Forget Lost Horizon--it's more like Lost Weekend for the lost generation in Lhasa. "Are you ready?" blasts the sound system promptly at 10 pm--and the crowd of young twenty-somethings shouts in unison,

"Yo! Hey! Disco! Disco!".

Benny, the beaming DJ from Chengdu cranks up the sound, the strobe lights flash and the dance floor fills up.

It's Friday night in Lhasa at the Top End Disco. The crowd is about 60% male, peach-fuzz faces and slant eyes, cuteness to die for.

It's a rice-queen's wet dream--although strictly speaking Tibetans do not eat much rice, but subsist on yak meat, potatoes, noodles and tsampa (roasted barley flour). Like their peers anywhere else in the world, these guys and girls (there are even a few drag queens), just wanna have fun.

You be the man!

There are virtually no foreigners--and being the only "European" in the hall, guys come up to invite me to join them--drinks (Pabst Blue Ribbon, Lhasa Beer or Coca-Colas) are on them.

I'm dragged to the dance floor to join their little circle, pay for my cab fare back to the hotel--and if you're lucky, sometimes you might get someone to go back with you after hand-holding, cuddling and dancing in the dark.

One well-built Tibetan student, on holiday from the University of Beijing, asked me to do a slow dance with him--pressing me up against his sweaty, barrel chest, and whispered, "You be the man."

Gay readers of Heinrich Harrer's Seven Years in Tibet must have been heartened by the author's disclosure that in Tibet homosexuality is very common.