In the beginning was the Word; and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John: 1:1)
The places described above are characterized by the absence of words. Whether heterosexual or homosexual, people use few words When people talk, it is about inconsequential things. None of the conversations has anything to do with what is actually happening. One man talks to another about the weather. Another asks what the time is. A third asks for a match...
The fact that no words are exchanged does not mean that the communication is more or less intimate, or that people are more or less interested in others. For Derrida, traditional Western thinking has focused on the superiority of the spoken over the written word. This is what he called “logocentrism”, or the idea that truth is closer to the spoken word.47 Moreover, our Western thinking has also been influenced by what he called the “metaphysics of presence”. This means that we believe we are closer to the truth when people talk to each other and directly express what they think. One only writes when one is not present and this can lead to mistakes. Written language is thus seen as the “great absence” and as a simple and imperfect substitute for oral language.
Our culture teaches us that to have sexual relations we must first “know” the person. “Know” means talk to. If we do not talk, we do not “know” someone and therefore our conduct is considered immoral. Thus, Hollywood has accustomed us to having to listen to a series of stupid dialogues before presenting us with the first sex scene. When things do not happen that way, as in the movie “Fatal Attraction”, there is a very high price to pay. But if we were to pay close attention to the verbiage uttered by actors before they remove their clothes, we would notice that they use metaphors to communicate. “You’ve broken my heart”, says an actress. Nobody whose heart has been broken could continue acting. This is another example of the fact that we say things which, although they may come out of our own mouths, actually come from fiction, from books, in short, from the written word.
If people go to a public place to have sex, we think they are promiscuous and vulgar because they do not “really” know their sexual partners. However, the same philosopher shows us that this hypothesis is false. Derrida does not believe there is any real difference between what is written and spoken, between what is present and what is absent. We do not get to know someone better because they express their thoughts directly or because they do so in a letter, a poem or a movie script. We all use a language which is pre-determined by what is written. We do not know each other more or better because we speak or because we touch. We might instead conclude that we get to know a person who represents to us a script of their innermost desires more intimately than another who talks to us like a parrot.
To illustrate this, let us do a visualization with our eyes shut (ask someone to read the following to you):
Let us imagine that we are in the public park of our fantasies. Someone we find attractive approaches us. He looks into our eyes and, without saying anything, asks us to reveal to him a sexual fantasy, a story which Judeo-Christian thought has made us feel is shameful and which we have not told anyone. We resist at first, but then we focus on this person and think that he would be the ideal person to realize this fantasy. We like him. He is like the model we have pursued since childhood. Our hormones are stirred up. We try to flee and begin to walk away. However, our feet feel heavy. Our body does not want to leave. The person follows us patiently and again looks into our eyes. “Why fight this desire?”, we think. Yes, we decide to reveal our fantasy. But it cannot be done with words. We must invent a language to communicate it to him. Nobody else will know about it. In a few minutes, we are doing it. Is this person a stranger? Does he know something that no one else suspects?
Is this intimate or not?
Let us remember that a metaphor is a word used to refer to another which substitutes it, suggesting a similarity between the two. When someone in the park tells us “this is a pick-up place” he is using the language of metaphor, the language of literature and fiction. Although the informer is present, he is using the language of literature and to understand it, we must find its meaning in a dictionary or in the written words of a novel.
Public sex places prioritize what we term non-verbal messages. However, just because words are not used, we should not conclude that there is no language. In public sex places, the body is the paper on which words are written. The organs are laden with meaning and their manipulation provides us with the narrative.
When we talk with someone we are not able to go beyond the discourses that have been learnt or read elsewhere. “I believe in love and I think you’re the light of my life,” a suitor once told me in a bar. “Does he think my face looks like a flashlight, or what?” I though to myself. “I probably have a greasy face and it’s very shiny”. To understand this lovely, corny metaphor, I would have had to read about the Cathars and their ideas that we are bodies which enclose the divine light. Did I get to know that romantic individual any better because he uttered that corny literary cliché or would it have been better to know him in a park, performing the role of a sexual fantasy, also taken from a literary work?
For now, guided by our informers, we shall give one of the many interpretations of the language of public places. From about 4 in the afternoon, heterosexual couples begin to arrive at the Parque Monumental and sit down on the benches, especially those where there is less light. Here they spend many hours talking, kissing and, when possible, masturbating each other. The park, then, is not just a center for homosexual activity, but also for heterosexual activity.
