According to Michel Foucault, history has no predetermined course, nor is there any evidence to suggest that knowledge and experience are cumulative, or that changes take place as a result of scientific progress.1 Instead, change is provoked by accidents and interruptions. In his analysis of the origins of the clinic, this philosopher and historian shows us how the plague and the concentration of corpses, rather than scientific discoveries, led doctors to begin carrying out autopsies. This fortuitous event was responsible for the shift from symptomatic medicine, in which disease was diagnosed on the basis of sight and hearing, towards modern medicine based on touching and internal examination.2
Along with Foucault, we believe that accidents and fortuitous events generate small revolutions in thinking. It is quite probable that if homosexual culture in Costa Rica --and possibly in Latin America in general --had not been confronted with an historic trauma, it might have remained hidden in the closet.
Costa Rica is a small country in Central America and one of the few nations in the world with an official religion. As in Iran, there is no separation between religion and the state. Thus, the public education system includes religious instruction for all students. All Costa Ricans contribute through their taxes to the salaries of senior clergymen. The Church is represented at all official government functions and there is no aspect of national life that is not influenced by it. On Christian feast days, the entire nation is paralyzed to make way for celebrations. Until a few years ago, people would even throw stones at vehicles that drove around during the holy days of Easter Week, and government buildings are still filled with religious images. Prayers are still said in public and private institutions. The majority of the country’s villages are named after some saint and God is even invoked in the televised weather forecasts.‘Tomorrow, God willing, it will rain”, says the weather reporter.
When a new government takes office, its first official act is to visit the Virgin of Los Angeles, the ‘national patron”. Once a year, when the Virgin is flown by helicopter from her permanent home in Cartago to the capital, San Jose, the archbishops ask the faithful to take out small mirrors (to reflect the sunlight) to greet her as she passes over the rooftops of their homes. An article published by ‘La Naciòn”3, Costa Rica’s leading daily, reports that ‘this week-end, the Virgin will be in Talamanca”, as if she were a living person. Anyone who is not familiar with the customs of the Costa Rican people might conclude that the small stone statue had gone on vacation.
The Church has the power of veto in many public and private decisions. When a group of lesbians tried to organize a conference in the country in 1987, the Church protested to the government for having given permission to the organizers and stirred public opinion up against the event.. In response, the then Minister of Security, who later became the President of Congress, declared that he would not allow the foreign participants to enter the country. The Minister boasted that the lesbians would easily be recognized at the international airport. People made jokes about him, saying that this brilliant politician had invented a ‘lesbometer” to spot them.4
To date, the Costa Rican government has been unable to offer sex education in the nation’s high schools. The Catholic Church rejected the instruction manuals that were prepared for this purpose, arguing that the texts contained ‘moral irregularities”. The Church demanded changes to embrace its own vision of sexuality, which is opposed to pre-marital sex, non-reproductive sexual practices, abortions, most family planning methods, respect for sexual diversity and condom use. The Church has also asked that the instruction manuals be imparted, among others, by those who are the least expert in the subject: priests.
It is hardly surprising that religious censorship promotes ignorance. For example, approximately 40% of young people are not sure or don’t know whether a girl’s first menstruation signals the start of her fertile period, and only 30% know when a woman is most likely to get pregnant. In addition, there are many myths: approximately 55% of young people of both sexes believe that masturbation is harmful and a slightly lower percentage believe there are vaccines to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.5
Costa Ricans traditionally conduct their sex lives by compartmentalizing them. In other words, they separate in their heads theory from practice. The Church’s sexual discourse is not questioned, but, in heterosexual relations, people do otherwise. This pattern is similar to what the ‘criollos” (Spaniards born in the New World) did during the colonial era with respect to the laws of the Mother Country: ‘I obey, but I don’t comply”, in other words, I don’t question authority, but I do what I like.
