Looking for life: Male sex work, HIV/AIDS, and the political economy of gay sex tourism in the Dominican Republic

Through long-term ethnographic fieldwork combined with a quantitative survey, this dissertation examines the lived experience of two categories of male sex workers---'bugarrones' and ' sanky pankies'---in two cities in the Dominican Republic (Santo Domingo and Boca Chica). While the clients to whom these men cater include both men and women, as well as both foreigners and locals, this study examines their sexual-economic exchanges with gay male tourists, as such exchanges are quite common and often preferred by sex workers. The theoretical framework places these exchanges and their social implications within the context of the rapidly changing political economy of the Dominican Republic, where informal sector work within the tourism industry is increasingly important for young men who can no longer be absorbed by the shrinking formal sector. The dissertation seeks to explicate the linkages between these large-scale structural changes and the ways that homoerotic exchanges in the global sex industry are transforming relations of gender and sexuality, not only among gay-identified Dominican men, but also among a large segment of men who do not consider themselves gay or homosexual, who are commonly married or intimately involved with women, and who engage regularly in clandestine sexual-economic exchanges with gay male tourists as a means of 'looking for life' (buscandosela , roughly, 'making ends meet'). The combined qualitative/quantitative methodology, and the dialogic approach to the analysis of distinct data sets, seeks to draw attention to the importance of contradiction, discretion, 'covering', and ambiguity in structuring sex workers psycho-emotional lives; their relationships with family, neighbors, and intimate partners; and their risk for HIV/AIDS. These dynamics have been obscured by most studies of tourist-oriented male sex work in the Caribbean, which have focused principally on local men's 'romantic' exchanges with female tourists, and have largely neglected the more covert exchanges that often occur with foreign gay men.