A third actor plays an important role in public places: the police officer.73 His role is to ensure that such places are not used for sex or for criminal activities. Different police units patrol the places described. Part of the attraction of such places for gay men is the feeling of being at the mercy not just of criminals but also of the police. Sometimes the police officers arrest them or beat them up and sometimes they accept a bribe to let them go. Julio explains the role of the police in alleyways:
One day I was walking towards the alley when someone I know stopped me and said it would be better if I didn’t go near the place. He said there’d been a raid three days ago, so it was best to hang loose for a while. He said that on that day two patrol cars showed up and parked at each end of the alleyway. There were about 15 guys in there and they couldn’t move from the shock. Two minors were arrested because they didn’t have I.D. cards; the rest were released, but they were trembling from fright. When something like that happens, people stay away from the alley for a few days.
Having sex in the park implies the possibility of being discovered. On some days, a patrol car will park on the north side of the park and remain there for several hours. From time to time, one or both policemen get out of the car and stroll through the park, although the most usual procedure is for them to stay in the car. Gay men who frequent the park are aware of this, and have learned to communicate among themselves. When people who are in the darkest areas of the park start running away, the rest know there is trouble afoot. “Run, boys, run, the cops are coming!” someone will hiss. In the southern sector of the park, the code used to warn others is to whistle a few bars of a song from the musical West Side Story. Whistling means that all sexual activity should stop. At that moment, gays and “locusts” generally call a truce and protect each other. The following dialogue, transcribed by one of our observers, is representative of what happens on such occasions. “How could you possibly say, officer, that we are queer?” says Ernesto, a “locust”. “My buddy,” he adds, pointing towards the gay man, “came to the park so he could have a very serious discussion with me; we were discussing the rise in gasoline prices this week.” “Sure!”, the police officer replies. “I guess this little queen was lifting his tail to show how everything rises. Come on, I don’t have time for jokes! Take out your I.D. or I’ll arrest the two of you!”
Every day, between one and two in the morning, there is a changing of the guard at the embassies and public buildings in the surrounding area. The police officers, walking in pairs, march diagonally across Monumental Park to the nearby police station. At that time, the park is practically empty. Once the changing of the guard has been completed, gay activities are resumed.
On one occasion when the area around Monumental Park was in complete darkness and there was a lot of sexual activity going on, the ethnographer watched as three patrol cars arrived. The police leapt out of their cars and turned on their flashlights. Very quickly, pairs of men could be seen scrambling away from the scene. In a few minutes, the park was deserted.
The speed of the action was astonishing. I could see couples emerging from everywhere. They looked like cockroaches when you’ve sprayed the kitchen. A guy came running out holding his underpants in one hand. I suppose he put on his pants so quickly he forgot to put them on. Another guy was wearing his t-shirt inside out. A couple fell into a gutter. A “locust” took advantage of the situation to steal his client’s sneakers. The other guy ran across the park in his socks.
Mario explains that people who are caught “in the act” are not always arrested.
I didn’t realize what was going on. . . . It was eleven at night. I was with some other guy. We were masturbating each other. The two of us had our pants down when we felt the flashlight on our faces. There was no time to do anything. Three cops approached us and asked us for our I.D. cards. Fortunately, the two of us were carrying our I.D. Even so, they told us we were under arrest. I had a thousand colones with me. At one point I approached two of them and asked them if they would take my money instead of arresting us, and I was lucky: they let us go. Now, whenever I visit the park, I pay more attention.
The police also check on public toilets from time to time. According to Roberto:
One night in November five guys and I were hanging out at this toilet, playing around with each other. It was about seven in the evening. All of a sudden, two cops appeared and made us leave. I was very scared. They made us stand against the wall and spread our arms and put our hands up against the wall. They also made us spread our legs and started to search us, like they do with criminals. I felt like I would die from shame, because at that time a lot of people were standing there waiting for the bus. When they finished searching us they let us go, after insulting us and calling us “corrupt”. Those bastards did it on purpose, to embarrass us. I didn’t go back there for two days, but now I go there later at night.