In the New World, slavery, the subordination of the indigenous people and the need for cheap labor made it impossible to uphold Christian rules that allowed sex only within marriage. Costa Rica’s poverty during the colonial period and its remoteness from the seat of political power, which for centuries was based in Guatemala, made for a poorer Catholic Church with fewer resources to impose its vision of sexuality.6
The Catholic Church preached chastity before marriage and prohibited adultery and divorce. However, it also had to coexist with a population exposed to undermining forces. The shortage of workers during the colonial period and the country’s incorporation into international markets through coffee exports in the nineteenth century, created a great demand for labor and for migrant populations, which in turn encouraged acceptance of children born out of wedlock.
Faced with a different economic and political reality, people opted to disregard many of the religious principles. Catholic writers admit that in spiritual matters Costa Ricans were more concerned with form than with content. The Catholic Church had to adapt itself to the reality that ‘conversion was never total”. With respect to the Hispanic population, Blanco notes that the Christian faith was assimilated more by form than by intellect.7
To profess the Catholic faith and not obey its moral dictates has been characteristic of the Costa Rican people and of Latins in general: 42% of all births take place outside of marriage; men have an average of 10 more sexual partners than women; 18% of babies are born to mothers under the age of 20; 45% of pregnancies are unwanted8; the annual divorce rate is 20%; 35% of all women endure physical or psychological aggression from their partners; 27% of university students have been victims of sexual abuse as children9 and every year nearly 5,000 abortions are induced.10
In Costa Rica, the people with scant education and those from the lower social and economic groups are the ones who, on average, have the highest birth rates. Whereas the fertility rate among the middle classes is 3.01, among the lower classes it is 4.17, or 30% higher.11 It is precisely this sector of the population who is most religious and is most affected by the Church’s anti family planning policies.12 For the middle and upper classes of society, when family planning measures fail, there is always the possibility of having an abortion in Miami.
However, for the Catholic Church to go against the infidelity of the majority of the population is like swimming against the tide. Its response has been to close its eyes to the ‘moral failings” of the Costa Ricans and of its own priests, some of whom have recognized their own children publicly.
If there is a double standard in heterosexual relations, it is not hard to imagine what happens with homosexuality.
In this sphere, people also say one thing and do another, though in a very different context. During the 1950s, for example, the police would raid gay bars and shave the heads of clients so that they would be recognized in the street. These practices continued without formal resistance until 1987.
Up until the mid-eighties, the attitude of Costa Rican gays was no different from that of heterosexuals: the dominant Catholic discourse on sexuality was not questioned, nor was it followed to the letter. Costa Rican gays, along with their fellow homosexuals in the rest of Latin America, learned to live a double life in which hiding one’s homosexuality was as important as practicing it. While there was never an explicit agreement between the state, the Church and homosexuals, certain rules of coexistence or minimum tolerance levels were established:
These rules--which were never made official but were faithfully obeyed --meant that the lives of Costa Rica’s gay men were submerged in a deep closet. Clients of gay bars lived in fear of being arrested, owners had to pay bribes to be allowed to stay open and middle class gays did most of their socializing at private parties. To be revealed as gay meant social disgrace and financial ruin, while being in the closet offered a certain privacy and benefits. In a survey carried out in 1989, we found that many Costa Rican gays lived in deep hiding. When asked who knew of their sexual orientation, 55% of those who frequented bars admitted that their fathers did not know, and 40% of mothers were also unaware of their orientation, along with 49% of their doctors and 68% of their neighbors.13
Life in the closet caused problems but it also had its benefits:
Foucault does not believe that changes in thinking occur as a result of an accumulation of experiences or scientific developments. This is shown in the fact that Stonewall (the gay armed uprising in New York) in 1969, the upsurge of the gay movement in the United States, the debate among psychiatrists on homosexuality and the struggle for peace in Central America, did not change the status quo for gays in Costa Rica. While Oscar Arias, Costa Rica’s president from 1986-1990, received the Nobel Peace Prize for his mediation efforts in the Central American armed conflict, his government carried out the worst raids against the country’s gay bars. So long as the price of revealing one sexual identity remained high (in other words, that the repression was overwhelming) and the closet offered certain benefits, (the possibility of certain reduced spaces for homosexuality), the gay population showed no sign of questioning the status quo.
