The sharper edge to traveling in Asia

Remembering the wild sexual world of writer Cleo Odzer

Written By: herbrunbridge - Apr• 25•10

Comparatively few WOWasis women readers browse Thai bookstores in search of books relating to Thai adult-themed nightlife, but those who do are often surprised to find a well-researched book on the life encountered on Patpong Road, expat writer Cleo Odzer’s Patpong Sisters (ISBN 1-55970-372-5).  Odzer held a Ph.D. in anthropology, and spent three years living the life of the district, interviewing girls, bar owners, and customers.  She got involved personally, too, and her book tells the tale of her tempestuous relationship with a Thai man, involved on the periphery of the bar scene.

What sets her apart from many women writing on the scene is that she was an adventurer and wrote from experience, rather than an armchair.  She was quick to realize the power that bar girls held over their own lives, and wrote of their autonomy, drawing the ire of many western women in the process.  Ironically, she was also reviled by a good number of western men.

The story of how the book came to be written is fascinating as well.  After shopping around her manuscript to several publishers, it was finally taken by former Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset for his Blue Moon publishing company.  He described the manuscript as a long-winded treatise on the relationship with her Thai boyfriend, and he asked to see her dissertation on Bangkok nightlife.  He melded the two, and Patpong Sisters is the result.  The book remains controversial, and is a fascinating and unconventional look at the scene.

Cleo wrote a follow-on book, Goa Freaks (1995, ISBN 1-56201-059-X), a chronicle of her free-spirited earlier days in the early-to-mid 1970s.  Her life was legendary.  Born in 1951, she modeled for a short time in Europe, was involved in an iconoclastic record album Alan Lorber’s The Groupies, reportedly was engaged to rock star Keith Emerson,  became a heroin addict and petty thief in India, temporarily dried out, and obtained three university degrees in New York in the 1980s.  She covered the Patpong scene after receiving one of her degrees, returned to New York and got involved in the internet world, and suddenly pulled up stakes and moved back to Goa, probably some time in 1998.  She was never able to shake her own ghosts, and died in Goa in 2001, of complications arising from her lifestyle.  In her own way, she was a remarkable women who bucked trends, broke rules, was brave and self-effacing enough to cast herself in a less-than-glamorous light, and was unafraid to write about it.   She was a vibrant, if challenging, tortured soul who left us too early; her future writings would have undoubtedly been as iconoclastic as the books she left behind. Cleo’s  website is still alive on the web.

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