Dulce sat on the edge of her bed and told me that she had risked arrest the night before to earn $20 by performing fellatio on an Italian tourist. “I’m not prostituting myself or hustling,” she said. “From my perspective I haven’t done either. I’m luchando (strug-gling). Struggling to survive, struggling to get ahead, do you understand me?” Dulce continued:If I had another way to make income, I wouldn’t ( jinetear) any more. There are people that yes, they like it. They like to go out every night, I don’t. I prefer the tranquility of my house, so I only do it when I need some money, when I’m totally broke.Distinguishing herself from what she saw as more materialistic hustlers by stating that she only goes out when she needs to, Dulce emphasized that she preferred to live a “normal” life, staying home with her boyfriend and avoiding delinquency.The inherent contradictions of young gay men, lesbians, and travestis engaging in strategic sexual relationships with foreigners even as they criticized the sex trade refl ected how personal values continued to be informed by preexisting socialist norms despite the fact that everyday realities of the post- Soviet crisis made these realities an impossibility. Whereas communism had promoted egalitarianism and cultural over fi -nancial capital, post- Soviet socialism had fractured this system and cre-ated an uncertain reorganization of social and sexual classes. The eco-nomic transition represented a break in preexisting social hierarchies, and those who rejected socialist values and cultural investments could prosper. Sex work became a dominant theme with which urban gays could contrast their own beliefs and experiences against others.REINSCRIBING SOCIAL HIERARCHIESI wondered why Osvaldo and Pedro were not more sympathetic to the

materialism and superfi cialit

isexualidad

Authentic lesbianism

that he failed to achieve an erection

They just don’t want to admit it.

Heterosexual masculinity

activo (active/insertive) and pasivo (passive/receptive)

capitalist exploitation

bugarrón, which typically signifi ed a heterosexual man who enjoyed clandestine male lovers. In theory, the bugarrón would always be the active, insertive partner during anal sex.

ictimized prostitute and oppressive client. Stephan Palmié has high-lighted how jineterismo cast the jinetero/a as an agent who literally “whips the money” out of his or her client

empty” apartment where the landlady slept in the living room and used the bathroom in my room twice a night, I found an apart-ment in the working- class barrio of Centro Habana, where the landlord kept a locked room to keep the appearance that he lived there.

y eliminating the church, leveling inequalities of social class, and working toward racial and gendered integration in the job sec-tor, the 1959 Cuban Revolution complicated the interrelated tropes of class decorum, whiteness, and sexual purity but did not eradicate them

brutality of Soviet systems

bor to “exorcise” homosexuality from citizens. In an example of reverse discourse (Foucault 1990: 101), urban gays drew on similar ideas about hustlers taking the “easy way out” and refusing “to work” as a way to critic

love and marriage had been fundamental components of socialist nation building;

“sex work.

respondents had all been raised by parents

same- sex practice among straight me

programs for female prostitutes, the revolutionary government had largely eradicated the sex trade.

f new post–Cold War intimate economies

nd travestis about these new social gains, people redirected the conversation to criticize the changes brought about by rising inequalities and the sex trade. I came to recognize that important gains in offi cial and everyday forms of gay tolerance were often overshadowed by the rise of poverty and the return of

umptions about gender and the domestic sphere, in addition to sexuality

o many i

by a doting grandmother who had been too aged and kind to discipline him

male activities involving the destruction of life (hunting and warfare) have more charisma, as it were, than the female's ability to give birth, to create life.8

n other words, woman's body seems to doom her to mere reproduction of life; the male, on the other hand, lacking natural creative functions, must (or has the opportunity to) assert his creativity externally, "artifically," through the medium of technology and symbols

? Specifically, my thesis is that woman is being identified with, or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of, something that every culture devalues