Georg Simmel15 believes that oppressed groups who opt to ‘accommodate” or adapt themselves to a disadvantageous situation always get less than they hope for. This ‘accommodation” may last years, centuries or millennia, but it is a fragile arrangement. The subordinate sectors have accepted a less than ideal situation and will always be alert to any attempt by the dominant groups to alter the terms of the ‘arrangement”. They will also seize any opportunity to improve the disadvantageous situation in which they find themselves, either when their power increases or when their subordination becomes intolerable. All situations of subordination are, according to Simmel, pre-revolutionary. At a certain moment, any spark can light the fire.
In Costa Rica there was no Vietnam war or liberation movement for blacks and women to trigger a US-style ‘Stonewall”.16 Thus, although the North American gay movement had some influence in the country, things essentially remained the same during the decade of the seventies and part of the eighties. However, by the mid-eighties, the situation was to change radically. The closet would no longer be a safe place and homosexuality would become visible in two ways: through political organization (which is not the subject of this book) and the upsurge in public sex.
In the case of Costa Rica, information about AIDS arrived before the first cases appeared in 1983. Despite this, the epidemic spread quickly. Given their homophobic attitudes, the authorities thought that so long as the disease claimed only homosexual victims, why try to stop it? The reactions of hostility, panic, repugnance, hate and rejection which gays with AIDS suffered in hospitals, made homosexual oppression more evident than ever before. Stories of nurses --both male and female --who refused to go near patients, doctors who made fun of their mannerisms and microbiologists who refused to perform blood tests on homosexual patients, clearly showed that the situation was no bed of roses. The Catholic Church’s persecution was no less virulent. It used the epidemic to blame sexual ‘immorality”as the cause:
AIDS is... a warning. There is a divine plan, a certain order; if men do not follow this, there are signs that show us things are going badly. We already knew that the problem of AIDS was coming: it is written in the Bible, but people do not know it, they ignore it. In a world like ours, full of evil and destruction, men kill each other, there are vices, homosexuality... That is why AIDS has appeared.17
But had another impact more threatening than social hostility: the end of anonymity. Soon the Ministry of Health began tracing the sexual partners of those who were infected with the supposed intention of asking them to take an HIV test. Since AIDS patients were required to supply the names of all their sexual partners in the past ten years, soon half of the gay community were on these lists. In a small country like Costa Rica, where there is neither confidentiality nor anonymity, the majority of active homosexuals were at the mercy of a homophobic Health Minister.
The HIV test itself became a source of ‘outing”. The fact that several people were involved in the process of tracing contacts, interviewing, taking blood samples, testing and recording results, made it impossible to guarantee confidentiality. For many gay men, the mere fact of being summoned for an interview on suspicion of HIV infection was a way of being dragged out of anonymity. The heterosexual population began to realize that the image it had of homosexuals was false and it lost its ‘innocence” with respect to those who were gay. Now, two apparently ‘decent” men living together were regarded as homosexuals. The forty year-old bachelor uncle was no longer seen as a mere eccentric.
The large number of gay people with AIDS ensured that the names of the majority of gays were revealed. Each person who became ill and died left a string of friends and acquaintances who were now linked together by their sexual orientation. Costa Rican homosexuals were forced out of the closet by the pandemic.
For a small country and even smaller gay population, the epidemic was to have a devastating effect. From 1983 to July 1998, 923 homo-bisexuals developed the disease. If we factor in the 30 to 50% of unreported cases, another 276 to 461 individuals contracted the disease without the authorities being notified. Each year, between 26 and 127 homo-bisexual men developed the disease. During this period, 506 have died, approximately 2 homo-bisexual men each week.18 The link between AIDS and the gay community, which accounted for more than 67% of all cases until 1996, revealed sexual orientation. It also revealed the sexual orientation of friends, acquaintances and companions of people with AIDS.
