In the movie “Fiddler on the Roof”, we are initially shown images full of color and music to convey to us the supposedly bucolic life of the Jewish communities of eastern Europe. However, the music and color soon subside, introducing the “others”, the problematic Christians, many of them anti-Semitic. If it were not for them, the movie suggests, life in Russia or Poland would not have been so tragic for this persecuted minority. Nevertheless, Levinas tells us that the look of the “other” determines our knowledge of ourselves. Without the other, we are nothing.54
We must do the same. We must also show the “others”. If it were not for them, the gays would have a fantastic time in public places, dancing and cavorting in response to the call of Eros. However, like birds of ill omen, there are vultures who circle in the sky waiting to disrupt homosexual pleasures. They share a common background, being from the poorer and least educated classes of society. The majority have not even completed second grade in primary school. Many are illiterate. A large group of them have no home and sleep in parks and vacant lots. They come from broken families, the result of a lack of sexual education that is part of the Catholic Church’s demographic terrorism. Most have multiple addictions: glue, marihuana, crack, alcohol and cigarettes. Nobody wants them and the middle classes dream of some calamity that will wipe them all out. The average life span of these poor devils is extremely short. According to Antonio Bustamante, coordinator of ILPES’ AIDS prevention program -- the only one of its kind for this group -- “most are dead before the age of 25”.
It is important to understand that their perceptions of homosexuality differ greatly from those of homosexuals themselves. Among Latin America’s popular sectors, homosexuality is not seen as a psychological condition. The idea that our sexuality is somehow “hidden” in our heads, as modern psychology adduces, is incomprehensible to them. That view is more in line with the ideas of the middle classes, for whom non-physical attributes such as class and education are important.
For the masses, it is the tangible things and the things that they lack which are important: a home, clothing, food, and of course, control over their own bodies. In his analysis of the relationship between modern life and insanity, Louis A. Sass tells us that it was not until the sixteenth century that people began to believe that a difference exists between personality and activity.55 Given that ancient and medieval societies were static and people could not change their occupation or their social status, the concept that one could be something other than what one did or did not do with one’s body was non-existent. There was no awareness of the idea that something in our heads could differ from what we did socially and that it was somehow independent and more “real”. Thus, Sass concludes that social “mobility”, promoted by economic development and “modernity”, was largely responsible for people beginning to consider their personality as something internal and as something changing and pliable, that could be “cultivated” , “educated” and “developed”. For the popular sectors of society, whether medieval or “modern”, who lack the opportunities to change and improve their career and social position, and the opportunity to “cultivate” their internal selves, this notion remains problematic or incomprehensible.
Foucault believes that homosexuality is a recent creation linked to modernity.57 The discovery of homosexuality (or its invention) was associated, from the start, with the medical desire to study it and regulate it. In other words, people began to be divided by sexual object (something not done previously) and some as suffering from a sexual disorder. This suggests to us that we were not always categorized by the object of our desire. In fact, in Classical Greece, citizens could change sexual objects without any problem. However, what could not be done was to change practices: honorable men could not allow themselves to be penetrated. But they could penetrate women, men and beasts.58
For young street kids, as for ancient Greeks, homosexuality is an inversion of gender which has nothing to do with psychological development. Homosexuals where those who exchange the masculine for the feminine. A man is heterosexual so long as he is masculine and the same holds true for women so long as they are feminine. Thus, “cacheros”59 and “locusts”60 are not perceived as homosexuals, nor is the idea of a specific “psychology” or inner world accepted.
Young people and adults from marginal communities who have few opportunities to study, make money and be socially mobile, exercise power through the only means they have at their disposal: their bodies. Gender is defined by the body, which is at the center of the battle for control. When these young people are asked how a woman should dress, they generally answer, “very feminine”: short dresses, shorts, tight-fitting blouses. Men should dress in a masculine way: pants, shirts, “macho” clothes. Women should “swing” their bodies as they walk, but men should walk straight. Their voices should be distinctive: refined and gentle ones for women, deep and harsh ones for men. The same is true of sexual orientation. Since homosexuality is centered in the body, it is visible in people’s mannerisms. Desire is not a subjective experience, but a chemical substance which, according to Alberto, a young criminal, is found in the rectum: “Faggots develop hormones in their asses which make them enjoy anal sex.”
Among the lower classes, then, sexuality is not defined by the object of sexual desire. The world is not divided according to psychological attributes, but rather according to who dominates whom. All those individuals who are “active” or “aggressive” are men and all those who are “passive” and who are “dominated” are women. Gender and even sexual orientation are determined by physical activity.