Julio, a sex worker who is a regular at this park, describes some of the heterosexual couples who meet regularly each week. For example, Armando, a friend of Julio, is a 22 year-old medical student at the university. He looks a little older than his age and is quite attractive. Celina, his girlfriend, is a sixteen year-old high school student who lives in an eastern district of the city. Armando waits for her at 6.30 p.m. every Monday to walk her to the bus. They sit on a bench and gaze into each other’s eyes. “Both know that she has to be home at 7.30 for dinner. Her parents are very strict and they don’t allow her to have a boyfriend.”, explains Julio.
Like on any other Monday, the sweethearts sit on a bench on the southern side of the park. They begin to kiss passionately. From a distance, we can see the young man placing his hand under the girl’s skirt. We could surmise that he touches her intimate parts but it is not really clear, since he makes sure that her skirt covers his hand. She holds his hand and gently takes it out. The hand under her skirt could mean that today he wants to have sex. The hand outside would imply that she does not want to yet or that she not be considered easy, or that perhaps she doesn’t want to today but another day, when she feels more like it, she might. Derrida would say that it is impossible to determine the infinite number of possibilities, in other words, it is “undeterminable”.
Julio points to another couple two benches farther on. “She’s an old broad who works at the government building nearby. She comes to the park and meets a guy who works at the hospital. The woman takes out a small white cloth from her purse. When this comes out, the man unzips his flies. It seems that the small white cloth means that his sexual organ can come out of its “casing”. He touches her breasts and she begins to masturbate him. They do not say a word to each other. His hand on her breasts is a signal that she can grab his penis and rub it. When he finishes, she gathers up her little white cloth, folds it and puts it back in her purse. The semen in her purse seems to imply that the sexual encounter is over. Is this an illicit affair? It would appear so, because a few minutes later another man collects the woman in his car. The hospital worker returns to work without even looking at her. You might think that the cloth in the purse is a metaphor to tell us of a relationship that must remain hidden, illicit. So much so, that Julio himself understands it. When I see either one of them in the street, I pretend not to recognize them, I pretend I’ve never seen them in the park.”
“The most daring couple is the one that sits over there on that bench,” says our informer. Come here Wednesday at 8 policy-making and you’ll see!” We meet Julio at exactly five minutes to eight on Wednesday. A couple of minutes later, a woman of around 40 and a young man of 18 meet at the bench. They arrive separately. They sit down, barely greeting each other. The woman looks like an office worker or a secretary. She takes out a blanket with colored squares and places it over the young man’s lap. The blanket suggests that something important is about to happen. The young man moves around beneath the blanket, apparently to remove his belt and take down his pants. Once he stops moving, she understands that he is ready. The woman kneels down and dives under the blanket. “She must give one hell of a great blow-job”, says Julio.
Heterosexual couples come to do the same as the homosexual ones. However, Julio himself correctly interprets their different metaphors: “Heterosexuals fuck with rags in their laps.” This means that somewhere they learnt that genitals should not be exposed, even if you have public sex. Penises, breasts and vulvas are covered with skirts, little white cloths or colored blankets. This language is very different from the gays’. “The gays go around with their dicks, their asses and their balls hanging out. The more dicks out in the open air, and the bigger they are, the more they enjoy it. When they want to have sex, they show all they’ve got”, says our interviewee. Moreover, heterosexuals do not display sizes or organs.
Though the couples are present in body, the same cannot be said of language. To understand this, we must follow Julio’s example and learn the code like any foreign language. However, we would not find a dictionary to explain the meaning of a cloth in a purse, or a colored blanket on someone’s lap.
After about 10 o’clock at night, the heterosexual couples leave the park and the place becomes a gay meeting area. There is a non-verbal code to initiate a contact. When two gays meet, one way of showing interest in having sex is to touch their own genitals on top of their pants. This gesture is characteristic of many heterosexual men in the country, who generally do it as a sign of manhood. However, in the case of gay men in a public sex place, this has a different connotation. The message here might be: “All this could be yours” or “I want you to touch me and to touch you” or “look what a great thing I have here for you, it hardly fits in my hand.”
Novices soon learn the code, though some interviewees told the ethnographer that at first they did not understand the significance of this gesture. One recounted the following story:
To me it’s normal to see macho men doing that at any time of the day, and I didn’t understand that things are different here. My friends who are experts at picking up contacts here told that when someone does that in front of you, then you have to do the same. It the way of answering, “I’m interested too”, without having to speak. It’s very comfortable and also very exciting. (Gerardo).
