GRINGOS IN SEACH OF BROWN SKIN BOYS IN OLD SAN JUAN

When the fetish is greater than the principle has been documented in class and colonial struggles literature. Mostly, about heterosexual relationships. Not all. Querelle by Jean Genet was brought to the Caribbean by many white American gay and bisexual men walking around Old San Juan in search of brown skin natives. Constantin Cavafis’ poems transplanted to some cheap hotel in La Marina area. It was the late 1950’s and early 1960s and Old San Juan’s port was still the only one in the city, bringing into its cobblestone streets sailors as well as tourists. Prostitution was big and thriving in the old town. Calle Luna was where a lot of those “antros” were located. Quite a few of the older white American gay or bisexual men did not know that some of those boys, hustlers or not, had knives -true, many poor Puerto Rican young men carried “corvas”, given to them by their fathers as presents to celebrate becoming a man, a “machito”. Some of those lusty gringos never thought -too white in control to ever think the brown skin boys were looking at them from a different angle- they would end up slashed for going too far. At the time, there were two bars catering to the male with male prostitution population: El Hill Top and La Cucaracha. After the old city was gentrified, the shipping industry port moved to the Isla Grande Piers on the other side of the bay, the hustler bars also moved to the area in Santurce known as La Quince. There are some salsa lyrics that sing to those two areas: Calle Luna y Calle Sol and La Quince. Class and colonial relationships are interwoven, yet rarely studied by academicians when it comes to male with male prostitution. Mostly written by heterosexual men who would not know what to do with it. It happens a lot. Thailand, lately, has been known as its epicenter; even justified by some: the general population approves it. Really! Perhaps the young men see no other option: no job possibilities. Perhaps the white man with money from the colonization powers has no other alternative: love to posses -not only politically-, to own those young brown skin boys.