When these people discuss how others became homosexual they conclude that it is the result of a confusion of the active or masculine activities with passive or feminine ones. Men become “homosexual” because they spent too much time playing with women’s things, and women become lesbians for the opposite reason. Asking a young man to clean the house or wash clothes may change his sexual orientation.
In everyone’s eyes then, “faggots” or homosexuals are “women”, while “dykes” or lesbians are “men” in women’s bodies. Individuals who do not fit into this pattern -- in other words, “cacheros” and the feminine lovers of “dykes”, do not belong to a category different from heterosexuality. In this way, the contradictions are made invisible and the world remains polarized between the strong and the weak. The “machismo” that is prevalent among Costa Rica’s lower classes is very different from the type encountered by Mirandé in the Hispanic communities of the United States, where it is related to family values, loyalty and religious views.61
The model of vulnerable masculinity applies more to communities where the traditional discourses are in crisis and men feel increasingly threatened by unemployment and their capacity to “head” their households. The exercise of physical force becomes the last weapon to preserve the prerogatives of gender. Men become men through violence and the subjugation of women or of other men. Males are trained from childhood to touch, abuse, mock, silence, force, subjugate persuade and finally rape women.
When we conducted the ethnographic survey in 1989 we found two marginal subcultures in public sex places. The first group were the “cacheros” who worked in prostitution -- heterosexual men who have sex with men for money. In popular Latin culture, these men are not considered homosexual, so long as they are the penetrators in anal sex, in theory or in appearance. Given that activity and passivity determine gender among the lower classes, “cacheros” were regarded as active and therefore masculine. For them, the motivation was to earn money from sex.
Many had their own specific pick-up points. But if business was slow and there were no clients, the easiest way to find them was to go to parks, toilets, alleyways and movie theaters.
I saw a queen pay a guy 1,000 colones to suck him. The guy was smoking a marihuana joint in a doorway with his dick hanging out. After sucking him, the queen paid him.(Victor)
Others went to public places, made their contacts and, once they were at the client’s hotel or apartment, they would put their cards on the table and discuss the price to be charged for various sexual activities. Sex workers tended to prefer men who arrived in cars, since it was easier to negotiate in another place, rather than in the pick-up areas.
I was very horny that night and went for a drive around the park. I met a very attractive young man who stared at me as I stopped at the lights. When I drove around again, he got in the car and it wasn’t till we got to my apartment that he told me what he charged and explained that the price would vary according to what we did.(Luis)
Sex workers committed crimes only when clients refused to pay them the agreed sum or when they got drunk or stoned and became careless. After all, it was not in their interest to be branded as thieves. Getting clients depended on providing a good service, and a reputation as a mugger would drive them out of the market.
There was another more peculiar group, the common delinquents:
There are a bunch of hoodlums here. I would never take any of them to my apartment. I did it once and they stole my things, but the sense of danger attracts me. (Gerardo)
Someone told me that once, in the park, a guy took out a knife and stole his gun. I’m telling you this so you can see that in these places there are weapons and people are frightened, really scared. Then the guy showed me a large knife. I froze and stepped back. That was something that scared me. To hide my fear, I talked to him the way he talked. I got down to his level. It’s a way of making yourself out to be part of the same group, the same social and cultural stratum, if you can call it that. (Eduardo)
Carlos was mugged twice. Jose recounts his experience:
On February 16, 1990, I was looking for adventure in the park. It was around two in the morning. At the edge of the sidewalk I found a kid of about 18. He was crying. I went over to him and he said that he’d just been mugged by a couple of guys. They’d taken out a knife and had stolen his watch, his shirt, jewelry, money and worst of all, they’d left him without his shoes. He was distraught and very nervous. He lived far from San Jose and didn’t even have money for a cab. Since I had my car, I offered to take him home. I said I’d leave him a couple of blocks from his house to avoid getting involved in any problems he might have with his family.
During an observation in the park, the ethnographer, in the company of some friends, saw a known deaf gay man walking around the area for several hours. The next day, one of the friends told the ethnographer than the deaf guy was in the hospital. He had been mugged at 2 a.m. on Monday, and had been stabbed twice in his stomach and once in his neck. Another gay man was mugged Tuesday. They held a knife to his throat and stole all his valuables.
Another common practice by muggers in those places was to steal people’s wallets while they were having oral sex. In the toilet, on January 14, 1990, at 8 in the evening, the ethnographer saw a man who was giving oral sex to another, take money out of his pants. When the ethnographer tried to warn the victim that he was being robbed, a third individual approached him and put a knife against his back, warning him in a low voice: “keep quiet”. The ethnographer left without being able to do anything.