La Llanura Park is patrolled by mounted police officers. The officers in charge of policing this area say they arrest many couples:
At night it’s a gay carnival here. When you approach the parked cars, you see people masturbating each other or having oral sex. Homosexuals have become so cunning at throwing us off the track that they spread hay everywhere so the horses stop to eat and we can’t catch them. The only thing they haven’t done yet is bring mares on heat to distract our horses!
In the case of saunas and movie theaters, raids are less frequent since they are private businesses. However, the police have visited them on several occasions looking for minors or illegal aliens. Our ethnographer describes a police raid at the Sauna Laton:
“Mister, could you open up the door of your cubicle? We’d like to ask you a few questions. It’s the police.”
“Listen, red neck, I already told you I „m not gonna let you in. ¿Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“Would you tell us what you’re doing in that cubicle?”
“Well, what the hell do you think I’m doing? I’m showing my Jacuzzi to a client.”
“A what?”
“I’m sucking someone off, asshole!”
“Mister, you’re under arrest. Come out so I can put the handcuffs on you.”
“That’s all I needed! An S and M queen!”
Costa Rican policemen tend to come from the poorer sectors of society. Many of them are from rural areas and moved to the city in search of better opportunities. They tend to come from large families. Our interviewees have many siblings. One of them lived with 18 brothers and sisters: 11 from a first marriage, and seven from another. Their level of education is only marginally higher than that of the “locusts”. The majority have only attended primary school. A few went to high school but only a handful actually graduated from high school. Their average salary is $200 a month, one of the lowest in the country.
In our in-depth interviews, we found a common denominator between policemen, gay men and “locusts”: experience of physical violence during childhood. One of the policemen interviewed, Luis, used to get “the stick” (he was literally beaten with the branch of a tamarind tree) throughout his childhood and teenage years. Carlos was kicked so savagely by his mother that she broke his ribs on more than one occasion. Noe was so terrified of his stepfather’s beatings that he spent a great deal of his childhood hiding under his bed. Miguel’s older brother used to punch him in the face so badly he lost three teeth and often went around with split lips. “That’s just what I remember,” he adds. “I’ve forgotten a lot of what went on in those years.” Sergio had to run away from home because of his grandfather’s violence. “He was my real father. But he was an old-fashioned peasant, and he was very severe with us.” When asked what “severe” means, he added, “He was strict. If you didn’t work from four in the morning until 10 at night, he would literally put your hands in the fire of the stove.”
However, there are differences between policemen and “locusts”. Policemen generally do not come from broken homes. In spite of their poverty, they at least had one or two parents, or surrogate parents, to raise them. None of the 20 policemen interviewed had grown up on the street or in an orphanage. Therefore, they tend to display a certain gratitude and loyalty towards their caretakers. This makes it very difficult for them to consider such violence as a form of abuse and they tend to defend their aggressors. Edwin, for instance, has this to say:
They were very hard on me. However, I am thankful to them because they taught me to become a decent man, who likes things to be done properly. If they hadn’t beaten me, I’d be in jail now, or I might be into drugs.
Aron feels the same way. He believes his parents behaved correctly when they punished him. “At the time I didn’t understand why they belted me, but now I do. I was a very troublesome kid, and it was important that I should be raised properly.” Benito thinks his father acted correctly when he used to punch him in the face. “He taught me never to say a four-letter word.”
None of the interviewees protested against the physical violence they suffered as children. Apparently they accept the idea of violence as “education”: the “spare the rod and spoil the child” syndrome, so to speak. The very middle-class and urban notion that children have rights and that they should not be subjected to excessive corporal punishment, seems alien to them. When asked if they considered their caretakers’ behavior to be inappropriate, the general response was “no”.
