EPILOGUE

The long-distance trucker is on a journey that takes him to different countries and to different mind zones. Fleeing from everyday life and the traditional discourses takes him to new territories. He escapes from the straightjacket of machismo with which he views his family role and will find new paths quite different from those in his hometown. On a subsequent trip, Luis admitted that he is more liberal on the road, and that he establishes more equitable relationships with both men and women. However, this has not modified his relationship with Katia. Luis is convinced that if she starts to work, she will leave him one day. He is also aware that he has no means to keep her tied to the home “with other roles and demands”. When I asked him what he meant, he said men with more money can give their wives more demanding and challenging roles as caretakers of children and the home. “People with money can make domestic work more complicated, to make women feel like professionals,” he said on another occasion. “When women demand more freedom, middle-class men make their kitchens bigger.”

According to Luis, middle-class women can now work outside the home, but the emotional and psychological demands of being a mother and wife have increased. “Wives must also become their own children’s psychiatrists,” he says. That was not so before. He adds that the working classes have not renounced the discourse of machismo, not because they are ignorant, but because they have no alternative ways of maintaining their relations of power.

On the road, sexual culture does not arise merely from different discourses, but also from interactions with reality. In the long run, truckers effectively stop behaving according to the macho creed and enter the dimension of Eros, with its prostitutes and homosexuals. The typical Latino male becomes a member of another sexual minority, and must hide and lie about his life – proof of how malleable human behavior is, and how thin the dividing line is between victims and culprits.

When I traveled with Luis through Central America, we both learned what it felt like to have to conceal our relationship. What seemed to me to be the most natural gesture with my wife, such as stroking her face, Luis and I now had to do in the darkness of the cab. Luis said he understood how homosexuals felt when they had to hide their identity. “But what are we then?” I asked him. “Two horny males, that’s all,” he said. Luis taught me that it is possible to engage in homosexual practices without a change of identity. However, I felt I had shown him the consequences of not assuming one’s own identity. “We may be two horny males, but we do the same as a couple of those faggots you despise,” I said severely. “So we either wear a condom, or you’d better find someone else to cool you down.”

Of what use is all this when it comes to prevention? Knowing how truckers compartmentalize their sex lives – as, indeed, do Latino macho men in general – helps us to understand that prevention cannot be isolated from sexuality as a state of mind. In other words, prevention must be undertaken precisely within the real-life context in which sexuality manifests itself. Attitudes will not change as a result of disseminating information through clinics, health workshops, the media and other channels linked to scientific discourse. Prevention must start where sex is practiced: in truck yards, brothels, dancehalls, bars, motels and truck cabins. In other words, prevention efforts must adapt to the compartmentalized life of truckers.

Luis did not want to use the condom the second time we had sex. He said he would use it with prostitutes and faggots he might pick up on the road, but not with me. I asked him why. “You were a virgin,” he said. “Wasn’t I the first?” “Yes, but how do you know I don’t have sex with other women? Also, I’m married, right?” The trucker felt this was entirely my own responsibility. “If your wife infects you, it’s because you give her permission to work,” he said. Luis was convinced that as long as Katia stayed home she would never have sex with another man. “Oh, man!” I exclaim. “How can you believe that! Don’t give me that bullshit. If Mother Teresa had been born in Costa Rica, she would have had sex with one of those priests Katia likes so much – so you either wear it [the condom], or you wear it!” That was the end of the discussion.

Prevention must also find its way into the other compartments of truckers’ sexuality, not just their life on the road. Soap operas, movies, songs, poems and other manifestations of the romantic discourse do not address prevention; they do not even show condoms. This is a situation that must be changed.

Luis turned out to be more romantic than I expected. He admitted, sheepishly, that he enjoyed TV soaps and watched them whenever he could so as not to lose the thread of the story. In these, love faces many obstacles and yet it always wins in the end, which perhaps accounts for their popularity. However, soaps never show lovers’ concerns about possible pregnancies or sexually transmitted diseases; the characters never discuss the use of condoms. Love scenes are always impulsive and “spontaneous”.

Some nights Luis would get drunk and become sentimental, if not downright maudlin. He would say that he loved me and that he could not live without me. Then he would display his perfect tumescence. When I said we should wear condoms, he reacted as if the purest act on earth had been desecrated. “You’re a real bummer,” he would say. “You can’t stop thinking about all that shit about health and disease. Why don’t you go fuck a doctor instead?” Sometimes I felt like sending a letter to the producers of his favorite soap, a Brazilian show called Xica, and begging them: “I know there was no Aids in colonial times, but why don’t you do me a favor and get the romantic lead, the Comendador, to wear a condom from time to time? After all, there were no television cameras back then either, and that does not keep you from using them to show us his magnificent rear-end.”

Religion could play an even more influential role, if it would stop boycotting family planning and Aids prevention. Luis will never use a condom when he has sex with Katia, even though he is more promiscuous than Salome. His wife would not demand its use either, since that would mean acknowledging Luis’s double life. Once this reality is acknowledged, the issue would have to be discussed, something Luis feels would not be to his advantage. If Luis’ infidelity were out in the open, he believes Katia would go looking for a job the next day. “Certain things are best left unsaid,” the trucker says.

