Singapore will forever occupy a distinct and sexually enticing place in the minds of many a Gay American. I was only a 4th grader at the time, but I distinctly remember the caning of Michael Fay, who received the brutal punishment for vandalizing some cars with spray paint. To be sure, I'm not a fan of S&M, but there was still something darkly sexual about the whole affair. Mercifully for Fay, the Singaporean president at the time, Ong Teng Cheong, reduced from 6 to 4 the number of times the bamboo stick would strike Fay's 20-year-old ass.

Whatever one thinks of the erotic undertones of being beaten on the behind with a bamboo cane, surely the Singaporean government just turned off a huge potential tourist market by deciding to retain its ban on gay sex. Thankfully, at least for breeders, anal and oral sex is now legal.

The Singaporeans, if anything, are good businessmen. Surely they know about the billions of dollars that are to be made from the gay tourism industry? Here is a very wealthy Asian island city-state frequented by many a businessman and just a hop, skip and a jump from Bangkok, that other sex capital. For a view into gay life in Singapore (where, at least, the leader does not go around proclaiming the non-existence of homos), it's advisable to defer to Sir Ian McKellan, who recently traveled to Singapore to perform King Lear.

Makes one pine for the Headline News of the 90's, when our attentions were drawn to dramas like the football star who murdered his wife, the white trash figure skater who had her nemesis beaten with a pipe, and the distraught lady who cut off her husband's Johnson.