Though may have the best of sex, “locusts” and gays inhabit totally different planets. For gays, with their sexual model of the body and its pleasures, and “locusts” with their vision of the vulnerable body, communication is a tortuous road. The same words do not have the same meanings; nor do certain practices mean the same. A simple desire, the slightest touch to the body, can unleash chaos. One moment someone might be taking a man to the point of orgasm, and the next to the point of death. In seconds, a torrid passion can turn into a bloodbath. Love can turn to anger. A term of endearment can be perceived as the greatest of insults. If some spoke Chinese and the others Russian there might be fewer problems. Things become more dangerous when we think we are talking the same language, but in fact, are not.
An example of this is the wave of homosexual murders in the past few years. Approximately 25 gay men have been the victims of “cacheros” and some have been killed by “locusts”. These crimes go beyond simple robbery. They are forms of torture which are impregnated with an unusual degree of rage.
A typical case was the murder of Klaus, a man in his forties, who was found dead at a hotel in the capital used exclusively for sex. According to his friend Luis, Klaus had received 35 stab wounds all over his body. His rectum had been cut into several pieces and so had his tongue. His penis was found in a vase. There was so much blood in the bed that a bucket was needed to gather it up. The walls were also spattered with blood: Klaus had put up a real fight for his life. Blood stains from his assailants were found all over the room. Several jugs and glasses were smashed. Some bore Klaus’ fingerprints -- he had probably tried to defend himself with them. Although he had screamed for help, his cries were drowned out by the loud music. The police believe Klaus struggled with his attackers for about ten minutes before collapsing on the floor dead. The multiple stab wounds must have weakened him until he could no longer go on. Aside from the victim, there were at least two more men in the room. The killers have still not been found.
Another victim was Eduardo. According to Hector, his friend and confidant, this 41 year-old gay man lived alone in a condominium in the south of San Jose. Opposite the door of his second-floor apartment lived Clotilde, a woman friend. Although Clotilde would get upset at Eduardo for allowing all types of men into the building, she would always be sure to peer out to see who came to visit him. She heard the doorbell ring when three men arrived. Eduardo opened the door and invited them in. A few minutes later, Clotilde heard the stereo system being turned on. “Oh, no!”, she thought to herself. “I wonder how late they’re going to be up making a noise?” she asked her husband. “It’s none of your business,” he replied. Both knew Eduardo was gay and they had a good relationship with him. Aside from inviting his friends over, he would help them in any way he could and would take care of their apartment whenever they were out of town. They even had a key to his apartment. However, a few minutes later the volume was turned right up. “Alvaro, something’s wrong,” Clotilde said to her husband.
Clotilde saw the three men leave the apartment with a large bag. They seemed agitated and in a hurry. One of them was looking all around, as if wishing to make sure that they had not been seen. She closed the drapes to avoid being seen. Intrigued, she convinced her husband to ring Eduardo’s doorbell. “Ask him if he needs anything”, she said anxiously. Alvaro rang the doorbell, but there was no reply. He waited a minute and then tried again.“Clotilde, there’s no answer, go get the key to his apartment,” he told his wife. Clotilde ran to find the key. She wondered where she might have put it. Eduardo had given her the key more than a year ago, just in case of an emergency, and she had never used it. At last she found it in one of the drawers in her bedroom. The minutes spent searching for the key still haunt her” “If we’d gotten to him more quickly, perhaps we could have done something,” she told us.
When the couple entered Eduardo’s apartment there was total chaos. Not a single thing was in its place. “How could they break so much in such a short time?”, they both wondered. They ran to the bedroom and opened the door. Clotilde describes what she saw:
There was blood all over the bedroom. When I looked at the bed, I saw Eduardo totally amputated: no arms and no penis. My God! I screamed like a crazy woman. Only the torso was in one piece. The flesh on his arms and legs hung from the bones. He was still alive and just had time to say: “My friends killed me. Tell my mom I love her very much”, and he fell dead on the floor.
Clotilde began to scream and tried to help her neighbor. However, her husband realized that nothing could be done:
Clotilde was in a state of hysteria. When she tried to lift him, she ended up with a piece of flesh in her hands. He had so many knife wounds that he looked like a sieve. I made her leave the room and told her to call the police. When they came they told me that Eduardo had 12 stab wounds in his rectum and that they had not only cut off his arms but even a leg.
