important detail.

The BravingKL Fridae Guide: On Members with No Photos

The sisterhood unanimously concluded that 95% of members who don’t have any photos in their profiles are regrettably Type C, that is perhaps even after the rescue of some level of Photoshop editing.

The remaining 5% of these members may come with Type A or B looks, but could be just too freakingly deep in the closet that it’s not worth the investment of your time, because you may end up just chatting with them in MSN or phone forever and never meet up, or if you ever do meet up with them, it’ll be forever in some obscure F&B outlets far from civilization, and then you’ll risk being dumped in the middle of dinner or movie if they ever caught sight of someone whom they know, for example like their grand auntie’s third daughter’s neighbour’s son.

The BravingKL Fridae Guide: On Members with Photos

The sisterhood believes that the population of members with photos in their profiles can be broken down into the following 3 main categories:

Members with clear & identifiable public face-pics – 65%:
These members, regardless of whether they are Type A, B, or C, are obviously not shy about showcasing themselves to the entire online population. These are folks who have comfortably come to terms with their sexuality and many will turn out to be genuinely nice people.

Members with non face-pics public photos – 20%:
These members employ some level of anonymity via photo-taking or PhotoShop techniques to showcase blurry photos, photos of silhouettes or outlines of their face and body features, or camouflaged photos (generally just photos of buildings or sceneries with the member posing as passer-by in an obscure corner of the photo, so that you’ll need to squint to find them, and when you do find them, you’ll can’t tell if it’s really them or their mother-in-laws or pets).

Also included in this category are members who put photos of everything else under the sun and moon in their profile, such as photos of their belongings (like pets, plants, perfume collection etc), photos of famous actors and porn stars and pure scenery shots.

A breakdown of these members:

• 90% of these members would regrettably turn out to be a Type C
• 10% of these members could still be a Type A or B, but could have an extremely low self-esteem, or more likely, have not come to terms with their sexuality yet, and thus may present imminent challenges commonly found among closeted folks.
  

Members with pics of body parts only – 15%:
These members choose to present you with the achievements of the countless hours spent in the gym, or photo proof of how well-equipped they are down there. (Of course, for members of different roles, this could be referring to the ‘provider’ tool in front, or the ‘acceptor’ tool behind).

Out of these members:

• 60% of them actually may have presentable Type A or B faces, but chose instead to focus your attention on their body, leaving us to conclude that there can only be one thing in their mind – sex.
• The remaining 40% have regrettably Type C faces, and so are left with the only option of marketing themselves via the showcasing of their Type A or B body parts.

The BravingKL Fridae Guide: On Replying Hearts

Are you the type who log on to Fridae everyday and head over to your hearts page the first thing, only to find yourself confronting a list of hearts from the same old members, day after day, without fail?

Well, the sisterhood believes that, if you have exchanged 3 to 4 rounds of heart with the exact same member, and it doesn’t seem like there will be any other follow-up actions from it (such as exchange of messages or chatting in msn), then don’t bother replying their hearts anymore, coz they’re most probably doing a non-selective heart-replying action on a daily basis, or better known as the DBKL Reply (i.e. sending hearts to every tom, dick and harry on their friends or bookmark list). This means, they actually won’t realize that you have stopped replying to their hearts, and thus will continue to send you hearts day after day till time immemorial.

Of course, if a particular member is your Type A (remember the Desirability Scale?), you would naturally have already taken the initiative to write to him. But in general, for higher success rates, invest more time on hearts received from someone NEW, especially if it’s accompanied with a message or a ‘Add Friend’ request (this means YOU are his type A, baby!).

And if you are the ones guilty of doing the non-selective heart-replying. Shame on you! Exactly what kind of fat hopes are cooking in your head!? We believe you may consider spending more time doing another set of chest pumps in the gym, or enjoying another application of facial mask on the sofa.