However, the type of abuse they suffered at the hands of their parents or guardians seems to have been different from that suffered by the “locusts”. The actual violence may have been the same, but the motivation was different. The parents of the policemen used violence to “educate the body”. In the case of “locusts”, as we have seen, violence was simply a way of imposing the power of gender.
Policemen’s parents wanted their children to learn how to control their needs and desires. In a poverty-stricken society with large families, a child’s life is harsh. Children are not “infants”: they are little adults. In rural zones, or marginal urban areas, children must contribute to the family income and help with household chores. Thus, domestic violence is directed at repressing childhood desires. The worst punishments are meted out when children want to do children’s things: playing, going for a stroll, eating more than is allowed, or experimenting with their sexuality. According to Jose Alberto, there was never any time for such activities:
The time I got my worst beating was when I ran away to swim in a pond. I’d been told to sweep the house and because I didn’t do it, my dad grabbed a whip and gave me the worst lashing that I can remember.
These children were not allowed to say “obscenities”, either. This concept embraces all common words related to sex. Not only did they never receive any sex education; their curiosity concerning sexual matters was actively repressed. Ernesto, a mounted police officer, lost a tooth after asking what “masturbation” meant.
I’d heard the big word in school. In fact, I still find it hard to pronounce it.. I went to my dad to ask him what it meant, and he punched me in the mouth. I lost a tooth. He told me, “Don’t you ever come back to this house with dirty words again.”
As children, most police officers learned that “the body is like a horse, which must be trained so you can mount it safely”, as Fernando says (“locusts” tend to think of the body as a dog). A trained body, therefore, is one that has learned through punishment. Parents are the trainers; children, the trainees. A good child must learn to suppress desires that cannot possibly be satisfied in poor economic conditions. What is more, he must not even express them.
Does a trauma exist when people are not even aware of it? The fact that police officers do not criticize their parents or caretakers does not mean that they have not suffered some kind of damage in their lives. Their sense of loyalty to their home, their gratitude towards those who raised them, does not mean that the violence they experienced has been successfully resolved. There is much evidence to the contrary.
First of all, when we asked them if they raise their own children in the same way, they generally said no. Genaro, for example, told us that he does not spank his two children. “No, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” he said. “But didn’t you just say you thought it was good that you were punished as a child?” he was asked. “No, times have changed. Now it isn’t good to do it,” he replied. Aron agrees. “I’ve never spanked my kids”. “Don’t you think they deserve a spanking from time to time, like you did?” “Not at all. Physical violence is not my thing,” he says solemnly. Even when some policemen use physical violence, their feelings about it are quite different from their parents’. Luis slapped his six-year-old daughter once, “but I cried after I did it. I felt so bad that I don’t want to do it ever again.”
Secondly, most of these men have probably chosen this occupation because it is closest to the notion of µeducating through punishment’. They not only enjoy punishing those who succumb to their base desires, but they also resolve their own problems -- as the gays and the “locusts” do through their activities-- through violence. In other words, the men who enforce the law seek to re-enact the abuse for two purposes: in the first place, to “teach” others what they were taught as children through punishment; and secondly, to do so in a different way. By replacing the modality of excessive violence with a more moderate approach, the policemen try to tell themselves that there is no need to inflict the physical blows that they received as children.
Policemen do not like gay men. The in-depth interviews reveal a great deal of hostility. Most of them perceive homosexuality as a vice indulged in by people who have strayed from the straight and narrow path. A minority believes that it is inherited as a result of hormonal disorders, and that those who suffer from this condition can do little to change it. This group is somewhat more tolerant towards gays. “They’re ill,” says Police Officer Perez. “There’s nothing you can do about it. We should feel sorry for them.” However, this view is the exception. For most policemen, homosexuals are perverts who have chosen to embark on a life of crime, the same way that burglars have learned to steal. “Nobody is born with an inclination to steal,” says Sergeant Fernandez. “The same is true of drugs or homosexuality. If you take the wrong path, that’s where you end up.”
