PROLOGUE
This book seeks to answer several key questions. What could have happened to make a
traditional gay Latin culture drastically change the rules of the game and take over public places to
exhibit what was once forbidden? What factor or factors have triggered this change? Do these
public places constitute a danger for the spread of HIV? How was Costa Rica‟s gay community
able to reduce HIV infection and the numbers of gay men with AIDS? Is it possible for
homosexuals to significantly change their desires and sexual practices? What are the typical
public sex places in a Latin American setting, how do they work and how do they evolve? Who are
the main actors, what are their motivations and their problems? How do the different groups that
participate interact and influence each other and what are the main communication problems?
Why are gay men murdered and how could these killings be prevented? Is public sex in a Latin
country always “progressive”?
To answer these questions, the Research Department of ILPES began a qualitative and quantitative
investigation in 1989 which has taken almost a decade. Our main mission, as always, was to
investigate patterns of gay behavior in order to take effective prevention measures against HIV
infection. It has never been our interest to denounce these activities nor to persecute those who
practice them. On the contrary, we believe that public sex provides a number of opportunities that
enable a sector of the population to “work through” certain problems of sexual communication and
even to learn about safe sex. Therefore, we have replaced the names of people and places with
fictitious names and have changed the locations and some of their characteristics to protect the
people who have helped us so much in this investigation. We are also aware of the great dangers
that lie in wait for participants and have thus paid considerable attention to these. In recent years,
many gay men have been murdered by clients who frequent public sex places and we believe that
our study can offer some basic safety rules.
One of ILPES‟ objectives is the empowerment of sexual minorities. However, we feel that these
groups have not had much of a voice, and still less have been the subject of social research in Latin
America. While traditional studies usually quote their interviewees, the latter tend to remain under
the dictates of the author who provides us with the overall and final interpretations. In our case, we
have tried to give a greater participation to our respondents, respecting their language and their
way of seeing things, as well as giving them a voice in many of our analyses. We have found, for
example, that criminals can analyze their own crimes better than we can, and also that active
participants in public places can be excellent ethnographers. However, this way of
“democratizing” a research project also has its problems. There were times when we would have
wished that much of the data gathered were more “politically correct” and that the language used
by these minorities were less coarse and rude to sensitive ears. We would also have preferred a less
homophobic brand of humor from our interviewees, including the gays themselves. But we
believe it is better to portray them as they really are, without the terrible censorship of their
language which is so characteristic of Latin American social science.
This study was carried out by a team of professionals who are in the vanguard of research on
sexual minorities. Among them are Rodrigo Vargas, a statistician and key organizer of this study;
Dino Starcevic, a journalist; Luis Villalta, coordinator of the “Listen to your Voice” project for