Another sign for making contact is to walk around jangling a bunch of keys in your hand. This means, “I have a place where we can be together” or “I have a car”. Once eye contact has been made with the desired person and the routine questions have been asked (What’s your job? Do you live alone or with your family? Where do you live?), you study the person’s character. Attention is paid to their accent, the way they speak Spanish, any nervousness or sign of anger in their answers. If, after this “reading”, you conclude that there is no danger, you establish contact and look for a darker place. According to Mario, “in the darkest area of the gazebo guys sit down on benches to touch each other and turn each other on. The ones who sit in there are only interested in receiving oral sex. Sitting with your legs apart means “I’m not moving from here. If you want something, you’ll have to bend over...”
Another common way of making contact, according to Gerardo, is to arrive in a car. Drivers cruise around the park at low speed. Some park on the west or south sides and remain in the car, waiting for someone to come over and talk to them, or they get out of the car for “an inspection tour”, as a walk around the park is called.
Pedro explains:
Guys in cars regularly pass through the park and sometimes fancy vehicles turn around and stop. Someone will get into the car and make the contact. Others park on the west side of the park and wait for someone to pass or for someone to go over and talk to them.
A car stopped at a park means that a private space is available. Once the driver and the walker make contact, the latter gets into the car. Sometimes they masturbate and have oral sex there right away, though they usually go to a place farther away to have sex and then return to the park where the initial contact was made. The way of making contact in the alleyway is slightly different. In the first place, many of the couples who meet in the park end up having sex in this street, so contacts here are more direct and there is less courtship than in the park.
The public toilet is another place that facilitates very direct sexual contact because its small size means that men are confined within a very limited space and performing a physiological task that requires them to touch themselves. People who use the urinal do not talk to each other. All the action takes place very quickly. If you pee, it means that you’re not interested in the other person. If you don’t pee, it means you are. Because there’s always the possibility that a heterosexual or a policeman might come in, speed is the name of the game. Part of the excitement of the place is the sense of the forbidden, of something fleeting ...there’s no need for long conversations and fastidious courtships,” as Mario says.
During different observations conducted from a point near the site, it was possible to see men arriving in cars and parking them in front of the toilets. They would get out of the car, go inside the toilets, have sex, return to their cars and leave. Others would park their cars, go to the toilet, contact someone who interests them, return with their contact and the two would drive off in the car.
Many people visit all three places. There are men who begin touring the three places from around nine at night and are there until one or even three in the morning. The number of people increases at week-ends, though the rest of the week there are always men wandering around the area.
Although the rules of contact in the movie theaters do not vary significantly, the fact that there are different areas of action means that each one functions differently. In the public toilets, for example, sex takes place hurriedly, as in the urinal. Availability is expressed with an exposed penis. In the darker sectors, men can perform acts that are more in line with those of the alleyway, and the seats in certain areas of the theater may be used for courtship, conversation and an invitation to go to a motel. However, the initial language is non-verbal. If you are interested in a man, you sit next to him and stare at him intently. “That means I like you and I want to be with you,” explains Victor. If the person agrees, they remain in their seat.
This is how a regular client describes the scene:
People come and go, walk downstairs and wander about all over the place. You can’t watch the movie in peace. If someone who isn’t part of the scene were to come in here and sit down to watch a movie, they wouldn’t be able to see anything because of all the people going back and forth. Sitting next to someone and staring at them is a sign of interest. If you don’t want to have sex with the person who sat beside you, then you move.
There are many ways of making contacts. In the seats downstairs, older men directly offer money to anyone willing to go with them to a nearby hotel. In fact, sitting here means that you are looking for a male prostitute. An older man sitting next to a young kid means that sex is paid for. “The older man just needs to touch the genitals of the young man to show that he’s interested,” explains our informant. The prostitute states his price and says little else. If the client gets up and waits for the young man to do the same, it shows that they have an agreement. If the price seems too high, the client remains seated and begins watching the movie again. “This means he’s not interested in the deal”, says Victor. If that’s the case, the young guy will look for another older man and sit beside him.
In the toilet, all you have to do is enter and other men will approach and touch your genitals without saying a word. In the back of the theater, the more attractive men wait for others to approach them to initiate a sexual contact. Sitting at the back means “I’m so cute that I don’t need to look for anyone. If you want something good, you do the work.” Once again, verbal communication is minimal. Upstairs, where the orgies take place, all you need do is to join them. However, not everyone is welcome. If three men, for example, are having sex and a fourth tries to join in and is not wanted by any one of them, then the three move somewhere else. “This means that they’re not interested in more people,” says Victor.