The case of Julio, aged 49, was similar. His former lover told us that the last time he was seen alive was at 9:30 on a Friday night when he let three guys into his apartment. Some other gay men lived downstairs and they had visitors that night. The loud music prevented them from hearing anything of what happened upstairs. Julio was found the following day by his ex-lover:
Julio’s sister called me. She was very worried because he hadn’t shown up at his nephew’s christening. She asked me to go check that he was okay. I told her not to worry, that I would go over immediately. When I entered his apartment, I saw that he’d been robbed. Everything was a in a mess: the drawers were open, the sound system had gone and the ornaments were all broken. However, I didn’t see Julio. I looked for him everywhere, including his bedroom. There was a bundle of clothes on the bed but no sign of him. I decided to use the phone that was on the night table to call the police and moved the sheets to sit down on the bed. Horror of horrors! As I pulled back the sheets I noticed that Julio was underneath. He was dead. One sheet was stuffed into his throat. He had been asphyxiated and tortured. The police told me later that they found both his testicles in his throat. His buttocks had been burned with cigarettes.
In an attempt to understand the criminal mentality we searched for studies on homophobes who kill gay men. Martin Kantor has devised the most elaborate classification of the different types of criminals.68 According to this author, the type of crime we are dealing with here involves killers with “emotional disorders”. Kantor believes these are generally men who have low self-esteem and who feel their lives have no “meaning”. When they compare themselves with gays they generally feel great envy and a desire to destroy them to prove to themselves that nobody should be above them, much less men who belong to a minority. The author believes that this type of homophobe is paranoid because he projects an exaggerated sense of well-being towards his enemies.69
Although the envy and rage that “locusts” feel towards gays is similar to that felt by the blue-collar workers studied by Kantor, it would be unfair to label them paranoid: the truth is, they do have a point. “ What do you mean we imagine that homosexuals have everything that we don’t have?”, asks Girasol. “The truth is, they do”. Moreover, the “locusts” seek out the gays just as much as the gays seek them. Unlike the North American blue-collar workers who seek out homosexuals in order to attack them physically (gay bashing), the “locusts” are as much the pursued as the pursuers. “We don’t go around looking for gays to screw them. They look for us”, says Pepe.
In order to understand and prevent such horrible murders, we decided it would be best to ask the “locusts” themselves to explain these crimes. After all, they are the experts on the subject. With the cooperation of the director of the El Salon program, we selected 10 “chapulines” who are sex workers and who have been on the point of killing -- or have actually killed -- a gay client or “pagador” as they call them. First, we described the above mentioned crimes to them (some knew the victims and the aggressors) and asked them to give us a “reading” or interpretation of the murder script.70
Most of the “locusts” interviewed agreed that the motive in all three cases was robbery. “It’s obvious that the guys wanted to rob them”, says Girasol. “Two or three “chapulines” probably got together and went to visit an old client. He probably fucked with one of them and trusted him enough to let him in with the others”, he continues. “The biggest mistake,” says Pepe, “ is to let more than one guy in the house. When “locusts” go around in a group it means they’re planning a hit. We would never fuck in front of our buddies,” he says. “But why did they decide to kill this guy if one of them had fucked with him?”, we ask. “Because a “locust” won’t kill the first time. He needs to study the place, the person, his habits in order to then do the hit. Often years go by before he can do it”, explains Gerardo. “Probably the gay was being cheap and wouldn’t hand over the dough”, adds Carlitos. Eduardo thinks that there might have been an argument: “Those three guys who were killed in a row were all drunks and badmouths, queens with poisonous tongues. Perhaps they insulted a “locust” or tried to some weird thing,” he adds.
“If they were only going to mug them or rob them, why kill them and mutilate their bodies?”, we ask. Julio believes that these crimes occur when the “locusts” have taken a combination of drugs: crack, marihuana and alcohol. “Anything makes you crazy. Probably they were all stoned and then they had an argument over money and they went wild and began to attack. Once you begin, you can’t stop”. Girasol, on the contrary, believes it was all premeditated. “The fact that three of them showed up means they were going to rob him. They had it all figured out,” he says with confidence.
There is a greater degree of consensus with respect to the mutilations: all three victims had their orifices filled. “The three were stabbed in the ass, the mouth and the dick,” says Jose. “This means the “locusts” wanted to punish them for being gays, for letting themselves be fucked.” Girasol agrees. “We can’t understand how a man would want someone to put a dick up his ass or in his mouth. It’s not natural. Even the priests won’t forgive you for that. I think these guys wanted to send a message that these gays were sick and that’s why they killed them,” he says. Pepe, however, believes that the severed hands might indicate that the client touched the “locust” on his private parts in an improper way. A severed penis suggests that the client had taken advantage of circumstances and had possessed him previously. This excessive violence is related to the kind of abuse which the “locusts” experienced as children: those who do not respect the rules of gender are punished. Just as they saw their fathers put their mothers “in their place” when the latter would not give them money for liquor, so they punish the “pagadores” who do things that are not proper for men or who refuse to pay them the money they want.