It annoyed me even more when Luis talks about God, religion and all the claptrap he has heard in church. In one of his personality compartments, Luis is like a cloistered nun. “Luis, how can you believe all that garbage that priests tell you about sex?” I would yell at him. “You’re a complete slut through. Aren’t you embarrassed to tell me that what we do is a sin?” However, Luis considered me to be an incorrigible atheist, unafraid of the devil himself. “I don’t know why you need to complicate matters like that. If you repent before you die, all is forgiven.” He smiled smugly. “I’m sure the truck’s brakes will go one day and the truck will flatten you against the road before you have a chance to repent or say a damned thing,” I said, irritated.

The most I achieved was to get him to read more progressive religious viewpoints. One day I gave him a book about homosexual churches in the United States and their position regarding the use of condoms. He was not fully convinced. “The writer of this book is a real queen,” he said. “Just look at his picture! He looks ridiculous! Who’s going to trust a man that looks like such a cocksucker?”

Another factor to bear in mind is the key role of sexual minorities in the life of truck drivers. Prostitutes are seen as sexual professionals, making them the most appropriate vehicle for prevention. Luis had many such friends on the road, and he would usually chat with them after sex.

Alda was perhaps the prostitute he liked the best. I asked her several times whether Luis used a condom when he had sex with her. She swore he did. “He says it’s for the good of both of us, and he’s never asked me not to use it,” she said. However, Luis had a long list of sexual partners, some of them closer to him than others. Perhaps he did not use a condom with all of them. A greater awareness on their part concerning the need for protection would have meant greater limits on Luis’s freedom and that of his fellow truckers. “You’d better cut out that crap about not getting Aids from people you trust,” our interviewer said to him more than once. “If it were like that, nobody would have caught it.” “Or maybe we all would have gotten it,” said Luis.

Instead of hiring health professionals, it would be more effective to involve sex workers and homosexuals in prevention campaigns. One approach would be to include them in condom marketing programs, giving them a commission for every condom sold. Selling – if only their bodies – comes naturally to both prostitutes and homosexuals; condoms would become another commodity. Such a plan might even promote the use of the female condom.

Ana Maria agrees with my plan. “If we hookers saw that we make more money selling condoms than putting ourselves at risk to charge more, we’d all practice safe sex,” she said. However, as always, it is the Latino middle classes that have seized control of prevention campaigns. Sex workers have to put up with people who make ten times as much as they do giving them condoms as if they were handing out presents to those less fortunate. “A social worker gets paid to give me condoms that I don’t use, so I can charge a client more. Wouldn’t it be better if I earned the commission?” Ana Maria said, with irrefutable logic.

One way in which truckers might find condoms more acceptable is if they are helped to use them in their various sexual compartments. Luis and I learned to make condoms erotic. While we were putting them on, we would exchange spicy remarks so as not to break the charm of our erections. The trucker loved to hear me say that I had bought extra-large imported condoms so he could be the envy of all men. When I took off the condom, I would take out a ruler and measure its length. At other times he would place mirrors all around, so he could see it going in. On yet other occasions, he would take a photograph, or ask me to tell him again, while wearing condoms, about our most erotic experience together. Such games have helped us to move beyond sexual compartments, from desire to prevention, from pleasure to health, without excluding the former. Such a way of conducting prevention campaigns is totally at odds with the traditional approach, but is more effective because truck drivers see it as an act of love, of caring for the partner, which they associate with the feminine.

Intervention to limit the risk might also prove quite effective, particularly where alcohol plays a role. On a variation of the “designated driver” principle, one of the truckers or other people around could be designated to ensure that everyone uses a condom. The person in question might participate in group sex or abstain, but his main responsibility would be to prevent unsafe sex. Jose, who runs a border-town bar where Luis often stops to get drunk, agreed to play such a role. If Luis is alone and drunk, Jose makes sure he is carrying condoms and uses them. Since he helps Luis to find women, and frequently shares them with him, he is the ideal “designated safeguard”. If the contribution of people like Jose were publicly acknowledged, say through an award, STD and Aids transmission rates would fall.

One of the most useful interventions, finally, would be to de-compartmentalize sexuality by studying and deconstructing prevailing discourses. Instead of focusing prevention campaigns to persuade truckers to use condoms – a prescriptive approach rather than one based on analysis – it would be more effective to promote critical thinking among them. Luis told me the biggest impact had come from realizing how many contradictions there were in his life. “All of these damned questions you ask have made me see how I’m one person at home and in my community and someone else on the road. That’s what I like best about you,” he said once.

When truckers are encouraged to think for themselves, compartment walls will start coming down. Critical thinking will have important repercussions in key prevention areas, such as the obstacles posed by machismo. When truckers realize that gender relations can take different forms, that they are constructs subject to change, traditional discourses can no longer claim the same unqualified loyalty. A process begins in which the hitherto unexamined life is now placed under scrutiny. The realization comes that things do not have to be the way we have been told they must be, that creativity can improve our lives. The world will not be destroyed if people experiment with sexual innovation; the sky will not fall if they have sex with members of their own gender.