Jesus reports a similar incident:
Once after a party, a friend of mine and I decided to take a walk around the park. We were really drunk and he decided to enter the park. I didn’t want to go in. About five days later, I met him in San Jose and he told me that he’d been mugged that night. He was left in his underpants. He had to wait for someone to find him a taxi.
Ignacio told us:
The first time I was robbed was about 6 or 7 years ago. I’d just come out of a disco and went to the park. A guy came up to me, a black guy who sells lottery tickets now. I felt a certain mistrust because he used a kind of jargon that I don’t use. I was a little drunk, but not too crazy. I began talking with the guy. He said he had an apartment near the hospital, by the railroad line, and invited me back for a drink. He tried to get information about where I worked and my name, very insistently. I gave him a false name and a false workplace. He repeatedly asked me for my phone number at work, but I didn’t give it to him. Before reaching the apartment he said the place might be occupied by a gringa friend. If it was occupied, he said, a light would be on. He made a show of arriving at the apartment and a light was on. He said we should go to an uninhabited area near the hospital. We went there and he began to suck me and I began to touch him. My wallet dropped out of my back pocket and I put it back in again. As my pants were half way down my legs, the guy grabbed my wallet and said he would take care of it. I trusted him. But after a while I began to feel uneasy and became nervous. I had a lot of money on me that day. He didn’t want to return the wallet. He turned and said: „I’ve just escaped from La Reforma (the jail), so I’m going to take this.’ In the end I persuaded him to leave me some money. He gave me 4,500 and the wallet and ran off. I felt real bad and I cried.
Carlos had a similar experience:
Another time, when I was very drunk, completely intoxicated, I saw a guy crossing the park. He came up to me and said we should talk. I didn’t like him much, but maybe because of the booze, my instinct sort of deserted me. A few days later I met him again. I didn’t remember him from before, I was very drunk and we walked. He took me to the same place as before. We masturbated. He was sucking me and took out my wallet. I saw him. He was bending down and I was standing. I didn’t do anything because I was so drunk that I thought if I did something this guy would kill me. I thought it was better for him to take the money and not hurt me. Very skillfully, he took the wallet out of my pants, removed the bills with two fingers and replaced the wallet. Then he ran off. I preferred not to do anything. The guy often does this to other people. I don’t know if he carries a weapon.
These places were so dangerous that one way of protecting oneself was to always go with two or more friends.
Similarly, there was also a danger of being mugged in the movie theaters and one heard stories about this, mainly involving people who were new to these places. A very experienced client told the ethnographer about a friend of his who went to the movies very well dressed and wearing valuable jewelry, some time ago. He was mugged in the toilets by two men who threatened him with a knife. They stole everything from him and left him in his underpants. The narrator had to go to his house and bring him some clothes. The victim stopped going to the movie theater for a while, though he has since returned. Now he wears clothes less trendy clothes.
According to Victor:
I heard about muggins. A queen who’s a friend of mine told me he was mugged by two gay guys in the bathroom. At first they let him suck them. He was doing it when he felt a blow on the back of his neck. It wasn’t so hard because he reacted immediately. They grabbed him by the neck and mugged him. They stole his chains and his money.
By 1998, crime had not diminished. In fact it had increased sharply. More than 25 gay men have been murdered in recent years. Many “cacheros” and gay sex workers have also been mugged and attacked by criminals. Nevertheless, this continuous pattern of violence cannot blind us or obscure the significant changes that have taken place in public sex places. One of these is the appearance of the “chapulines” or “locusts”. They are so-called because people liken them to the swarming pests that attack crops. “Locusts” are juvenile gang members who mug and rob people. However, instead of invading the countryside, their sphere of action is the city. They operate in groups and while one immobilizes the victim in an armlock, the rest rob him of his belongings. Sometimes, “immobilize” means stab with a knife. The “locusts” are both male and female, but here we are only concerned with the former, because they are the ones who have sexual relations with gays.
The “locusts” are a focus of attention in this study because they are the group that is most antagonistic towards gays in public places, and because they are responsible for the majority of the murders of gay men that have occurred in recent years. They, like the gays, have been taking over public places to impose their own culture. Their appearance in Costa Rican society dates back to about ten years ago, approximately the same time as the upsurge in public sex places.
Eight years ago, there was a division of labor between “cacheros” or prostitutes and criminals. The first made money off gays in exchange for sex. The second robbed both gays and prostitutes. The “old” criminals were thieves, pure and simple. Their objective was to rob people, nothing more. On a few rare occasions they would make certain sexual advances to trick their victims. But they would eschew all sexual contact with them.