We then asked the interviewees to give us a list of “triggers” that might make someone move from sex to crime. Since the “locusts” had not forced their way into any of their victims’ homes, we were intrigued to know what factors might have lit the fuse. It was clear that this was not the first time they had interacted with their victims. In some cases, the victims were regular clients of the “locusts”. Others, such as Klaus, had sex with more than 1,000 “locusts” before meeting their deaths at the hands of three of them. What could make the difference between having sex one night and killing the next? The “chapulines” gave us a long list of “triggers”:
1. Not respecting the agreed price or asking for unjustified discounts
Among “locusts” there is an almost unanimous belief that many gays agree to pay a given sum and then try to cheat them. They also agree that this is the main cause of violent attacks. Juan Jose nearly killed a gay who made him take out his penis to masturbate him in a park and then fled without paying him the 3,000 colones he had been promised. Luis attacked a man with a bottle when the client, who had offered him 5,000 colones to penetrate him, and done so, claimed he only had 3,000. Mikol was furious when he agreed to give a discount to a client who said he only had 2,000 colones and, when he pulled down his pants and the wallet fell out by accident, he saw that it contained more than 20,000. He immediately took out a knife, stabbed him and ran off with the money. Pepe was invited to an orgy at an apartment. After having engaged in sex with three gays, they offered him some old clothes. He immediately picked up the fish tank and smashed it over the host’s head. He was so enraged that he couldn’t contain himself and the victim ended up in intensive care. In other cases, clients pay the agreed sum but flaunt their wealth: they take the “locusts” to their luxurious homes or carry a lot of money around. Faced with such extravagance, any agreed price seems ridiculous to the “locusts” and an assault is imminent. Their addiction to crack also increases their need for money. All sexual activity is seen as a prelude to smoking one or two hits of crack. If the money does not materialize, their rage is enormous. “Look, you feel hungry and haven’t eaten for a day. A client comes up and offers you 5,000 for a fuck. You work out the numbers and see yourself smoking some crack. If the guy doesn’t pay up, you feel like killing him and sometimes you do it”, Girasol confesses.
Humiliation:
“Chapulines” believe that many gays despise them and treat them without respect. Carlos, for instance, tells us that he was enraged when one of his clients complained about the size of his penis. At that moment, he took out his knife and stabbed the gay man. “Nobody makes fun of my size and lives to tell the story”, he says. Others make them feel bad by complaining about their odor. Juan Antonio punched a client when he told him couldn’t stand the smell of his feet. “The sonofabitch didn’t care that I shoved my dick all the way up him in the park, but at his house he complained about my feet”, he tells us. “I shoved a knife in his ass so he would stop complaining about the smell.”. Luis went to eat at a Chinese restaurant with his client after making love in the park . “The guy complained about the way I ate my soup,” he tells us angrily. “I grabbed the hot soup and threw it in his face, so he’ll learn to keep his mouth shut,” he says with satisfaction.
Disregard for roles
We have seen how “locusts” share the idea that homosexuality is a form of behavior inscribed in the body. People become homosexuals because they change the masculine and aggressive role of the male. Thus, “male men” as they call themselves, are then ones who are not penetrated and who don’t do “women’s things”. Doing “women’s things” means kissing, allowing oneself to be penetrated and giving oral sex. When a client tries to penetrate them or touches them in an µimproper’ way, he is severely punished. “This guy tried to fuck me. I’d already made it real clear that I’m a macho man and never give my ass. When we went to his apartment, he tried to rape me. I grabbed my knife and stuck it into his stomach. No sonofabitch touches my ass!” Pedro assures us. With the crack boom, some “locusts” admit that they have been forced to “give their ass” and “do things one doesn’t want to do” because they are desperate for money. Although in theory they do so voluntarily, they feel a tremendous rage at having to abandon their principles. At any moment, a small spark can ignite the fire. “That sonofabitch forced me to suck him for 6 reds (6,000 colones). When the guy fell asleep, I put some gas on his ass and lit him up”, says Pepe.
What does changing roles mean for the “locusts” ? It is not always easy to guess. For some “chapulines”, being asked to wash dishes in an apartment or to help in the kitchen may be seen as an attempt to feminize them. Carlitos nearly punched his client in the mouth when he was asked to help him chop onions. “That bastard wanted to treat me like a broad,” he recalls. “If he wants a maid, he should get a woman,” he says. Another way of making them feel as if they are being “feminized” is to be taken to gay bars or homosexual meetings. June broke two of his clients teeth when, without permission, he invited three gay friends of his to meet him: “ That asshole wanted to sweet-talk me and introduce me as his husband”, he says.