The BravingKL Guide to FRIDAE

Another topic of conversation that inevitably dominates our sisterhood dinners these days is Fridae. Yes, it’s supposedly THE premier gay personals site for Singapore and Malaysia (and some say Thailand, Taipei and Japan too). We find it fulfilling to share our experiences of how we spend our precious online moments staring into the screen browsing profiles and replying hearts and messages, and how we deal with the multitudes of colourful characters that would grace our myFridae page everyday.

Naturally this evolves into our respective observations and analysis of the entire Fridae culture, followed by a semi-heated debate to advocate, challenge or clarify on each others’ viewpoints, and finally a collection of conclusions and best practices that we would unanimously agree and apply, which shall now be known as the

• The BravingKL Guide to FRIDAE

Stay tuned!

The BravingKL Desirability Scale

The sisterhood dinners have been getting rather productive lately. While savouring our meals, we find it necessary to engage ourselves in challenging discussions that help to analyse and address some of the common topics and issues that are close at heart to the gay community in KL.

Inevitably peppering the discussions are Men, Men and more Men. (OK, we can be shallow and deep at the same time). So we find it absolutely necessary to create an analysis that would easily facilitate any references to Men.

Sindy was the first one to propose this, and then we collectively worked on improving the definitions and analysis, which I will now present to you as:

• The BravingKL Desirability Scale

The scale helps to break down and group all men into 3 main categories:

• Type A: These are men who have what it takes to make you want to pursue them. This is not specific to just physical appearances, but may include the entire package with factors such as intellectuality and financial stability.
• Type B: These are men who may not trigger the rush in you to want to pursue them, but if he come after you, you wouldn’t mind dating him. In other words, he’s a convenient option.
• Type C: These are men whom you would never consider dating, even if he’s making all the moves to pursue you.

All three categories can then be further broken down into 2 sub-categories each:

• Type A1: These are the rare Prince Charmings in your life! You not only think of pursuing them, but you take active action to do so.
• Type A2: These are your princes who fall short of certain qualities so that you would just only think of pursuing them, but may not actually do so if they do not send a positive signal your way.
• Type B1 and B2: The distinction between B1 and B2 are not as clear, but generally you will succumb to the pursuits of B1 better than B2.
• Type C1: These are the general guys who do not interest you at all.
• Type C2: You would rather commit suicide than to date him.

Having the scale now properly defined, we then set out to plot a variation of graphs showing the number of guys that fall in the three main categories. Everyone naturally have very different plots of his own desirability chart. We find it interesting to analyse some of them here:

The standard plot reflects the normal distribution of men that we would encounter in our daily lives, judged against the generally-accepted standards in society. Naturally we would expect to find Type A the fewest, followed by Type B, and then those that we would normally filter as Type C.

DBKL are people who set a relatively low standard of quality-control for their men, translating into the fact that they would seem to find almost every single man they encounter to be attractive. The active DBKL's, who are naturally inclined to make the first move, will thus find most men plotted around the Type A vicinity. Studies conducted by the BravingKL Institute of Studies of Gay Men reveals that more than 95% of Active DBKLs are Type C, while the remaining are Type A or B who suffer from a permanent disorder that affects their visual judgements and signifcantly lowered their quality control, symptoms commonly exhibited by a drunken man.

The passive DBKL, while also finding most men that they encounter to be attractive, will not make the first move to pursue them. But if any one of these men do, then the success rate is rather high, if not always a 100%. Thus passive DBKL's find most men plotted in the Type B category. The study confirms that Passive DBKL shares the same social model as Active DBKL.

The princess believes she is too good for anyone, and thus sets impossibly high standards for the man in her life. She ends up with very few men who fulfills her type A and B criteria. Almost everyone is a Type C in her eyes. The same study reveals that only a fraction of Self-Infatuated Princesses are Type A, while in general, all of them suffer from a permanent dillusion of their own attributes due to various factors such as forgetting to install mirrors in their bathrooms.


The scale has since been healthily adopted so far in our daily lives. Among some of the examples of how this is peppered in daily conservations:

• "Type A coming, at your four-o-clock."
• "I can’t believe I’m just his type B!"
• "I don’t mind a type B tonight."
• "A table full of C’s."