The trauma of losing nearly 1,000 people and the fact that thousands of others were infected with the virus, was to have a great impact on Costa Rica’s gay community and on the way in which it related to the heterosexual majority. Homosexuals realized that Latin-style concealment and pretense was no longer of any use. The epidemic seemed likely to spread unchecked given the government’s unwillingness to launch a prevention campaign. In fact, the government’s initial response was to increase the number of raids and create panic about AIDS.
Given the spread of AIDS among the gay population, on April 5, 1987, the Health Ministry decided to raid the Bar La Torre, the most popular gay discotheque at the time, with the aim of ‘preventing ” the epidemic.
Hundreds of gays were taken off to jail without protest. Some later said that they felt like Jews being taken to the slaughterhouse: the ironic smiles of the police, being treated like criminals, the Deputy Interior Minister Ramos directing and observing the events and enjoying the degrading spectacle.19
Unlike Stonewall in the United States, there was no armed uprising that night, or the next night or any night so far. But things changed. For the first time in the country’s history, gays and lesbians joined together to form the first political organization and they protested to the media about the raid. From this movement, several political organizations and anti-AIDS groups were to emerge, such as prevention programs and a series of gay institutions and businesses which are the equal of any in the major Latin American cities.
The objective of the Association for the Fight Against AIDS, founded in 1987 and ILPES, founded in 1993, was to prevent AIDS in the community, a task which the government was unwilling to undertake. Beginning that year, prevention and awareness courses were programed for gays with the aim of encouraging safe sex.
Promoting safe sex implied something more than simply using a condom. In the session on safer sex, (the workshops consist of 12 three-hour sessions), the facilitators encourage participants to consider other forms of sexual contact that do not involve penetration. One of the exercises, for example, involves imagining what would happen if men did not have genitals but still wanted to have sexual relations. Another session explores the value of masturbation as complete sex.
Oral sex is encouraged as a safe alternative (despite the debate on the issue). So are homosexual pornographic films. However, one of the most important issues discussed is Christian guilt and the persecution of homosexuality. The workshops try to analyze why the Christian church persecutes gays and how they are made invisible and harassed by an arbitrary sexual morality.
About 3000 gay and bisexual men have attended ILPES workshops.20 In a small community, this is a substantial figure, because the information, the questioning and the different options are shared with others and the ideas are disseminated beyond the official number of participants.
The workshops not only served to encourage the organization of the gay community but also questioned the excessive importance attached to penetration in the Latin culture. As one of the facilitators told us, ‘it was time that we Latins stopped thinking that sex was just fucking”.
In the 1989 survey, we found that penetration was the preferred sexual practice. Of 162 gay men who frequented bars and were selected at random, only 23% admitted to feeling very excited about fellating a man wearing a condom. If a condom was not used, the number increased to 48%. When asked about active anal penetration, 41% admitted to feeling very excited with a condom and 64% without a condom. In other words, nearly double preferred penetration to oral sex.21
Despite the gays’ growing political organization in the country, by 1998 the members of all these groups numbered barely 100 people. For a generation that grew up in the sixties and seventies, it was not easy to be openly gay in such a small country like Costa Rica. Since social repression remains overwhelming, the majority of gays who have taken the courses are still fearful of exposing themselves through their political participation. However, AIDS continued to have an impact on them. On the one hand, the workshops provided them the theory to question the prevailing model of penetration in the country. On the other, homosexual pornography would show them the practice.