Inconsiderate labor relations
For the “locusts”, clients are a source of income. Unlike gays, sexual pleasure is totally irrelevant to them. The majority are heterosexual and do not enjoy sex with men. When a client or “pagador” establishes a relationship with a “locust”, the latter expects some form of compensation when the relationship is broken off. For the criminal, there is no justification for ending a relationship for passionate or amorous reasons. Juan killed Victor when, after three years of being his client, Victor found himself another “locust”. Gerardo cut off one of his client’s testicles when he found out that he was paying another “chapulin” more than him. In the case of Ricardo, when he realized that his client had decided to live with another “locust”, he set fire to his apartment “with the queen and everything inside”, he admits.
Homophobia:
Most “locusts”, as Fernando tells us “hate queens”. This means that they share society’s feelings of contempt towards homosexuals. To have to depend on them in order to eat or to buy drugs creates a permanent hostility. Since “locusts” do not consider themselves as homosexuals or enjoy sex with men, they are probably more intolerant. (It would be necessary to analyze the difference between “cachero” prostitutes and “locusts” in a subsequent study to evaluate sexual pleasure, or its absence, as a factor in violence against gays.)
When a gay, in the eyes of a “locust”, behaves in a very feminine way or draws attention to himself in the street, he does so to “humiliate me”. If the gay is sexually passive, the “locusts” despise him for allowing himself to be penetrated. On some occasions, generally when they have taken a mixture of drugs, any “weird move”, as they term a mannerism, can provoke an attack. According to Carlitos, when he fucks a gay and sees him acting so feminine and so content with his passivity, “I want to grab him by the balls to make him into a man.” Once, when he had smoked some crack, he began to beat a client with a club. According to the “locusts”, the most dangerous time to provoke a homophobic attack is the moment after ejaculation .“When I come, I feel this enormous rage about needing to have sex for money. “At that moment,” confesses Pedro, “I feel like killing the client. I feel disgusted and it makes me mad. I’ll turn any one of them into pulp.”
Finally we asked the “locusts” to put themselves in the place of their clients. What advice would they give them to help them avoid being killed by “chapulines”? This was the list they gave us:
The gays’ vision of sexuality is “modern”, as opposed to that of the “locusts”. They believe that people’s sexuality is determined by the object of desire. For gays, sexuality is an internal and fixed phenomenon which is not determined by practice. Whether one is active or passive, one can still be gay. For them, the body is not a battle ground but a source of pleasure: both the orifices and the protruding organs form part of sexuality. Therefore, if they go to bed with a man, they do not see the need to protect themselves like a fortress. Femininity and masculinity are not regarded as permanent and rigid structures, but as characteristics that change in time and space. If yesterday men could not cook, today they can do so and it is not the end of the world. What was masculine yesterday, might not be today. If a gay man prepares a dinner for his partner, the latter is not “feminized” because he has to wash the dishes.
This model clashes with that of the “locusts”. For these two groups, each word acquires a different meaning. For gays, a “homosexual” and a “locust” who goes to bed with men are one and the same thing. Sex workers are often termed “gays”. If you are going to have sex with another man, the gays believe that both bodies are there to be touched and enjoyed. For them, homosexuality does not reside in the backside, nor is it governed by hormones or chemical substances. They cannot understand how a “locust” can consider the rectum to be the sacred altar of masculinity, the forbidden city of the body. Thus, when they become better acquainted with a “locust”, they will try to fondle him there, believing that if he does not enjoy it is because he is a frustrated homosexual. It goes without saying that this leads gays to commit errors of judgement which the “locusts” resent.
However, if the problem were simply a matter of linguistics, any “Cachero-Gay” -“Gay-Cachero” dictionary would resolve the conflict. In this hypothetical dictionary we would find, for example, the following explanations:
| CACHERO-GAY DICTIONARY | GAY-CACHERO DICTIONARY |
| Homosexual: man who allows himself to be penetrated | Homosexual: person who has sex with someone of the same sex. |
| Queen: woman in a man?s body | Queen: any gay that we don?t like |
| Man: a male who fucks everyone | Man: butch queen |
| Woman: delicate and passive individual | Woman: a being represented by transvestites |
| Client: all queens | Client: old queen |
| Cachero: macho man | Cachero: frustrated queen |
| Male: active man | Male: a man before he had drunk three beers |
| Backside: restricted access zone | Backside: leisure park |
| Penis: weapon to dominate the weak | Penis: typical food |
| Public places: home | Public places: first liberated territories of the Gay Republic |
But even with such a dictionary, the misunderstandings would continue. Both groups share a territory which serves as a common link -- for some to realize their fantasies and others to make money. So long as the territory is a public place, the magic spell seems to have the desired effect: the number of killings in these places is minimal. It is when people make the mistake of leaving public places for private spaces that killings take place, one after another.