Saunas provide more opportunities for conversation. You can talk to a man at the bar and then take him to a private room. There is also the option of entering the sauna room and waiting, as is the case in Decoro, for the lights to be turned off and then approach and touch the person who is next to you, without saying a word. They way to assent is to remove your towel. “This means I’m at your disposal”. Pedro explains.
Another way of making contact is to enter one of the rooms, leave the door half open to signal availability and wait for someone. If someone comes into the cubicle and is not attractive to the person in there, they gesture “no” with their hand. “If the person lies down with his backside facing outwards, it means he’s passive in anal sex and that anyone who is active is welcome,” adds Pedro.
The language of public places is so complex that anyone can make a mistake.
Alvaro, a new client, tells us about his experience:
The first time I came to the park I didn’t know what all these codes meant. I was walking along one of the paths and met this guy who was touching his genitals and looking at me. “How dirty”, I thought to myself. “He’s probably itching because he’s full of lice”. I continued walking and another guy did exactly the same. Oh no! All these guys are infested with lice, I thought, and I decided to run away.
Alberto, a 23 year-old, made a similar mistake in a sauna.
I’ve always wanted to help my friends. Because I was the eldest of my brothers and sisters, I always had to cover them up when they were asleep and make sure that they weren’t cold. The first time I went to Decoro I noticed that there were two cubicles with the doors open and two guys were asleep on their backs, naked. I felt so sorry for them that I decided to go in and cover them up with a sheet and close the door, so they wouldn’t get a blast of wind. What I got was a blast of his anger! “What’s the matter with you crazy ship?”, one of them yelled,.“D’you think you’re the Nanny? Go cover up your grandmother’s ass!”
How is practice determined in a place where sex must be done quickly and verbal language is absent? In heterosexual relations the “scripts” have always been clear because penetration is the prerogative of the man. But what happens with anal sex and oral sex between men? How does one decide, in a matter of seconds, who does what to whom? Before public sex places became popular, these decisions were made on the basis of social class. In Latin America, the poor have always been at the social, economic and sexual service of the rich.
But the class factor is irrelevant in most public places. Because of the danger of robbery, wealth cannot be made visible and clothing is useless to determine it. Education is hard to see in the absence of a spoken language. Thus, the more established criteria that traditionally governed relationships between Latin gays, no longer operate. In other words, here money does not determine practice, nor does it serve to teach each person his function. Perhaps the only exceptions to this rule are those drivers who can impress with their cars. But they are a minority. A more convenient language for these places is the language of North American pornography. The main rules are size, beauty and youth, which easily allow for the establishment of clear hierarchies in public sex. At the same time, pornography itself not only serves as a language but also as a teacher. After watching so many of these movies, people gradually assimilate their values. Soon, something that was once considered disgusting, such as oral sex, becomes a preferred practice.
Both in pornography and in public sex places, the size of the penis is now the main criteria to establish penetration. Fifteen years ago it was considered vulgar or ridiculous to show one’s genitals as a way of attracting sexual partners. Even in 1989, the penis was exposed in a more subtle way, by holding it inside the pants. Only in the urinals would men open up their zippers and expose themselves. Now, however, the penis is out. In the park, men walk around with an erection.
Why the need to expose it? Because size determines function. Those with a large penis are the ones who will receive oral or anal “services”. No other criteria is needed for two men to reach a quick agreement.“When I take out my dick and compare it and see that it’s bigger than my date’s, he knows he has to suck me or give me his ass”, says Julio.“But what happens if the guy is older than you or seems more educated?” we ask. “Nothing happens. It’s the law of the jungle here. If my dick is larger, he either takes it or he looks for another one.”
Another criteria is physical attractiveness. As in pornography, the most handsome men receive more attention from the rest. “There’s a very good looking guy who comes here and sits at the back,” says Ernesto at the 545 Cinema. “The guys take turns to suck him just because he’s so gorgeous.” When the above criteria are not sufficient, youth serves as a parameter. The youngest men tend to receive oral sex from the older ones, rather than the other way around. “Unless they’re prostitutes,” says Victor, “the young kids go to the movie houses to find old guys to suck them. If you’re getting on in years, your job is to suck,” he adds. Humphreys found exactly the same in his study of North American public toilets in the sixties: “In most cases fellatio is a service performed by an older man upon a younger”.48 After the age of forty, the author found that the practice of passive oral sex was a rarity. Part of aging is losing this privilege.