The police officers’ homophobia is expressed in more subtle ways. When we asked whether they behaved differently towards gay men, since they considered homosexuality to be a crime, the answer was no. “Just because they are that way doesn’t mean we discriminate against them,” said Aron. Luis believes that every citizen deserves the same respect, “even if he is a criminal”. However, the policemen’s actions suggest that discrimination is rampant.
One way of establishing differences in public places has to do with the sexual orientation of the couple. Police officers admit to being more tolerant of heterosexuals when they find them engaging in sexual activities in a public place. This tolerance is expressed in two ways: they are far less likely to arrest a heterosexual couple, and, as Officer Fernandez says, they are more inclined to “let them finish what they’re doing before intervening.” When a police officer finds a heterosexual couple having sex, “one waits for them to finish before reprimanding them,” says Roberto, another policeman.
Only one interviewee mentioned that a heterosexual couple had been arrested for having sex in a public place. Officer Chavez admitted that he had arrested the couple, both minors, “because I was just starting off and I didn’t have much experience.” He found a 16-year-old boy having sex with a 14-year-old girl. Chavez arrested them both, took them to the police station and then he called their parents. My boss chewed me out. “Why did you get us into this? , he said. “The girl’s parents are going to break her when they find out.” Nevertheless, Chavez told the parents what they had seen. “They just started kicking the girl, and they took her to a doctor to find out if she had lost her virginity.”
When it comes to gay couples, police offers do not show such consideration. Policemen readily admit that when they run across two men having sex they feel that it is “revolting” (Aron), “repugnant” (Chavez), or “makes me feel like vomiting” (Carlos). Officer Gutierrez feels “anger” while Ortega feels “nausea”. Intervention is immediate and there is no question of waiting for the act to be consummated. In many cases, arrests are inevitable and in some violence plays a role. Luis admits that he will hit offenders with his baton a few times so they will learn “not to do such dirty things”. Perez reprimands them “forcefully” for being so “revolting”. Ortega tells them angrily to “get out of my sight”. Fernandez pulls his gun on them “to scare them”.
For the average policeman, gay men are people who belong to a higher social class but have not been properly raised. Too much luxury is what has led them to lose their discipline and moral fiber. If gays were poor, as policemen are, “they’d realize that life’s not a party where you can get away with anything,” says Fernandez. “Homosexuals weren’t raised the way I was, and they allowed themselves to be led astray by vice and drugs,” says Mario. For Perez, homosexuality is “pure shamelessness”, in other words gays have no sense of decency or fear of God.
Policemen, therefore, see themselves as responsible for the “re-education” of gay men. Most of them spend a fair amount of time telling them that “what they are doing is filthy”, in Gutierrez’s words. “They should learn that sex is only between men and women. Being a faggot is a waste,” says Aron. All arrests or raids contain an element of “re-education”, of instilling “good citizen values”.
It is possible that the police officers are re-enacting the abuse they were subjected to as children, in order to “educate” gay men, that is, to teach them how to control their own desires. In other words, they wish to discipline the gays as they were disciplined: through corporal punishment. It is hardly surprising, then, that some policemen should take this “discipline” to the same levels of abuse that they suffered. Many of our gay interviewees said they had suffered great violence at the hands of the police: beatings, torture, intimidation and even rape. The same applies to the “locusts”. They are perceived by the police as beings dominated by improper material desires, who should learn to live like the police, with their aspirations firmly under control. “Criminals are people who haven’t learned to control their vice, which is a lust for money... as if you can simply steal anything you want.”says Officer Madrigal.
Although the cases above are true, we do not believe they are representative most policemen’s behavior. The gay men and “locusts” we interviewed admit that not all officers are violent towards them; many of them will preach rather than hit. Others ask them to leave the public place where they happen to be “so you don’t get into trouble”, and some even turn a blind eye when they realize that a couple are having sex. When asked what situations merited a violent response, gay sex in public places was not mentioned. It would appear that policemen’s homophobia follows the same disciplinary model they learned at home: the body is punished in order to train it to behave “correctly”. Some excesses may occur, but the ultimate goal is not violence, but “discipline”.