By 1998, things had changed significantly. The main criminals were now the “locusts” who had driven out and displaced the traditional hoodlums. By operating in gangs, they had developed a whole new street culture. When asked about their identity, they proudly describe themselves as “chapulines”, a way of life. The development of their awareness of themselves as a minority merits a separate book. However, what concerns us in this study is that the “locusts” are significantly different from the old-style criminals and the traditional “cacheros”: they have evolved towards combination of sex, robbery and death. At some imprecise moment during the past few years, the “locusts”ceased to be mere delinquents and became part-time “cacheros”. In other words, many of them stopped mugging gays and began to “fuck” them and rob them, a lethal combination.
The question that comes to mind is what happened during these years to trigger this change among the “locusts”and what is it about their culture that poses such an enormous threat to their homosexual clients?
“Locusts”, along with many juvenile delinquents who prostitute themselves,62 share a common history of abuse and violence at home. From all the interviews carried out with participants in the El Salon project,63 both “cacheros” and “locusts”, we find that abuse was generalized. As children, they experienced all types of punishment and cruelty. They were raised by people who vented their rage against them using tape recorder cables (Alberto), rods, (David), whips made from dried squash vines, (Antonio), hoses filled with sand (Heriberto), electric cables (Josue), punches, floggings and stones (Mario). Some lived with mothers who were prostitutes or with fathers who abused them sexually (Deni, Rolando). Mario’s case stands out, though it is not unusual:
My dad was an alcoholic and took money from my mom to pay for his booze. Since he didn’t work, if my mother didn’t give him money he would beat her and beat us too. One day he grabbed her and began punching her and forced her to open her mouth. She begged him: “No! You can’t leave me without my false teeth!” Well, the sonofabitch beat her, forced her mouth open, pulled out her false teeth and sold them for a bottle.
Why so much violence? When we asked them why they were beaten so much, they could not find a reason: they just stared blankly. They grew up in homes which had no “mission” for them. The “locust” from the smallest family had 7 siblings and the one from the largest had 18. These large families were the result of the Catholic church’s anti family planning policy. The people who raised these kids lost their patience easily and quickly. There was no way to maintain so many children, and money and work were harder to come by every day. It was their fathers, step-fathers or the companions of their mothers who were the most sadistic and brutal. These jobless men, who were addicted to drugs and alcohol, imposed their power physically. No longer able to provide food regularly for their families, they maintained their macho privileges through violence. Thus, the locusts’ school of violence is closely related to gender issues: it serves to preserve gender imbalances. This phenomenon is important to understand why “locusts” use so much violence against their clients when gender rules are disregarded.
At some point in time, the future “locusts” began their own revolution of the body: escape from home. There was no food and no structure for them. Families disintegrated: “We all went our own way”, says Girasol. Most ran away from their homes before the age of ten. With one or two exceptions, none of the interviewees had a home. They had been thrown out by their parents or had fled from their homes and now live on the streets, in slums or drug-addicts’ “bunkers”. “More than 20 of us (locusts) live in this park,” says Guillermo. “When it rains, we get wet. Everyone grabs a bench for a bed. If the cops come around we ask them what’s the point of moving us if we have no place to go?”. It goes without saying that they make a living from robbery, the sex trade and drugs. The pattern is the same as the one Russel found in his study on male prostitutes in the United States. According to Russel, one of the main factors to explain prostitution and drug addiction was “the absence of support in homes replete with children, from which the future prostitutes were thrown out onto the street to fend for themselves.”64 To survive, as MacNamara tells us in his analysis of male prostitution in American cities, they sell their bodies, the only “saleable” thing they have.65 However, Snell does not find the same pattern among the street prostitutes in his study: unlike Costa Rica’s “locusts”, only 10% of the young men who prostitute themselves in the public places of the US capital actually live on the streets.66
Most “locusts” were subjected to a kind of violence that inured them to the penetration of their bodies by ferocious and inept parents or guardians. No punishment could be accepted as rational when they did not even have food or a place to live. The slums could not cope with so many children, and every new arrival displaced the previous child. When these kids fled, they promised themselves that nobody would ever lay a finger on them again. “No sonofabitch is going to lay a hand on me again,” says Guillermo. I’ve already had enough, so I couldn’t take another blow”. Luis shares this view: “Nobody touches me unless I want them to. Nobody who wants to stay alive.”
In the streets the “locusts” acquired a great knowledge of the weaknesses of Latin American cities. To become experts in urban guerrilla warfare, it was necessary to study the different areas of the city and the minds of its inhabitants. Open public spaces were identified as being most vulnerable: parks, commercial centers, movie theaters, toilets and recreation centers. At the same time, victims were targeted if they appeared distracted: a woman window-shopping, a young man enjoying himself with his girlfriend, a pair of lovers at the movies or on a dark road, an office worker in a hurry ...All would be easy prey for these young men by being in public places and letting their minds wander. While the woman gazes at the store window and wonders what that blouse might look like on her, or the young man kisses his girlfriend and closes his eyes to enhance the feeling, the “locusts” would pounce on them and steal their belongings.