One reason for this is that by leaving the parks, movie theaters or toilets, the “locusts” and the gays see each other the way they did before coming under the magic spell, which, for a few brief moments, made them forget about class differences. On leaving Sexland, the cruel reality becomes evident: some are the favored and others are the oppressed. Let us consider the story of Joselito, a 21 year-old locust, who was taken to a gay man’s apartment:
I was sitting on a bench one night in Colombia Park. I was hungry and cold. It was night time, around midnight. I hadn’t picked up any clients and was fed up with waiting. Suddenly, a guy came up and sat next to me. He asked me if I was alone and what was I doing. I told him I was waiting for a friend. I noticed that the guy was staring at me. “You like me?”, I asked. “Sure, you look real good”, he said. I smiled so he would see I was interested. He was an old guy of about fifty. He asked if I wanted to go with him. I said that if I went, I would charge 5,000 colones and that I only liked being the man. I saw that the guy didn’t object. “Well, you understand what I’m saying?”, I asked him.“Sure I understand. But don’t you think I’m kind of old for that? After all, you’re just a kid. How can you do it to me?”, he asked. “Well, only you can say whether or not you want me to do it to you. But I don’t do anything else. And I don’t suck either.” I added. He told me he liked me so much that he was willing to do everything. We began walking and he told me his car was nearby. It just happened to be a BMW! I got in and we drove to his house. He lives in Rohrmoser (an expensive residential district of San Jose) in a huge mansion, and alone. When we arrived I saw a kind of luxury I’d never seen before in my life. The house was full of things everywhere. It looked like a museum. It made me so mad to see such luxury and me starving to death. “I have to rob this sonofabitch”, I thought. Once we were in the bedroom, the guy asked me why I smelled so bad. He said I should go take a bath, that he wouldn’t do anything if I didn’t wash myself. At that moment I took out my knife and stuck it in his arm to frighten him. I grabbed everything I could and ran off.
We ask Joselito whether he would he have robbed and knifed his client if he had not been transported to a reality that would be better for him not to see. “I don’t know what to say. If the old guy had given me his ass in the park and paid me five reds (5,000 colones), I wouldn’t have done anything to him. But when he took me to his house and made me feel like scum, it made me mad,” he tells us.
Lets us now hear the client’s viewpoint:
Last year I went to Cine 545. I sat in the back row where there were several men on their own. I noticed one who was masculine and blond, the kind I like. I moved and sat next to him and put my elbow on the armrest between us. He put his elbow there too and turned and smiled at me. For about 10 minutes we didn’t do anything but leave our elbows touching. I felt a tingling all over my body and the warmth of his arm. I liked the fact that the guy wasn’t in a hurry. After a short time, which seemed like an eternity to me, he leaned over and gave me a delicious kiss. He said his name was Pablo and that he wanted to go with me. “Do you charge?”, I asked discreetly. “Yes, but if you do what I want and do it well, I won’t charge you anything,” he said”. I was totally confused, because I felt he was a very special person. By now I didn’t care whether he charged or not. I invited him back home with me because my apartment is near the movie theater. When we went outside into the light, the guy looked haggard and badly dressed. Back at my apartment I noticed that he was spending a lot of time looking at my compact discs and my paintings. “How much did all these CDs cost you?”, he asked. I tried to change the subject. However, I began to see the anger and the vulgarity in his face. When he took off his clothes, I saw that he was dirty -- and he wanted me to give him oral sex! I must admit, I was very disgusted and asked him to leave. Fortunately, he didn’t make a scene though I gave him 5,000 colones to avoid any problems. Later, I discovered that he’d stolen three CDs. I was so pissed! I wish I ’d never left the movie theater.
This mutual deception is what leads clients to take a “locust” home. However, it is not too clear why some gays, as the “locusts” claim, take them home and do not pay them what they promise. One explanation might be that, as some gays say, that “crooks never have fixed price in mind. They try to see how much they can get. You pay them the agreed sum and they say that you promised them more. They want to see how much they can get out of you.” (Esteban). This desire to modify the agreed price was also noted by MacNamara in his study of street prostitutes in New York City.71 However, the “chapulines” themselves recognize that many of their transactions take place without a hitch and that only some are problematic. Th