It is early evening when I walk into California, one of about 15 gay bars that dot the matrix of alleys behind the main road in Itaewon, the section of Seoul, South Korea, famous for its tawdry nightlife and its proximity to the American military base.

The bar door barely closes behind me before a petite young Korean man named Se-Ho, who has eyed me from across the bar, comes scurrying over and stands directly in front of me.

At 5-feet 9-inches and 200 pounds, I am considered average build in America. In Korea, I stick out as a big man. My beard and mustache also distinguish me here.

Se-Ho, who stands about 5-feet 4-inches and can weigh no more than 125 pounds, is smiling up at me with dark round flirtatious eyes. He’s already stuck his hand inside my shirt and is rubbing the hair on my chest.

“Ooh,” he coos. “Big American daddy!”

I laugh involuntarily, partly out of self-consciousness, partly out of surprise. But Se-Ho is not deterred.

“Are you a rice queen?’ he asks. “I’m a potato queen.”

Now completely embarrassed, I stumble over my words trying to explain that the terms “rice queen” and “potato queen” are considered derogatory and not used so freely in America.

Se-Ho’s eyes turn from playful to perplexed. “Of course you do,” he replies. “How do you think I learned them?”

The American influence in Itaewon is obvious in many other ways, too, sometimes painfully so. The first give-away that this is an enclave for foreigners are the inordinate number of signs in English-a rare site in Seoul. Second is the uncustomarily high percentage of Caucasian tourists haggling with street vendors for Buddha statues and fake Rolexes.

The less photogenic legacy of the American presence here is found just off Itaewon-gil, as the major road is called. One block off the main strip, the alleys dip down dramatically, as if to warn you of the decline you are about to take.

Here are Seoul’s famous whorehouses, where young Korean girls beckon from the windows and porches to American soldiers stumbling in the streets, drunk and horny.

Here, too, is home to Korea’s newest gay nightlife, a cluster of bars along a narrow stretch of alleys collectively called the “Homo Hills.” Despite the neighborhood, the gay bars, while small by American standards, are decidedly chic. They are decorated alternately with dark wood or shiny chrome and mirrors, and each one seems to have a miniature dance floor.

I later find out it is no accident that Korea’s gay bars are situated so intimately next to the pay-for-sex institutions. As improbable as it seems, their location is about safety from the police. While prostitution is technically illegal, the Seoul police wouldn’t dare raid the playground of the American Army boys, spoiling their fun and the money that they bring with them.

The former gay district was located around Pagoda Park, a small square in the center of the city, with a towering,14-century marble pagoda as its centerpiece. But after years of police raids and harassment, park cruising tapered off and many of the bars closed shop and moved to the naughty strip in Itaewon, where they found safety among the prostitutes.

Even the gaggles of American soldiers who wander the streets here seem to have adopted a don’t ask policy about the bars that everyone knows are gay. The soldiers come to Itaewon to get their own thrills, and as long as they aren’t bothered, they don’t seem to care how others get theirs. And of course, the presence of more than a few military men in the gay bars is an open secret that delights the likes of Se-Ho, who tells me he only goes with Western men.

Even without my asking, the bartender at California hands me a photocopy of a hand-drawn map with the words “tourist map of gay Korea” written on it. A black dot on the map identifies not only bars, but other gay hangouts from the homo- friendly Hamilton Hotel to the Burger King, where gay men linger for hamburgers and cruising after the bars shut down.

The bars are all in walking distance, and filled with an unusually high proportion of drag queens.

“All Korean man is looking for strong American soldier or businessman like you,” says one drag queen who calls herself Miss Lee and is decked out in a purple sequin dress and blond wig that rises high on her head. We are in a basement bar called Trance, and Miss Lee, whose real name is Kyung-Chan, is bemoaning the fact that she and the other drag queens here are often looked down on by Korean gays. But, she says in broken English learned entirely by watching American movies and talking to American visitors, “we are the strong ones. We build gay Korea. Other Korea gay man, he just hide.”

Miss Lee is right. In four nights of going out, I didn’t find a single gay Korean man who was out, other than a couple of the bar owners and the drag queens.

Most were like Moon Han, a shy 26-year-old man with pretty features and excellent English. Like most young men here, Moon Han still lives at home with his parents in Seoul, and he would never come out. “It’s not because I am afraid for myself, but because it would shame my family. They couldn’t hold their heads up. It would ruin them in the community.”

Korea has no official law against homosexuality, he says, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for social tolerance. “It is just something that is never talked about in Korean society,” he says.

The threat of shame and disgracing the family honor, more than fear of violence or discrimination, is the biggest obstacle to coming out and leading a “totally gay” life, says Moon Han. I’m not quite sure what he means by a “totally gay” life, but I know it includes a boyfriend, something he wants but says is hard to find with another Korean man. Both the housing situation in this overcrowded, cramped city, and the country’s traditional social structure of intergenerational families living under the same roof, dictate that single men live with their families. Privacy is almost impossible to come by, especially the kind needed for a covert gay love affair.

Mubarak Dahir receives e-mail at MubarakDah@aol.com.