When asked about the reasons for muggins in public places, police officers who are not afraid of being politically incorrect blamed the gays. Miguel, one of the least homophobic officers interviewed, admits that when they get a call to investigate a mugging “my buddies go reluctantly, because they feel it was the queers who brought it upon themselves by deciding to fuck in those places.” Sergeant Sanchez agrees. “What the hell is a momma’s boy doing in a park at three in the morning? Isn’t it crazy that we should have to go there get him out of a mess?” Such attitudes suggest that the police would rather not intervene in the struggle between gays and “locusts”, and when they do their sympathies are with neither group.
However, there is a strong police presence in public places. The police do not let a day go by without patrolling these areas. Although crime levels are high throughout the country and people complain about the lack of policemen patrolling the streets, the authorities make it a point to visit public parks during their rounds. When Fernandez was asked why the police pay so much attention to La Llanura Park, and even have special mounted police units patrolling the area, he said,
Look, the truth is we do it for the kids. Children are a country’s greatest hope. Parks should be places where they can play with their families. How can we let them see a homosexual scene in a place like that? How low have we sunk when a little girl playing with her doll ends up seeing two men sucking each other’s penises? How can we possibly not intervene to get rid of such filth in recreation areas?
Fernandez’ argument seemed reasonable enough. However, we were puzzled and asked: “What would a little girl be doing playing with her doll in a park at three in the morning?” “Don’t be naive!” was the response. “Minors visit the park to prostitute themselves and smoke crack!”, he said with a self-righteous air. “Yes, but then they’re not kids who will be perverted by gays. Their heterosexual parents have already done that”, we reply. “I agree,” he said reluctantly. “But still, do you think it’s good for a girl prostitute to see two guys kissing each other?”
Fernandez’ zeal in eradicating sex from public places is shared by the security guards at the University of the Republic campus. According to Officer Muñoz:
To put a stop to all this filth, you always need to be vigilant. At night, I climb onto the rooftop of the highest building and I take my binoculars. From there I can see any strange activity that’s going on, paying special attention to male couples. When I see one that’s very close together, I climb down quickly and follow them. One night a couple went down to a little stream that flows through the campus and went under the bridge. To catch them, I had to crawl on my hands and knees so I wouldn’t make any noise with my boots. Then I had to wait „til they began having sex. Once their pants were down, I turned on the flashlight and arrested them.
Ernesto, a low-ranking policeman, has had considerable experience in preventing sex in movie theaters.
I sit in the back row at the movies and keep my coat on so people can’t tell I’m a policeman. Since they seem to find me attractive, there’s usually some guy who will sit next to me. I pretend I’m watching the movie but I’m all ears. The guy will stare at me a few times and I’ll look at him just once, to pretend I’m interested. When the asshole touches my penis, I get up and go to the toilet. He follows me, thinking I’m into it. I get to the toilet and go into one of the cubicles and sit down on the toilet, leaving the door ajar. When the guy gets in, that’s when I arrest him.
One possible explanation for this great zeal has to do with the very nature of the police corps. They are men who live, eat, work, play, and fight among men. Their bunks are next to one another, they use the same showers. Interaction is so intimate that they even have a saying to describe how they live: “At the police station, you hang your balls up at the door”. This means that aggressive masculinity must be checked and that collective life in the station is “feminine”, or intimate, even loving. If one leaves one’s “balls” hanging on the door, one loses one’s privileges as a male, and might even fall into the temptation of imitating the gay men that, in Sergeant Chavez’s words, “walk around without their balls on.” Hence the need to control the potential for homosexuality within the police corps. One way of doing it is to punish homosexuals, so that policemen can learn the price of giving free rein to their desires.