Their concern for the open and vulnerable places in cities and for the people in them, would lead the “locusts” to share a very particular vision of the body and sexuality. Like the marginal social groups to which they belong, “locusts” believe that gender and sexuality are inscribed in the body. However, it is a body which is seen as a battle field. Just as a city has open and attractive spaces for the public, so too does the body. The difference between victim and aggressor lies in the ability to open and close these “doors”. The “locusts” are obsessed with orifices. Theirs must remain closed to the world; those belonging to others, ready to be taken.
When sexuality is centered in the body and not in the mind, or in some invisible ethereal personality, homosexuality is determined by the organs and their functions. For a “locust”, a homosexual is someone who allows his body to be invaded. Although homosexuality can be inherited and people can be “born” homosexual, practice can also lead the body towards a “sexual inversion”. In this respect, their views are no different from the nineteenth century doctors who, as Margaret Gibson points out, believed that homosexuality was inscribed in the body but, like the plague, could be acquired through practice.67 “Locusts” believe in hereditary factors but also in the notion of a vulnerable body. Nobody should let their guard down, because at any moment danger can strike: like a virus, homosexuality can invade them.
Homosexual orientation is, then, an invaded orifice. Anyone can suffer this invasion: we all have orifices. When this occurs, the organs themselves are transformed and become “homosexualized”. “That queen I screw is dominated by her ass. She has an insatiable faggot ass. She’s lost control of her own asshole.”. “And yours?” we ask Jose, a “locust”, “what is your ass like?” “Mine is a man’s ass,” he replies proudly. “I’ve trained it only to ship”. “It seems like you’re talking about a pet and not about a part of yourself”, we remark. “Yeah, the ass is like a dog. You have to kick it so it understands that it should only follow its master”, he concludes.
It is probable that the encounter between gays and “locusts” was something that nobody wanted or expected. Unlike the “cacheros”, “locusts” had never had contact with homosexuals that stretched back to time immemorial. “Cacheros” have long had relations with gays in prisons, on ships in the army and police forces, and in all Latin places where women were scarce. Among the lower classes, men may penetrate other men when there are no women or when there is a lot of liquor around, without suffering the stigma of homosexuality. A common joke in Costa Rica asks: what is the difference between a homosexual man and a Latin heterosexual ? The answer: three beers inside.
But the gangs of “chapulines” have enough “chapulinas” -- female gang members -- and therefore cannot be compared with sailors, prison inmates, banana workers or truck drivers, who spend much of their time away from women. There must have been another reason for them to copy some of the patterns of these groups. The only one we can find in their answers is that the relationship developed through sharing the same physical spaces. “Locusts” and gays invaded the same public spaces, during the same decade, for different reasons. The encounter was inevitable as the parks, public toilets, movie theaters and leisure centers became their homes.
But this does not explain why the “locusts” went from being muggers to “cacheros”. What did they find in these common spaces that would lead them to go beyond the “old” criminals? This is a key question, because it explains, in part, why they became killers of homosexuals.
The “chapulines” cannot recall the exact moment when they became sex workers. At some imprecise moment in their lives, they went from being criminals to being criminals who do sex work. The only common denominator in their histories is the recollection that, in some public place, a homosexual turned to look at them. The recollection of that first look is what still remains in their heads, which are now filled with crack and glue and are not altogether clear.
All I can remember is being in Parque Pinochet ready to mug a guy and take his chain. Suddenly, I see this guy watching me, kind of shadowing me. The guy makes me nervous. „Why’s that shithead looking at me? Is he a cop?’ I think to myself. But I know how to recognize a cop. You see the look of hatred in their eyes. This guy wasn’t looking at me with hate. But I didn’t understand why he was watching me. It bothered me and it screwed up my hit (robbery). (Miguel)
To be a successful “locust” you must be inconspicuous. In other words, people shouldn’t notice you. You do your work when they’re distracted. But when someone is watching what you do, everything gets complicated and there’s no privacy to do a good hit. This started happening to me in Parque Monumental. When I noticed that some people were watching me, I got upset. (Armando)
Deciphering the meaning and desire in another person’s gaze takes time. It produces intrigue and curiosity, but also confusion. “I didn’t understand,” says Jose, “why they stared at my cock. Nobody had ever looked at me that way before. Is there something weird abou