Although these rules are not universal and are often disregarded, they enable people to reach agreement in a few seconds. It is when these rules are not followed that problems, arguments and discussions arise.
According to Derrida, the spoken language and words are no less and no more present than a movie script or a Garcia Marquez novel. When we do not know the meaning of a word and look it up in the dictionary, we are given another word for reference. However, we might not know what this one means either, and must continue with our search. Each word of our spoken language is, therefore, referred to another and another ad infinitum. Thus each word when expressed is inhabited by the ghosts of all the words to which it is similar and from which it differs. Derrida termed this “la differance”, a very subtle way of telling us that each word needs the other, is “differentiated” from it and its meaning is postponed or “deferred” by it.
Language is also occupied or inhabited by other languages of reference and of difference. In each one of these, we find another language to which it relates. The language of pornography is no exception: it is permeated by the language of globalization.
The only really important event in this Central American country in the past eight years has been its incorporation into the global market, symbolized by the Internet, where integration also implies specialization. Costa Rica has been forced to leave behind its protectionist policies in order to “compete” on an equal footing in the world market. All areas in which the country does not have the competitive advantage because of the small size of its internal market, such as the manufacture of refrigerators, for example, must be abandoned in order to specialize in those where it does have an advantage, such as producing chayotes ( a kind of vegetable) or sexual tourism, to cite two examples. The strict laws of supply and demand will determine the criteria and set the guidelines.
As market theory goes, a prostitute with a small penis, for whom there is less demand, will not be able to compete with another who has a large one. “On average, escorts have the larger penis. Otherwise they wouldn’t do well in the market.”49 Sooner or later, the sex worker with a smaller organ will adapt to reality: he would do better to mug clients rather than fuck them. Those with more than eight inches, on the other hand, will make more from sex than from robbery. Their organs are like a small business that even allows them to have employees. “My friend has a huge dick and he charges 5,500 colones”, says a mugger who operates in the park. “And why the extra 500 colones,” we ask, intrigued by the coefficient. “That’s my commission”, he replies.
The language of porn is inhabited by that of University of Chicago economics. Milton Friedman50 never imagined that when the clients of Costa Rica’s public sex places learnt the language of public sex from porn movies, they also “imported” his economic theories which inhabit this language like ghosts. Thus, they not only learnt how to suck penises, but also how to set a price for each one. The largest, the prettiest and the youngest, are the most expensive, the most alluring and the most sought after. In the flesh market, size does matter.
However, as we shall see, the language of pornography, or that of the “Chicago boys”, or of post-industrial capitalism, when applied to an under-developed country, generates certain tensions. In a Latin American culture obsessed with class differences, in which one sector of the population feels more at home in Miami than in its poorer neighborhoods, the Anglo Saxon pornographic model creates an illusion of democratic capitalism. For a few moments each day, the Nicaraguan mugger, an illegal and dispossessed immigrant who is being searched for by immigration agents to deport him, becomes because of the size of his penis a porno star. His physical attributes bring him respect, admiration and demand from clients in the park, the movie theater or the public toilet. Although he may not feel any sexual attraction for these men, he cannot help but feel satisfaction at his popularity and at the high price he commands. The young man feels he has value, that for an instant, the world has turned upside down, giving him a taste of what things could be like if he had money. Everyone wants to be with him, from the politician who left his car in a nearby car park and has removed all distinguishing marks, to the government bureaucrat who has spent the day planning raids on undocumented foreigners.
However, the dream, like every fairy tale, has its end. When the prostitute, like Snow White, finally awakes, he will find a whole bunch of dwarves that he doesn’t want to see. Contrary to what Pat Califia51 theorizes for the United States, there is nothing revolutionary or radical about public sex in Costa Rica. There has been no progress in the revolution against the Judeo-Christian tradition just because people have oral sex in a park, instead of in their bedroom. What is truly revolutionary is that it shows some of its victims that the world could be ordered in a different way. The prostitute who has been aroused from his lethargy by the kiss of a horny prince, will never see things in the same way again.
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47 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976.
48 Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade. Impersonal Sex in Public Places, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, Second Edition, 1975, p.108.
49 Matt Adams, Hustlers, Escorts and Porn Stars. The Insider’s Guide to Male Prostitution in America, Nevada, Adams, 1999. P.62.
50 Professor at the University of Chicago and winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics
51 Pat Califia, Public Sex. The Culture of Radical Sex, San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1994.