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 former prison inmates, who carried out the research with the police officers; Antonio Bustamante, director del “El Salon” program for juvenile delinquents in street gangs; Abelardo Araya, coordinator of the “Movimiento 5 de Abril” program for gays and lesbians who assisted in the ethnographic observation of public places; Lidia Montero, director of the ILPES publishing company, and Hector Elizondo, coordinator of the “2828” program for young street gays, who helped me contact many of the sex workers. As always, Julian Gonzalez was the main editor of our work and David Gorn designed the cover.
To all of them, my most sincere appreciation for their great work.
While democracy is our goal, it is important to have a single victim who can be sued for what is written in this book. So, despite the enormous debt I owe to all who participated in this study, the responsibility is mine alone.
Jacobo Schifter Sikora