Once they took me to a queers’ bar without telling me. The captain said I should go out on patrol with my buddies. When we went inside, I saw mostly men and only a few women. However, I thought everything was normal and did not pay any attention. Suddenly I noticed that the men were dancing together and some were kissing each other. It was disgusting! I felt a horrible pain in my stomach and went to the bathroom to vomit. When I came out, my partners had all the customers lined up against the wall and were asking for their I.D. cards. I don’t know why they didn’t tell me we were going to a homosexual bar. What was the point of scaring me like that?
The “scare” is another lesson for the body: if you live intimately with other men, you should learn what happens to those who are tempted to love them.
In spite of their best efforts to repress latent homosexuality in many policemen, or to control those who are already gay, the various police forces are only partially successful in their objective. Homosexual acts are not uncommon among policemen, and they are influenced by public sex. This is evident in many ways: voyeurism, participation and even prostitution or bribe-taking. Policemen, then, are another group that participates directly in public sex.
As we have seen, most policemen were trained to control their desires. However, when they come across gays and “locusts”, they see the faces of those who follow their urges. Both homosexuals and “locusts” struggle for the things that their bodies desire: sex and pleasure. For instance, “locusts” mug people and steal things to buy drugs that will give pleasure to their bodies.
The first step towards participation in public sex is voyeurism. Policemen gradually become seduced by the sexual scenes they witness. Ernesto admits that he learned to let heterosexual couples “finish what they were doing”. However, it was only later in the interview that he admitted to searching for them “more often than I’m ordered to”. In other words, he learned to enjoy watching a couple having sex. Mario feels the same way. Even on his day off he will often go to porn movies to watch couples getting it on. “The more experience you have, the better you can do your job,” is his excuse. Officer Morales is particularly fond of catching transvestites in parks. “I don’t like homosexual sex, but when it’s a transvestite with a man, I can’t deny that I hang around a while to see how they do it. If a man is dressed up as a woman, it doesn’t seem so repugnant,” he says.
The next stage is to invite their spouses, girlfriends or pick-ups to visit such places. Says Sargent Perez:
After seeing so much filth in La Llanura, you begin to get kind of horny. Three months ago I met a girl who worked at a nearby store. We agreed to meet at the park. It was at night. There were lots of homosexual couples around. You can recognize them because they park their cars and start looking around for a pickup. My partner was very shy, but she said she liked policemen a lot. “Why, honey?” I asked her. “Is it because you think we’re rough?” “No,” she said, “it’s because you’re so masculine and daring.” Since she had given her consent, up to a point, I gave her a long kiss right there and then, in front of all the [gay] couples. A lot of queers were walking around, and they would stop to stare at us. But I wanted to show them how to do things properly. In the end, the woman allowed me to touch her all over, and I told her to sit down on the grass. When some guys came closer, I took out my penis and stuck it into her, lifting her skirt. It was a little uncomfortable, because I’d never done it in a public place before, and because the guys were masturbating while they were watching us.
Gregorio has also learned to enjoy the darkness of public parks. Over the past few months, he has been visiting the Colombia Park as a place to have sex. When he is off-duty, he arranges to meet his girlfriends there and he claims he does things he would never have imagined.
I’ve been getting bolder every day. It would never have occurred to me to have sex in the park. In fact, for the past months, my job has been to put an end to it. However, for some time now I have found it a real turn-on. Last week I took this girl to the park. She was scared because she’d never done it [in such a place]. I told her not to worry, that I was a policeman and nothing could happen to us. The more frightened she looked when I touched her, the more turned on I was taking off her clothes. To make a long story short, I left her completely naked. I just put my coat over her.
A third step, which not everyone takes, is to participate in homosexual sex and sexual commerce. None of the policemen interviewed admitted to having done it, but they said that some of their colleagues had. “Locusts” and gays insist that many policemen force them to have sex with them, and then demand a bribe to let them go. This is what Jaime, a “locust”, had to say:
I was with a client and two policemen showed up.. They hit me with their baton and said: “You fuckin