This study represents more than ten years of research in Costa Rican and Central American prisons. My interest in writing about homosexuality in these institutions stems from my commitment to fight against HIV infection. Back in 1988, I began giving AIDS prevention workshops as part of my work with the former “Asociación de Lucha Contra el Sida”, today known as the Latin American Institute for Prevention and Health Education (ILPES). As a result of these efforts, I was contracted by the World Health Organization (WHO) to conduct a study about the knowledge and practices of men who have sex with other men in Costa Rica. This study would include a section on the situation in the penitentiary system. Some of the data gathered from that study has been used in this book. Later, I began a series of workshops with prison inmates to increase their knowledge about AIDS and improve prevention efforts. The different histories of hundreds of prisoners were imprinted forever in my mind.
The objective of this book is to reveal part of the sexual culture of prisons in order to improve AIDS prevention programs. The aim is to study the type of relationships which occur in these institutions and the factors which place inmates at risk from contracting the HIV virus. This data has been facilitated thanks to a series of studies carried out with the close collaboration of ILPES and the Ministry of Justice. Finally, I would like to make some general recommendations so that the holistic approach to prevention may take new leaps forward in the fight against AIDS.
I believe that all attempts to “colonize” the sexual culture of prison inmates -- whether through medical lectures, psychoanalytical therapies, mandatory AIDS testing, scientific “pamphlets” in condom packets, theater “plays” that spread terror of Aids, visits by social workers from the
Department for the Control of Aids -- will fail unless they learn to respect that culture. This type of sensitivity has been demonstrated in Costa Rica by the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Social Adaptation. I hope that many other Justice ministries around the continent will be interested in examining this policy, both its many successes and its failures.
Another wish, no less important to me, is to describe how a sexual culture, far removed from the discourse of Costa Rica’s middle-classes, is built up by the most dispossessed sectors of our society. This prison culture develops parallel to the predominant culture and, at the same time, allows us to look in a different way at our own culture. Even within a sexual counter-culture, relations of power are established which create resistances. Any discourse or practice that attempts to set general rules for the entire population has its saboteurs, its revolutionaries and its martyrs.