According to Gary W. Dowsett, 22 some studies in the United States suggest that organization and participation in the gay community is not an important factor in explaining changes in safe sex. However, ‘participation” was defined as interest or activism in gay organizations. In Australia, by contrast, ‘participation” was considered to include not only the political, but also the social and the sexual aspects. In other words, ‘participation” did not simply mean militancy, but also included people who socialized in bars and in public places known to be homosexual venues. When this information was included, it was discovered that the most important factor in explaining the reduction of unsafe sex was the degree of ‘participation” in the gay community.23
The reluctance of social scientists to include non-political activities in the gay community under the heading of ‘organization”, has led them to overlook the important changes brought about by social and sexual centers. Carrier, for example, believes that in Guadalajara little has changed in the lives of gays in recent years, since the number of homosexual bars and organizations has remained static.24 In their study on homosexuality in the Dominican Republic, Antonio de Moya and Rafael Garcia also measure the impact of AIDS by the decrease in the number of gay bars and hotels.25
In Costa Rica, as in Australia, gay meeting centers experienced a kind of ‘sexual revolution of desire”. Instead of decreasing in number, they actually increased, and instead of becoming more furtive they became more obvious. Bars and social centers have proliferated in recent years. While in 1989 there were just four bars, three saunas and no hotels exclusively for gays, by 1998 the figure had risen to 20, including three new hotels.26 However, Costa Rican homosexuals made enormous changes in their practices and sexual fantasies, which are not only evident in the number of public or private establishments. Unlike what was reported in Mexico by Carrier or in Santo Domingo by de Moya and Garcia, where AIDS traumatized and reduced the gay spaces, in Costa Rica the opposite occurred. One possible explanation for this difference is that the gay community here was able to mount an effective prevention campaign that would save it from imminent disaster and give it a sense of confidence in itself and in its ability to change things.
In the 1989 survey, during the first five years of the AIDS epidemic, gay people had already begun to make changes in their sexual practices. Men who went to bars had reduced or eliminated various practices with casual or occasional partners (people who were not their steady partner) and had decreased the frequency of penetration by the following percentages:
Active anal penetration: 34%
Passive anal penetration: 37%
At the same time, masturbation had increased significantly in 60% of cases, and 40% had never had oral sex.27
The reports from the prevention workshops clearly show that there was a period of panic during the early years of the epidemic, when gays preferred to hire porn videos and masturbate at home, rather than make contacts in bars or public places. However, after a gradual acceptance of the condom and with the knowledge gained from workshops and movies, they opted to make changes. According to Carlos, a workshop participant, ‘the first years were very difficult for me. I was terrified of AIDS and of getting infected. I preferred to have sex alone. However, as I began to feel comfortable with safe sex, I began to enjoy it again and to go out to bars and public places.” Ernesto confirms that ‘pornography was my teacher. That’s how I learned to enjoy things other than penetration. I remember that before it had never occurred to me to do other things. Semen disgusted me and I didn’t like oral sex. However, I learned new things and I began to enjoy them. You get used to everything.” In Pepe’s case, change was easier: ‘ I joined the gay scene when there was AIDS and it was more common to masturbate and have oral sex than before. I started off in a different ‘school” from those who had become gay before the epidemic.”
After the initial ‘shock”of the gays, at a time when people were still unaware of the danger of contagion through oral sex, information that this was not dangerous, even without the protection of a condom, was a factor that propitiated a kind of sexual revolution. Both masturbation and oral sex would become the safest and most favored practices in occasional relations and, even more important, would be performed according to scripts learned from pornography in public places. During a period that is difficult to pinpoint exactly, but within the past ten years, homosexuality stopped imitating the Latin heterosexual model with its emphasis on penetration, discretion, shame and double standards.28 The longstanding pact with the Church and the State was coming to an end: the practice of homosexuality would come out of the ‘closet” and become public in the very heart of the city. Moreover, things would not be done in accordance with the traditional Latin model which considers only penetration as true sex. From now on, oral sex and masturbation would be the preferred practices. This would bring enormous benefits: from 1995, the number of new AIDS cases among gay and bisexual men was to decline sharply.29
Obviously, the changes were not general: there is always a vanguard group who leads the way. Not all gays learned from porn movies, nor did everyone use public places, as we shall see farther on. However, a larger number of gays began to ‘take over” these places and turn them into a kind of school for sexuality. Others used them to work on aspects of their personality implanted during childhood. For whatever reasons, neither the places nor the gays would ever be the same.
Homosexual pornographic films, which can be viewed comfortably at home, are mainly imported from the United States. Unlike traditional Latin American culture, they have other values:
These are the rules that are followed in public places, as we shall see in the following chapters. Ironically, what began as a change in the gay sexual culture and did away with the implicit understanding that homosexual practice should be hidden